Month: August 2011

Good Old Games Offering First 4 Ultima Games Next Week

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Update: They are now available!

Something else to occupy our time while we wait for Pub 72 for UO – reading about other Ultima-related news. Earlier in the summer, Good Old Games began offering the first of what we hope is many games from the EA and Origin back catalogs, including Wing Commander: Privateer and Ultima Underworld 1 and 2. Yesterday, they added to their Origin offerings with Wing Commander 1 and 2.

Now PC Gamer is reporting that next week they will offer Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar for free, along with the first three Ultima games in a bundle for $5.99. The bundle is considered to be the “Age of Darkness” Ultimas, with the following games:
Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness
Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress
Ultima III: Exodus

Now, “Ultima 0”, aka Akalabeth: World of Doom is not being included, however it’s available elsewhere, including an iOS port for Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad platform.

Yes, you can download Ultima IV for free through UltimaForever.com, however you will need to set up DOSBox. One of the advantages that Good Old Games offers is that the games are packaged in a DOSBox environment, allowing you to just download the games and start playing them under Windows without a lot of effort (my fellow Mac users, there are ways to play these).

There is also an iPad remake of Ultima IV in development.

If you want to read more about the early days of Ultima, see this brief Ultima synopsis at Ultima Aiera.

The timing of this is very interesting, just as we head into Ultima Online’s 14th Anniversary, and the expected high resolution artwork update.

Source: PC Gamer

A Note to Sonoma and Britannians Across All Shards

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While we wait on Publish 72 details, Catskills and its EMs have laid down a challenge to Sonoma:

Nearly a year ago, Sonoma defeated Chesapeake in the first Cross Shard Treasure Hunt Challenge and have held the title of Champion ever since. We, the people of Catskills, feel it is our obligation – nay, our DUTY to challenge Sonoma and ultimately to defeat them. Representing us in this Challenge will be two teams of Catskills finest adventurers – the Purple Pandas, and our Shard Champions the Blue Beetles!

Thus, we formally declare our challenge to Sonoma, for a contest of bravery and skill to take place on the Test Center between our respective teams. We eagerly await the response of EMs Eira and Sangria.

Respectfully,
EM Barnaby, EM Adris, and the Shard of Catskills

via UO Herald

A UO Artist Speaks!

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The following is from an artist who works on Ultima Online, and I thought it might be of interest to people, given the issues that are coming up these days, and the amount of silence over the account management migration that UO has went through this month, along with its fellow games Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Ultima Online has experienced some particularly severe issues from this migration, compounded by people worried over housing.

Over the last 10 days or so, many of those issues have started to be cleared up, and with the game time codes being re-enabled, many more issues are starting to be cleared up as we head towards the Publish 72 announcement, which will hopefully be tomorrow.

This was posted on Stratics today, however the thread has been locked and so it will probably be missed by many people. Unfortunately the thread was full of attacks on the UO developer team, so it came as a surprise to many of us that one of those on the UO team decided to speak out. While I strongly disagree with the personal attacks on the developers and UO’s producer – this migration was not of their doing, and I know that many of them have been working extremely late to try and fix things, as have developers from the other two MMORPGs, I understand the frustration with the lack of communication between all three of the teams and their players. Some have the attitude that the developers don’t care or are not working, when that’s not the case – if they weren’t working to try and fix what issues they can, and players started quitting, they would soon be out of jobs.

It’s juvenile to assume and publicly declare that it’s all their fault or that they haven’t been trying to fix the issues that are within their responsibilities, and even outside of their responsibilities. The people who make those kinds of attacks will be in for a rude awakening once they have graduated high school or college and have joined the real world.

The lack of communication is a serious issue, but what Electronic Arts allows them to publicly say and their commitment to Ultima Online are two completely different things. In my dealings with the developers, artists, and UO’s producer, I have no doubt that all are committed to UO. It would have been easy for many to have moved on to other games, including Star Wars: The Old Republic during some of its major hiring phases, however they chose UO.

Anyways, here is the message in its entirety, and as I mentioned, it was originally posted on UO.Stratics.com.

hat I’m not any sort of EA spokesperson and I know nothing about the inner workings of this account migration, and any issues it might have and because of that I can’t comment on anything pertaining to it. So for the purposes of this post, let’s set that issue aside. Not a dodge, I’m just not speaking on things I know nothing about. Da**** Jim, I’m a doctor, not an engineer. Ok, and I’m not a doctor, either.


Also, after writing this I’d also like to say sorry for sounding preachy, it’s just something that I care a lot about, and that’s dev/player communication.

So I think it’s obvious that I second this comment. Woodsman and puni666 and others have made very insightful comments. I can’t speak for my fellow team mates, but I feel pretty sure that most of us know little about the inner working s of the account migration issues and thus really have little to say on the topic that would be of any relevance to the questions you folks have.

But I saw this post from Syrus and really felt a pull to make a comment on it, especially in light of some of the other posts I’ve seen on this and other threads about dev posting. This is actually a topic that is important to me, so despite all the warning klaxons going off in my head to just close the browser and get back to work, I continue to type. I want to share with those who are interested my perceptions of Dev/Player interaction and posting on Stratics.

You should know outright that for me I believe that Dev/ Player interaction is a privilege, not a right. Player interaction is the probably the most rewarding aspect of this job for me, I kid you not. I have met some amazing people, and have been fortunate to call many friends – even those I’ve only met once, or have never met in person at all. I wish I could put into words what the player meet ups does for me, but in short, it’s a powerful energizer.

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Code Activation Re-Enabled

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Earlier today, Kai Schober has posted this on UO Herald:

Code activation has been re-enabled on the account center. You can once again enter game cards, item codes etc. in the account management under ‘Activate a Key’.

For your convenience we have created an account activation guide to explain the different options available on that page.

Please contact our customer support if you have additional questions.

So time to hit up UOGameCodes.com or find the emails from the past purchases you have made and haven’t had a chance to apply. From what I’m reading elsewhere, they all appear to be working fine.

Login Issues – Fix Coming

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After the previous day’s fixes/maintenance that revolved around the account management center, some login issues arose for some players.

Greetings,

After yesterdays maintenance some players encountered difficulties logging into the game; thanks to the players who brought this to our attention. We are currently preparing a fix to resolve it shortly. As soon as it goes live we will let you know.

In the meanwhile the housing system is still deactivated, so you don’t need to worry that your house may decay.

Thank you for your continuous support.

And Update (Aug 24, 2011):

Update 12:30 am EDT: We have investigated and fixed the mentioned account issue that impacted a small number of our players. If you had problems to login please try again now.

Please note that because our gamecode system is still offline those running off game time will have their time extended until we resolve the issue. We anticipate a solution to be in place within the next days. Rest assured that both your characters and accounts are safe and no harm will come to them.

Please keep an eye on the Herald for further updates.

UO Herald