Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar Video Preview

Apple-focused website iMore is offering a video preview for Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar, showing some off-screen gameplay footage taken at GDC 2013. There’s also a brief write-up that goes with it, from which I’m going to quote an excerpt:

You’ve got all of the standard trappings of a classic RPG in Ultima Forever – slaying monsters, gaining experience points, leveling up, unlocking abilities, and amassing loot – but there’s a ton of storyline to chew through here too. You’ve got to remember that Ultima has been around for ages, and so there’s a lot of lore to pull on. There’s a tie-in with Facebook so you can keep in touch with any players there and coordinate your next raid.

By far my favorite mechanic of the whole game is how they handle virtues. Making certain decisions in dialog and completing quests will have players gain different kinds of virtue points. Every city values a handful of virtues, so the more highly-ranked you are in one of its associated virtues, the more quests are available to you in that city. You even earn virtue points for helping out your underlevelled friends on quests.