Browser-based Ultima game launches
Lord of Ultima promises a rich strategy game set within the Ultima universe.
EA's Phenomic studio has announced the launch of Lord of Ultima, a new browser-based online strategy game available to play for free.
Lord of Ultima immerses players in a brand-new strategy game set within the Ultima universe. The game introduces social features, such as advanced trading, alliance creation, online chat and community forums.
"Lord of Ultima was designed to ensure that everyone, from strategy newcomers to diehard fans, can make it to the top of the leader board," said Volker Wertich, Creative Director at Phenomic. "Phenomic is committed to building dynamic communities that delight players as they interact with the game, each other and the legendary world of Ultima."
Set in the new world of Caledonia, players start the game as eager conquerors in the early stages of raising an empire, and then move from developing a humble village and evolving it into a prosperous, highly customized capital.
Players can progress as peaceful merchants by trading resources over land or sea and using diplomacy. They can also become feared conquerors, by creating mighty armies of knights and mages to crush enemies.
Lord of Ultima is available in English and German and is playable now by visiting lordofultima.com.
User Comments
FantasyMeister
Hackers killed off, timeslips fixed, no more memory leaks, alliance bug sorted. The game is now up to scratch and earning its 'not in beta anymore' description. Just.
I now have two cities and am frantically working on my third and eyeing up a local neighbour's castle to make my own. Following a recent internal alliance spat I joined a new alliance citing 'integrity' as my reason. Which is just shorthand bollocks for "I love a good alliance spat then throwing a hissy fit and leaving."
Bizarrely, it was announced by EA recently that this is not a persistent world anymore, there can be only one Lord of Ultima after which the game wipes and restarts from scratch until there's another one. Rinse and repeat.
So all this resource management and army building will be for nought unless I invest £70 a month in microtransactions to speed things up. The bizarre bit is that even though I vowed never ever ever to play another tick-based round-based RTS after losing 3 months sleep to Planetarion, I'm still playing LoU.
What election?
FantasyMeister
First week: Major problem with hackers launching attacks consisting of over 2 billion troops from one city and taking over the world.
Second week: Time slips - whereby the ingame clock sometimes runs 3 times slower than usual, then 3 times faster to catch up, meaning you haven't a clue when you launch an attack if it will arrive at the expected time.
And now week 3: Memory leaks - whereby your browser-based game takes over 99% of your CPU resources. I'm lagging as I'm typing this.
Yet still very addictive. Woe betide anyone who actually bought any ingame extras with their credit card, as half of them don't work and the other half won't work as expected due to the bugs.
Overall so far: Easily the shoddiest launch of a free game featuring microtransactions. Ever. Oh, and the alliance bug from 9 days ago? Still not sorted. Not even acknowledged.
FantasyMeister
However, a bit buggy considering it's just come out of beta (those of us using Firefox in the alliance that I'm in are having problems accessing our ingame guild pages), so overall feels a bit rushed, doesn't feel like there's much support, but then it's free so has the right to be a bit crappy and fail later on because of it.
As for lifespan, my current guild leader advised that in his case he lasted 2 months before a Visa-toting alliance wiped out his city.
Overall, I don't think I'll stick around that long or make a career out of playing it and definitely won't be divulging my credit card details to EA, mainly due to the bugginess, which is a shame as there's a very deep strategy game here. Meantime it's quite good fun planning city layouts, raiding local dungeons for loot and chatting away with everyone.
FantasyMeister
Just seems a little strange that, at first glimpse, it appears to have one of those 'may the biggest wallet win' systems whereby you can buy extras for cash in a shop using your credit card. I've got this feeling my little city-in-development is going to get wiped out imminently by a Visa-toting alliance.
I'm going to have to play around a bit more with it to see how big an affect that has on the balance of things, but first impressions so far are great.