Please note: This was an April Fools joke.
Greetings!
I was going to take this opportunity to reflect back on what’s happened over the past few months and even year as that is what producer’s letters normally cover, but we covered a lot of that at the recent House of Commons, and we are now in a better position to really talk about the future of UO. There are a few recent developments I will address.
The Video and the House of Commons that we had back in February. Let’s go ahead and get that out of the way. You guys really beat us up over both of them, and I’m here to say that we deserved it. The bruises have finally healed. What the video was originally going to be was discussions between myself and the rest of the devs over what we wanted to do in the coming year. Back in February I said that a lot had changed between January 3rd and the end of February. That video was thrown out, because during those 7 weeks, things changed for the better and bigger. I don’t want to say that UO was given a new lease on life because as far as I’m concerned, UO was never dead, but what was originally in the video was small potatoes compared to what we have been asked to do. We made another video based on what we were asked to do, but as it turns out, we revealed too much information, too soon, in that video, and much of it was cut out. It went from 25 minutes down to 3 minutes. Some of those things are planned for next year, and to be frank, had we mentioned them this early, we feel that they would overshadow our plans for 2011. You will get to see the full video at some point.
What have we been asked to do? A lot. Let’s just say that what we are doing will appeal to veteran players and to potential players who have never even heard of Sosaria. Over the past few months I’ve talked frequently with Dr. Ray, better known as Ray Muzyka, as well as others within BioWare and BioWare Mythic. As the head of BioWare, Dr. Ray wants to build up all of BioWare’s MMO properties and not just Star Wars. He wants to offer players a lot of choices between MMOs. Ultima Online is a part of his plan for BioWare Mythic to increase its presence in the MMO market. He likes what we are doing and planning on doing, and while much of his time is currently devoted to Star Wars: The Old Republic, he fully supports UO and will be making more resources available to UO, and has asked that I pass that along to you. We plan on having some town hall meetings with the players later this year and early next year, which will also be UO’s 15th anniversary, and Dr. Ray has indicated that he wants to attend some of them to show his support. In the coming year, Dr. Ray and others within BioWare plan on doing more for Ultima Online, and some of this will culminate in Ultima Online having an official presence at PAX East 2012. The feeling is that the 15th Anniversary in 2012 is very important to UO, BioWare Mythic, EA, and the MMO industry. Players like to receive gifts every year on the anniversary, but we feel the best anniversary gift is working to make sure that Ultima Online is around for another 15 years. A lot is being done that I can only now begin to talk about, but there is more that I can’t discuss until next year. The feeling right now is that anything that is announced beyond what the UO dev team has talked about will be overshadowed by Star Wars if it’s discussed at the BioWare level, or that players will be distracted by it and will overlook the major changes coming this year. Something that we brought up – some of us on the current UO dev team and on past UO dev teams have worked on other BioWare Mythic projects, and the leaders of BioWare have agreed that since those projects benefited from our involvement, that they would loan us developers and artists from other projects.
What I can say is this – we’ve been given a checklist of certain things that need to be done with UO to bring it to a level that BioWare and EA wants it to be at. Some of these have been discussed before and I’ll go into a little detail about others in this newsletter.