Ultima is back, with an all new game called Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar.
It's a free-to-play game for iPad and PC, but the goal is for it to be a BioWare-level story making full use of the Ultima world.
The similarity in title to Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar is not coincidental. "It is Ultima IV," Paul Barnett, creative director at BioWare Mythic, explained to Kotaku in a call. "We've taken Ultima IV, and then we've re-imagined it. We've basically taken the Batman reboot option.
if Ultima Forever is trying to avoid the known problems that casual and tablet games routinely face, and yet still be a free-to-play game, how does EA plan to make their money? "It's not 'energy,' it's not like a Facebook game," Barnett confirmed. "The entire game can be completed for free, although it would take you a long time.
I was a huge Ultima fan when it was a stand alone game, and Ultima IV was fairly groundbreaking because there were consequences for your actions for literally the first time in a computer game. But that is no longer a novel idea. Faction and other systems like it have been duplicating the same effect for years. I don't know that they can recapture that same feeling now......since most players are not going to remember the old days of killing all of the peasants and looting them all with no repercussions from guards.
Ultima II is what started me as a programmer. I had a $5,000 286/AT *turbo* computer my dad gave me, but I made minimum wage and was struggling to even eat. There wasn't many games I could buy. A friend of a friend loaned us his borrowed Ultima II disk just overnight to see if we could break the copy protection.
We stayed up all night with a machine code debugger and figured out the "super-sectoring" technique it was using for the copy protection. Poked the machine code instructions ("CD13") into memory to call the BIOS interrupt to load that sector, swapped the floppies out, then poked the machine code to save that sector that was in memory to the copy. Then we tried to run the copy.
...and holy shit, it worked! This was 1985 I think. I was totally hooked. A year later I was a temp at an insurance company playing with all their computers, and a year after that I was promoted to systems analyst.
