Ultima Forever Adds Female Mages; Summer Release Still a Go

The Ultima Forever team at Mythic Entertainment recently updated their Twitter feed with some exciting news:

The same update was posted to the Ultima Forever Facebook page, with an accompanying screenshot (above). Here’s a crop of the upper-left corner of the image, where the character portrait is displayed:

Sarah's the name, magic's the game.
Sarah’s the name, magic’s the game.

The full-sized screenshot can be found on our Screenshots page.

This is a welcome bit of Ultima Forever news; there had been some controversy over the fact that both of the classes that would ship with the game at its launch were seemingly male-exclusive. Images of a female Paladin were greeted with some happiness, but the Paladin is not slated to be available as a playable class at launch.

Ultima fans, in particular, are rather sensitive to this issue, as the ability to play as an avatar of either sex has characterized almost every game in the series (save for Ultima 8 and Ultima 9, in which the technical complexities of implementing multiple appearances for the player limited both games to a single, male-by-default character appearance). Mythic’s solution at present is not perfect, in this regard, since there is no word as yet that the Fighter (the other at-launch class) will be anything but male. Even so, it’s nice that Mythic were able to implement an option to play at least one class as either male or female for the game’s launch.

Which, according to comments on the Facebook page, will still be happening this summer.

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