Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar - A Miracle That The New Ultima Exists

Kotaku has an interesting article about Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar writing that it's a miracle the game even exists.

The back-story behind a new Ultima game should be a horror show: Ultima—beloved role-playing game series designed by the great Richard Garriott who sold his company to cold, corporate EA and down the tubes Ultima would go, returning in 2013 only for money-grubbing reasons. Nope. That's not it.

Some of that is accurate.

Some of that is part of the secret origin behind Ultima Forever, a re-interpretation of Garriott's beloved PC adventure Ultima IV, transformed into an massively multiplayer iOS game and released last week for zero dollars.

The game is nearly a gigabyte. It's all hand-painted, 2D, top-down. At its creators' most recent estimate, its play area is about 11,562 iPad screens large (down from at least 15,000 because they had to cut some content). It includes 22,318 lines of dialogue—141,660 words.

The game comes from EA Mythic, which was briefly a part of BioWare. As a BioWare game it was going to be made for Netbooks, then for Facebook. It was going to be a PC browser game, then it was going to be downloadable, according to Forever producer Carrie Gouskos and studio general manager Paul Barnett. "It went from 2D to 2.5D," Gouskos told me. "It went from Zelda to Castle Crashers to Diablo light."