Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar

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

~ the goodbye ~

By 2013 the word Ultima on a box was a licensing decision rather than news. Electronic Arts had owned the name since 1992 and had not shipped a numbered entry since 1999, so anyone still watching had learned to check what was actually underneath the word before getting interested. What was underneath this one was an iPad.

The pitch had real ambition in it. Ultima Forever took its frame from Ultima IV, the game that had made the eight virtues the actual mechanic instead of a story about a dark lord, and tried to run that on a touchscreen for free. An isometric view over painted backgrounds with the characters modeled in 3D on top of them. You could play alone or drop into somebody else's session.

It was announced at San Diego Comic-Con on 12 July 2012 and released on iOS on 7 August 2013, more than three years after the domain had been quietly registered. The reception ran from mixed to hostile and nearly every review pointed at the same thing, which was the money. Eurogamer gave it two out of ten and called it a Cow Clicker with a beard.

~ the chronicle ~

~ lady british ~

The detail that tells you everything is the name change. Ultima's world has a ruler called Lord British, who is Richard Garriott, who created the series and played himself inside it for twenty years. When Garriott left Electronic Arts he kept the trademark. So EA owned Britannia and did not own its king.

Ultima Forever solved this by putting a Lady British on the throne instead. It works fine in fiction and it is a legal document standing in the middle of the game. The franchise had been separated from the person who was the reason anyone cared about it, and the workaround was visible from the first cutscene.

~ the studio went first ~

Mythic Entertainment made this. That is the same Mythic that built Dark Age of Camelot, was bought by EA in 2006, and spent years afterward operating Ultima Online for a company that had run out of ideas for the name. On 29 May 2014 Electronic Arts closed Mythic down.

Which left a live online game with a maintenance bill and nobody whose job it was to pay attention to it. That gap lasted about two months. On 31 July an administrator posted that the online services would end, and the game went from having a future to having a date.

~ the day it died ~

Servers went off at eleven in the morning Eastern time on 29 August 2014. In the weeks before that the team turned the taps on. Gold key drops went up and equipment stopped degrading, so the two things the shop existed to sell you arrived for nothing. Every constraint that existed to sell you something was removed once there was nothing left to sell, which is the standard funeral rite of a free-to-play shutdown and is still strange every time.

My own Ultima was a 1997 world running on shards in this country that Electronic Arts never knew existed, and it lasted longer in that form than anything the company shipped under the name afterward. Ultima Forever had a real studio behind it and a year of public life. The volunteers had none of those and are somehow still the reason the word means anything here.

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