Lord of Ultima

» see lordofultima.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The word Ultima meant something specific to me. In the early 2000s I played Ultima Online on Turkish private shards, which is how that game reached this country at all, and the name carried a shape with it. A world you lived inside, with a house you owned and other people's decisions ruining your afternoon. In 2010 Electronic Arts put that word on a browser city-builder with construction timers.

Lord of Ultima went to open beta on 20 April 2010. EA Phenomic built it in Ingolstadt, a German studio EA had bought in 2006 for SpellForce and then pointed at the browser market. You picked a spot on a shared world map and laid out a city on a grid. Then you waited. Resources accumulated and buildings finished on a clock, and the clock was the actual product.

The money came in through something called Funds, bought with a card and spent on interface conveniences and on protection from being attacked while you slept. Nothing in the game required them. Everything in the game went faster with them, which is the entire design of the genre and the reason it printed money for Travian and Bigpoint in those years.

Connection to the series it was named after: close to none. No Britannia and no virtues. It borrowed a word from a franchise EA had bought in 1992 and had not shipped a real entry of since 1999. Anyone who arrived because of the name worked that out inside an hour and left.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

EA closed EA Phenomic in 2013. The studio behind SpellForce and BattleForge was folded, and Lord of Ultima kept running with nobody left who had built it. A live game with no development team is a line item, and line items get reviewed.

Players saw the maintenance stop before EA said anything. Server merges arrived without explanation and the forums went quiet. That is what the end of a free-to-play game looks like from inside it, months before there is a date to point at.

~ the day it died ~

The notice went out in February 2014, early and by accident, when a press release went live before it was meant to. EA gave no reason. Closure was set for 12 May 2014 at 07:00 UTC, and the message to players was that Funds already bought would not be refunded or moved to another game, so they had better spend what they were holding.

Most servers were already off by 5 March. People who had been told days earlier to spend their balance found the game they were meant to spend it in had gone, which is the part still repeated whenever this closure comes up. Two months of announced life, then the switch thrown early on most of it.

~ the long tail ~

A group of players built the replacement themselves. Crown of the Gods went on Kickstarter and funded in seventeen minutes, which says something plain about the audience EA had decided was not worth keeping. It is still running.

EA kept the Ultima name and did nothing further with it. Ultima Online passed to Broadsword in 2014 and stayed alive under a small team on a license, older now than most of the people playing it. The browser game that borrowed the word is gone and the 1997 game it borrowed from is not.

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