BioWare Mythic Reviving Ultima With New F2P Title

A true Ultima title has not been on the market since 1999, but BioWare Mythic may revive the franchise with its newly announced successor Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar.

Ultima Forever will be a free to play MMO RPG. It is set to release later this year on PC and iPad as a true cross platform experience with rich and deep RPG elements.

In an interview with Eurogamer, BioWare Mythic’s Label General Manager Ray Muzyka expressed his excitement for the upcoming game.

“With Ulitma Forever: Quest for the Avatar we’re excited to give gamers the opportunity to play a high quality game with their friends anytime, anywhere, on both PC and iPad,” Muzyka said.

Players will be able to choose between two character classes known as the Fighter and the Mage. The fighter will be a one-man army of sorts with a multitude of attacks and support abilities. The Mage will focus mainly on ranged combat and assistance but with fewer, more powerful abilities.

Even though the art direction and gameplay may be different than in the prior installments simply because of the advanced technology available, the series virtue system will likely remain.

“Virtue is how you treat other people, in lots of games it’s how you treat NPC’s. We want to take the same idea of how you treat other people and then apply it to the players,” BioWare Mythic’s Lead Designer told TGDaily.

In the same interview BioWare Mythic’s Creative Director Paul Barnett attempted to explain what Ultima Forever is trying to achieve.

“The idea that it’s finding out who you are, that there’s a difference between who you claim you are and who you actually are in the game,” Barnett said. “Hopefully if we’ve done it right, what it’s actually hearkening back to is that good story telling that we used to do in the past, when technology was a lot simpler.”