It’s Nearly a Miracle That Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar Exists

Kotaku has published an interesting feature on the recently released free-to-play mobile-focused Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar, a title that, we learn, had a really troubled development history. Considering we’ve been hearing rumors about it for years before its official unveiling, I’m really not surprised. Here’s a snip:

Barnett told me that, back when Mythic was BioWare Mythic, their little Ultima-remake-that-could was “BioWared.” That meant, he said, that they decided to “make it big, put a lot of story in it, be brave, make it bold.” One of the heads of BioWare loved Ultima IV. The other loves MMOs. Do the math. This was an expensive project, three years in the making.

Some time later, Mythic was just Mythic again and another fiefdom at EA, EA Mobile, became in charge of this BioWare-size Ultima project. Too bad it broke EA Mobile’s rules of thumb.

“We break many rules on mobile,” Gouskos told me. “Too big (size-wise), too connected (they want games to have offline content), dungeons too long (we had some dungeons that were 45 minutes but we added 100 five-minute dungeons to compromise), way too many words (too much localization cost), and not enough free-to-play mechanics. Definitely grateful to EA Mobile for being bold and letting us release this type of game given that it breaks so many rules.”

Barnett was happy that EA Mobile took the risk, too. They assume that there can be flukes on mobile, he said. Sometimes a game that shouldn’t succeed does, and, hey, most of Ultima Forever wasn’t financed by the EA Mobile division of EA, so why not? “Mobile were smart enough to go, ‘As we didn’t pay for it because it’s come to us [nearly] finished yeah, we’ll release it. Sure. Because it might be an outlier,'” Barnett said. “They basically get an enormous RPG for free.”

Who else got Ultima Forever for free? You.

Or you could, if you download it. It’s free-to-play, and, yes, that means there’s some weirdness. You need keys to do lots of things in the game, and one easy way to get keys is to just buy them with real money. This rubbed our own Mike Fahey the wrong way when he was playing it, but Barnett and Gouskous still describe the game as “immensely free.” They can say this, because, they say, they’ve played it played tons of it without paying a thing.