The Dragons' fire burned hot for this game, and thus it successfully raised an initial “maybe a bit too reasonable” sum of $1,919,275, exceeding its $1,000,000 base funding goal. But it probably wouldn't have gotten as far as it did if not for the the impressive cohesion of the Ultima Dragons, possibly the longest running video game fan club ever, their presence on the Internet predated by an earlier incarnation on the long defunct Prodigy network, somehow still around despite decades with no new Ultima games to talk about. It was a unique enough pitch to get funded. A game that was both single player and MMORPG, offline and online, and would appeal equally to fans of both the classic Ultima series and of an Ultima Online that was now in dire need of an update. Say what you want - the promise made to backers was interesting enough. With the Ultima community's support, he and his newly founded team at Portalarium would create a new adventure that was “totally not a sequel to the Ultima series” (it totally is) called Shroud of the Avatar. When that inevitably went offline, Garriott decided like so many others to turn to crowdfunding. The Ultimate Collector, Lord British's last project before SOTA, was a game about buying and collecting stuff. With Garriott having set sail to Zynga with his digital persona still in his pocket, the lazily named new queen of Britannia, Lady British, never saw the land she ruled ported to either Android or PC as promised, which was quite strange as I'd tested a functional PC client during beta before the mobile version was even announced. Although it was mildly endorsed by Richard Garriott, Ultima Forever had nothing much in common with the Ultima series despite the similar game world and copious namedropping of the Eight Virtues and legacy Ultima characters which EA still owned the rights to. Mainly a whole lot of nothing, interrupted only by the prospects of an Ultima Online 2 (canceled), an Ultima X (also actually Ultima Online 2 (also cancelled)), a very loosely related browser game called “Lords of Ultima” (now dead), and finally “Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar”, a vague attempt at resurrecting the franchise as a free to play iOS game by Mythic Entertainment. The Ultima community, for whom the game was supposedly intended first and foremost, had been through a lot since the release of Ultima IX. Shroud of the Avatar was, even before its official title was announced, even when it was just a thought communicated to the world as “The Ultimate RPG”, a very personal matter. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader Alpha Released.The Game Awards 2022: Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty.Baldur's Gate 3 Community Update #17: Patch 9 - Holy Knight.Neverwinter Nights: Siege of Shadowdale module gets an Enhanced Edition after twenty years.Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - The Last Sarkorians DLC releasing on March 7th.Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader Dev Diary #3 - Enemy Creation.Colony Ship Early Access Update: New Location - The Heart.Steam Next Fest, February 2023: Demos of upcoming RPGs available from February 6th to 13th.Geneforge 2 - Infestation remake now on Kickstarter.RPG Codex GOTY 2022: Results & Cool Graphs.Baldur's Gate 3 Community Update #18: Baldur's Date - August 31st.The Thaumaturge is an upcoming turn-based RPG set in a supernatural early 20th century Warsaw.Hibernaculum is a sci-fi horror dungeon crawler set aboard a massive colony ship, now on Kickstarter.
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