Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar Ask the Devs #1

The first part of the “Ask the Devs” community Q&A centered around Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar is now available, with questions concerning an eventual Android port, offline mode, and more all answered. Here’s a snip:

Will I be able to play offline?

No; Ultima Forever is designed to be a social online experience, where you’re able to play with other players in a persistent, breathing world. Thus, it is required that you be on our servers, necessitating a wireless or cellular connection.

We’ve heard a lot about ‘moral quandaries’ in U4E. Can we expect to see many quests where the PC/Avatar must *act* on a Virtue to advance, or are we more likely to be answering questions? In short, is U4E more ‘Talk the Talk’ or ‘Walk the Walk’?

Actually, there’s a little bit of both.

Many increases to individual Virtue scores are based on player-character actions. For instance: Mentoring (helping lower-level players in earlier dungeons) will increase your Sacrifice virtue, whereas being mentored (asking for help) will result in increased Humility. Many of the virtues are also manifested through how you play with other players in cooperative dungeons. Honesty boxes, sometimes found in multi-player dungeons, are but one example of this.

A fair number of actions in Ultima Forever that result in an increase in a particular Virtue are resolved through conversations. So you can think of it as: playing with others is (walking the walk), and interacting with NPCs is (talking the talk).

Will this be available on Android?

As with all platform releases, we base our decision on demand. We are currently evaluating this market and what is needed for conversion, and have been working on an Android version for a few months. There have been discussions about release on both Android and PC. And who knows. maybe the Commodore 64? 😀

Will I be able to play the original Ultima IV game on the iPhone, too?

Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about our roots, as you can see from our re-release of a back catalog of games (including the Ultima series on GOG.com). So who knows?

Thanks, Ultima Codex.