Is Ultima Still Relevant?

Ultima Forever is an attempt by EA to bring back an aging classic, an important franchise that has seen little to no love since the turn of the century and there hasn’t been a mainstream release involving the Ultima brand since 1997. While both the Ultima series and Ultima Online hold an important place in the history of the MMO genre, as well as the history of gaming overall, the series has fallen into disrepair and, after several attempts at getting a new Ultima game off the ground were thwarted, nobody expected to ever see a revival and, for the most part, I’m not sure too many people cared. There had been upwards of 10 games in the series, there had been multiple re-releases and novel tie-ins and, three decades after the original game was released and without the original creator, there was no way EA could recapture the soul that made the series a success.

Ultima For Forever?

So it’s a little bit surprising that Bioware and EA have announced a new entry in the Ultima series, a free-to-play dungeon crawler that’s not an MMO, according to lead developer Paul Barnett, but just a game with “a lot of people.” You may remember Paul Barnett as one of those named quite frequently in the EA Louse blog a couple of years ago, he was one of those responsible for Warhammer Online. The Ultima web game was mentioned by name as well, perhaps a hint at the validity of the original blog.

Ultima Forever is not an MMO

“You know him as the crazy British dude that appears in random videos at EA to promote his latest bullshittery,” Louse wrote. “We know him as the crazy British dude who we have no idea of how he still has a job. This man was supposed to be the saviour of Warhammer's vision and design. Now all he can do is promote his strange ideas about his little secret project web Ultima game that's been almost universally criticized by all of us and focus groups. What's that? You didn't know Paul loves one of those old Ultima games so much he's making a literal copy of it for Facebook? Well, the cat’s outta the bag. Too bad it sucks ass."

So I suppose we’re going into the game with a slightly tainted view of what’s coming. They might have fixed things over the last couple of years, but if it completely sucked then, there won’t be a huge amount of change to the basic idea.

The Battles of Lord British

Until recently, when it’s obviously been proven wrong, the understanding within the community seems to have been that new entries in the series haven’t happened because of a stalemate between the current owners, EA, and the original creator, Richard Garriot. It was thought that although EA owned the lands of Britannia and the right to use the Ultima IP, Garriot retained the rights to many of the characters in the game, meaning that any game created by EA would severely lack its place in the overall lore. Think Fallout without Super Mutants and the Vault Boy.  They obviously seem to have got around this some way, given that Garriot isn’t at all involved and that Lord British is now Lady British. It’s also fair to say that, since it was mentioned specifically in the EA Louse blog, that Ultima Forever is a game that has been in development for quite a while.

Revival

The question isn’t so much whether Ultima itself is still relevant – anything can be made to be relevant I suppose, even if it means annoying the original fans – but more so whether reviving an important but rapidly aging series is a good idea at all. Ultima Online is still available to be played by people who fancy it, the original games are fully downloadable on GOG and other digital platforms. For people that want a slice of the retro pie, a reminder of the games they played when they were younger, the games are still out there. Will these same people enjoy a new game set in the same world, with modern features and changed systems? Will anything EA do turn this from a game that it’s fun to look at with the context of age or will Ultima Forever end up as a rather sour love letter to a genre that is no longer top of the tree?

Play 4 Free

Personally I find it hard to believe that Ultima Forever is anything but a fan offering, I can’t believe that EA is using the Ultima name alone to sell this game. It’s being made because somebody wants to update the series, not because the franchise itself needs, or even necessarily because fans of the series want, a sequel. For people who loved the MMO enough to keep up with new entries in the series, they know that Garriot is working on the unofficial sequel to Ultima Online (and I’ve heard that he even went as far as to say that if he got the rights from EA, the game he’s currently working on could be changed into Ultima Online 2). For those that aren’t into oldie RPGs and dungeon crawlers, the Ultima name won’t change their mind not to play it. Instead, the one thing it seems to have going for it is that it’s free to play, under EA’s Play 4 Free brand. That alone will insure a healthy number of players.

Meanwhile Richard Garriot is working on other projects->

Conclusion

Is Ultima still relevant? It’s a really difficult question to answer. There are so few people enjoyed gaming today that remember the beginning of the series, and a great deal of the people that would call themselves “core gamers” weren’t even alive when Garriot wrote Ultima thirty years ago. But that implies that a game isn’t relevant unless young people know about it, or unless there has been a new title every year. You have to look deeper than that, at how much the series is still emblazoned over the people that remember it. Those of things we just don’t know, and obviously EA have a better grasp on that than us. My guess though would be that this has the Ultima name attached to it just so that people can see that EA still want to do something, anything with the franchise, more than because it’s a fully-fledged Ultima game, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see both Garriot and the hard-core fans of the series reject this new entry more or less as soon as its released.