Ok, now this is blasphemy. Bioware is making a "free to play" Ultima game. Just this shows it's aimed to people who have no idea what the Ultima games are, and at much know Ultima Online and that Lord of Ultima browser-wathever.

But they are making it a freemium game for iPad and PC... This is too much. Yet another attempt more at EA to create an online cash cow with a licence they killed and then shot to the head several times, just in case.

Ok, Ultima X looked nice for a MMO (improving your character depending on what you did choose on quest, instead of grinding), of course, it died.

UO2 was a weird thing that had nothing to do with the Ultima games, also died.

UO was originally a great idea to make a sandbox MMO, but EA decided it would do better if it tried to compete with other MMOs (don't ask me why you would think trying to sell a truck to motorcycle fans would do well), and now it's a grind fest.

And now their latest random shot at the Ultima license is this:
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/07/ultima-is-going-free-to-play-and-it-might-work/

I love how they put microtransactions as some kind of magical improvement on the game. But they always do that.

I'm not familiar with the concept of "free to play" and "in-game payments", but don't you think that back when Ultima 4 first came out, the old-school fans might as well have remarked that "this has nothing to do with Ultima" as "Ultima is about fighting an evil wizard and not about any 'virtues'"? Or when Ultima Online first came out (which was very much about what you call "grinding" right from the start), people could have said that "multiplayer is not what Ultima is about"?

The article makes one excellent point (even if the intention behind it is incredibly misguided): How many of the "fans" will actually play the old Ultimas as they are? There are probably hardly any left. Passive nostalgia alone will not keep a series alive. These "true fans" are not worth caring for and "new fans" (in relevant numbers) cannot be gained by pointing to the old stuff.

That's why I think they would better do new games than these absurd attempts at reviving an old game. It's just like when you see a film based on a series of the sixties. They want to bring the fans of the series, that's supposedly the reason for taking the license, who want the film to be as similar as the series as possible. But at the same time, they want to bring new people, so they avoid making references to the series as much as possible, fearing they would get lost. And it ends being something with no relation whatsoever with the title it has.

It can happen the opposite way. The last Deus Ex is a great cyberpunk game, one of the best action-stealth games I've played. But what is the relation with the other Deus Ex? Literally, the game is about corporative secret wars and fear to cyborgs, instead of conspiranoia and urban legends, until suddenly at one point in the middle and another in the end they say "Oh, by the way, forget all I told you. Actually the bad guys of the other games are behind all this." And then the game ends.

And that is, of the latest ones, the best insertion of new game in a famous license I can think of. I know they want the fame of the games and all that, but it ends just making it all confusing.

But, well, nowadays everything has to be part of a series, to ensure a copycat second part in case it sells. All I say is that in a rational world, people who wanted to play the Ultima games would play them. Just like I wouldn't like people to think "The Three Musketeers" has anything to do with any of the worst adaptations of the book.

And the "freemium" thing (free and premium. Yes, I know nobody got a stroke trying to make this word) , that is what offended me, means this is just like the Facebook games and such. You can play free the game, until you find your character gets tired, and you need to wait 24h to visit again a dungeon. You can craft your armors, until you find out you would need eight hours a day during a month to get enough iron for your armor, due to low chance rates. And so on.

You get tired of this (like any normal person)? Well, don't worry. Pay 0.5€ to recover fatigue, 1€ for your armor, another for your sword. You want horses? We have horses. Just 1€ each. Houses? Don't worry, as long as each month you pay a nominal amount of money, you have a house. And it keeps going.

Until you end on the nice part. Everybody has the same chances on the game, just that those who pay have more. The absurdly high amount of experience needed for each level are reduced to half during two weeks for just 5€. The same to the fatigue use. And then you can also get new spells and such, paying a bit more.

I did play the freemium version of Company of Heroes while it existed. Compared to the original one, playing it made me feel tired. You had to spend an ingame currency to use special units and such things they added (of course, they were very important to be able to stand against others), and each victory would give you around the minimum of that currency you would need to keep playing. It felt like you were being strangled, quite disgusting.

Well, I think I ended writing too much and now I'm not sure there is a point behind all this. But here they mixed three things that get to me: Ultima, absurd license reuses, and pseudo-free to play games.

I feel your pain, but tastes and business models change. And again – by the same logic, Ultima 4 (and following) should never have been called Ultima. Ultima 3 was (and still is) the pinnacle of a large, interconnected and completely free world. What came after is completely different in theme and also several steps backwards in terms of complexity. So why do you say those games deserve the Ultima title? Just because this was before your own time?

The good thing about all of this is that nothing will change the old games. They will always be there.

Well, it's true that the three first Ultima have nothing to do with the next ones. And they never had a clear idea of what exactly happened between the third and fourth. And from one game to the next the history could be easily rewriten, landmarks be moved from one corner of the world to another, or events and people just be completely forgotten. I suppose that was not one of their biggest point, but I don't think they even cared much about it.

In the end I suppose the best thing is just waiting to see and then picking up the good things. In a few years probably nobody will think anything of this, but new good games appear from time to time. But in the end, even the best ones are forgotten, sadly.