Quite a few of us have been awaiting the introductory letter/producer’s letter from Jeff Skalski, who is over the Ultima Franchise (including Ultima Online). It was finished last week, and went through the approval process, however it was held up somewhere in the process. Where or what parts of the letter, we don’t know, but this was just posted a few minutes ago:
Few edit request changes that I’ll turnaround 2night 4 anothr round of approvals. Crossing fingers my intro lettr 2 UO fans goes up 2morrow.
I think this is going to be a big letter and very important for UO’s future and UO’s players.
Last week, I mentioned three things needed to start fixing UO
1) Act like BioWare owns it.
2) Raise the level of communication.
3) Talk to us about the short and long-term plans for UO.
I stand by those and think that some of those areas will be addressed in Jeff’s letter. To what extent, I’m not certain. I know that things cannot continue in the current state – BioWare needs to publicly act like they care about UO, and communication between players and UO team needs to increase, and this includes doing something with UOHerald.com. We’ve just seen a flurry of communications from the UO team following Publish 73, but this is something we’ve seen in the past – a major publish followed by a burst of communication, followed by virtual silence until the next pub. There needs to be a constant flow of communication, even if it’s posting on UOHerald.com once a week with a few paragraphs concerning what’s happening.
And finally, we need to know where UO fits into the BioWare scheme. We know some things about the long-term plans of UO – Publish 73 saw the first of the high resolution artwork upgrades, terrain, for the Enhanced Client (EC) and Publish 74 is going to include high resolution updates for the wall tiles.