Okay this is weird starting with a tweet on Jun 26 that stated
"A virtues quest has begun.." Ultima Franchise Producer for Bioware-Mythic Jeff Skaliski has been tweeting each of the 8 Britannian virtues one by one

Starting with Justice on July 4th, then Honesty, Sacrifice, Humility, Honor, and Compassion each following day. Now some people will think this is to tease Ultima IX coming to GOG since at this rate he will have done all 8 virtues by Wendsday/Thursday but from my understanding Ultima IX hasn't been submitted to GOG yet. Of course that is if he's just going to do the 8 Britannian Virtues and not the 3 prinicables(Truth, Love, and Courage), the Gargish Virtues, and so on.

Maybe this means we will finally see a formal announcement concerning Bioware-Mythic's much rumored Ultima Project, that or maybe Paul and the others finally got EA to agree to let Almost Human do a new Ultima Underworld. Who knows.

You can find his twitter here: https://twitter.com/Jeff_Skalski

...then demonstrate the Virtue of Sacrifice by buying the remaining DLCs. ;)

Let's hope this is something better than Lord of Ultima...

https://twitter.com/UltimaForever/status/222685248960462848

Virtuous things are happening today.

It's the much rumoured new free 2 play Ultima.

Game informer had just announced that Mythic is announcing tomorrow a new free 2 play game this combined with the 8 virtues being tweeted by Jeff and the tweet yesterday from the offical Ultima Forever twitter it's no doubt that the game to be announced is in fact the much rumored free 2 play Ultima.

Well, all I can say is that there's no way it's worse than Lord of Ultima. XD

Well I'm giving them the benefit of doubt on this as there are guys in Bioware-mythic like Paul Barnett that are really passionate about the series,unlike the guys who did Lord of Ultima, hell it was because of them pushing EA to re-release Ultima on GOG,and of course with help from the Ultima community, we got this series on here. So if anything it will probably at least have some passion and love for the series in it and who knows it may be good and may help build a bit of a Ultima revival. I know some people will balk at that notion but really it doesn't hurt to hope.

Of course I heard through the grape vine that it isn't going to be very good. But I reserve judgement on the actual game.

Oh, yeah, you should probably check out Ultima Forever now...

Almost signed up for the beta... but then I Realized you needed an Origin Account, HA and let EA spy on me? No!

If you bought anything from them on any console and activated your DLC for it, you have an Origin Account. Now, if it needs the Origin CLIENT, then we're going to have a problem.

surprised no one has said anything about the art style or Lady British, which only exists because Lord British is owned by Richard Garriott.

I am the only one disturbed by the WoW style graphics? I don't even wish to know what they did to the spell-casting system or how they implemented the virtues. No saying a priori that this will be bad, but the meteors in the sky aren't a good indication.

Some publishers seem to have convinced themselves that giving a game WoW-style graphics is key to making it appeal to WoW's audience. Zenimax are taking the same direction with The Elder Scrolls Online.

I wouldn't say there WOW graphics they actually look more like Torchlight's then WOW. Seriously look at their image for the fighter and then look at the Destroyer class in Torchlight 1

EA's track record with Ultima doesn't fill me with much confidence -- at all. Nor does BioWare's involvement after the ME3 fiasco. And let's face it -- EA wouldn't release a game as F2P if they actually thought it was any good at all, i.e. they thought they could make money with it.

On the other hand, this does look to be a bit truer to the Britannian mythos than the abysmal Lord of Ultima, "Lady British" aside. But there are some things that worry me as a longtime devotee of the series, such as only having two character classes and the emphasis on combat in a storyline that appears to be a retelling of the highly spiritual Ultima IV. (Even the title fills me with suspicion, in a subtle-hint sort of way. "Quest for the Avatar," as opposed to the original Ultima IV subtitle, implies that your character here may not be the Avatar of legend, but you may encounter him/her in the game.)

But that might just be the cynic in me who's seen EA thoroughly botch the Ultima name and mythology practically since acquiring Origin twenty years ago. I'm trying to keep an open mind, but I'll confess -- it's hard in this case, especially after the travesty of a trumped-up browser game that was Lord of Ultima.