Past the mission structure designed to leave you just a level or two short of accessing the next area, through the towns stuffed with endlessly recycling fetch quests, and milling with all the other Avatars, going nowhere. Ultima Forever is Cow Clicker with a beardīut it has, and so I must soldier on. Combine this with constant lag, as well as an average frame-rate of 15fps (which can and will drop lower) and the incredibly regular crashes, and you wonder whether this game should have been released at all. The point is that this is not a fun combat system, whether you're paying or otherwise - it doesn't need precision, or strategy, or thought. The point is not that in-app purchases make this grind easier and faster by giving you better kit and therefore fewer hits to kill enemies.
Even then it never feels precious, or interesting, or anything other than temporary. The loot is entirely disposable crap, unless you're paying for gold keys to get good stuff. Go into a dungeon, tap furiously for 10 minutes, leave. There are special moves, and you can move around to score backstabs or avoid attacks, but 99% of the time this is soul-crushing, mechanical drudgery. Combat comes down to just tapping on enemies constantly. Everything is straightforward to the point of absurdity. The critic Ian Bogost once mocked up something called Cow Clicker to illustrate the banal absurdity of most freemium mechanics, and Ultima Forever is Cow Clicker with a beard. Ultima Forever rips you off with its keys, for sure, but it is their impact on how the game actually plays that ruins it.
Critics of free-to-play often focus on the money side of things, but really the specific amounts matter little.
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The free-to-play business model is entirely to blame for this, because Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar (to give its full title) is a game built around several principles that flow from it. Make no mistake this game has the surface of a vibrant fantasy, but it is a grasping and shallow product. These words you can visualise chiselled on a gravestone. The title of developer Mythic and publisher EA's new entry in the series, an iOS-exclusive, free-to-play MMORPG-lite, is Ultima Forever.
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