Thoughts on the Producer’s Letter, the Top Secret Edition

So we have the January 2012 Producer’s Letter. Producer’s letters are the kinds of things that can give us insight into how a corporation or a studio views a game, and for quite a while, UO’s outlook was pretty bleak, because the producer’s letters were quite generic and full of buzzwords and a certain type of vagueness. Very odd when compared to the producer’s letters of other games, where the producers would get into very detailed specifics and were willing to talk about future plans.

With so much secrecy around UO’s future plans, you’d think they were adding goddamned panda bears to UO. World of Warcraft is adding pandas, and not only are they not ashamed of it, they seem quite proud of it and want to tell you about it every chance they get. I guess when you bring in so much money, crazy shit like adding pandas as a playable race starts to sound good.

But UO? Far more simple things than a new continent or giving the furries what they have apparently been wanting for years is shrouded in secrecy. There have been too many times where things were kept secret, and when they were finally revealed, we were like “You kept this a secret from us? And here we were worried you were going to add fucking panda bears.

I went on a rant a few days ago about things that need to be addressed, such as UO and its community as well as UO and its future and what I wanted to see in the producer’s letter.

Sadly, not much has changed over producer’s letters from previous years. Things we already know about from the November 2011 producer’s letter or other posts on UO Herald, or past UO producer’s letters have now been repeated in the latest version of the producer’s letter.

Things that didn’t need to be said again, but were repeated anyways:

#1 2012 is UO’s 15th Anniversary and there are events planned.
#2 Pub 73 and 74 have been released and pub 75 is in development.
#3 The dungeons are being revamped, one at a time.
#4 UO devlopers, artists, players, etc. are great and deserve pats on the back.
#5 The Origin store needs work.
#6 They want to deal with hackers (do you mean cheaters/exploiters?)

Things that we already know about, and that are useless to tell us about anyways without specific examples:

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Got My Copy of the Ultima Ultimate Collector’s Guide 2012 – Did You?

I was planning on getting this anyways, but last week Amazon put it on sale for $39.20 and I couldn’t resist getting it immediately.

So just what is the Ultima Ultimate Collector’s Guide 2012 edition?

It’s a huge book written by Stephen Emond that covers:
* 520 main releases
* 286 books and collectibles
* Nearly 150 miscellaneous items
* A total of nearly one thousand items from 24 countries across 6 continents.
* Differences between releases of the same games, maps, etc.
* History and lore of the world of Ultima.

Oh, and it’s over 800 pages.

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Publish 74 is Out and About

Publish 74 is out and about on the production shards, yay! If you want to read the full list of changes, check the UO Herald.

I’m just going to give a brief rundown.

Valentine’s Day is nearly upon us. We’re getting cupid statues and cupid arrows. You can tag your true love or the object of your stalking, I mean desire, with these arrows.

A major live arc/storyline is starting up. We’ve been getting hints for a while now – the town loyalty, the rioters. It starts in February is set to run through at least September, and involves both the main UO team and the EM team, and is meant to lead to the 15th Anniversary.

Bulk Order Deeds (BODs) are getting a makeover. NPCs will now cache up to 3 BODs a day for players. All BODs are limited to obtaining a new one every six hours, regardless of crafting skill. You can now bribe NPCs that give out BODs to get even better BODs. I’m not sure what to think of it, since I see both sides to argument – that it was a pain in the butt to obtain certain types of BODs, but on the other hand, I can see the bribery prices going sky high, putting certain BODs still out of the reach of a lot of players. It’s a gold sink, and it will definitely lighten some peoples’ bank boxes.

I’m not going to talk about the Runic Re-Forging – you really need to read the UO Herald publish post about it. It’s interesting, but not something I have time to check out and comment about.

Continuing in the series of dungeon revamps that started last year, Wrong has been revamped! Very happy about this. The New Loot Generator applies to Wrong. The mobs are tougher, there are escort missions to gain Compassion rapidly. The Prison of Nightmares has been added – you’ll have to try this one for yourself. New stealables have been introduced for the thieves out there.

Clean Up Britannia has gained 4 new dyes. I’m glad to see Clean Up Britannia continuing, and hope it’s permanent.

Looting rights distribution has been changed, and healers are included equally, assuming they act as they should.

Some Bard changes were made – I don’t have an active bard character so can’t really comment on those.

Finally, there are a lot of bug fixes. Again, read the UO Herald post for more information – too many to list here.

The Classic Client was updated to version 7.0.23 and the Enhanced Client to 4.0.23.

Overall thoughts
A lot of work has went into Publish 74, and at the same time it seems to have come together fairly rapidly. It’s a good sign, and there is clearly a lot of work being done to rework current systems, in addition to the dungeons. The numerous bug fixes are also a good sign.

Would like to have seen information about the high resolution artwork update to the Enhanced Client.

UO 2012 and Community

Over the past year, I talked about things I thought needed to happen as UO moved towards its 15th birthday. Sadly, while some things are being done to move UO in a good direction, such as dungeon revamps, other things which are more important in the long term are not being done, even though they are incredibly obvious to all who are concerned about UO. Back in October, I made a post, Three Things to start Fixing Ultima Online, which were:
1) Act like BioWare owns it.
2) Raise the level of communications.
3) Talk to us about the short and long-term plans for UO.

Today, I want to talk about #2, although it certainly ties into the other two.

One of those things was improved community relations as well as promotion of UO’s community. Back in November 2nd Producer’s Letter from Jeff Skalski, he even highlighted that as the #1 thing in the list of plans for UO.

Sadly, it’s not really happening.

The community team is still woefully understaffed and UO shares a few people with at least three other BioWare Mythic teams, and it shows. While Dark Age of Camelot was finally moved away from the CamelotHerald.com website over to the DarkAgeOfCamelot.com website and received a much needed makeover, the Warhammer Online website makeover that was promised roughly 8-9 months ago, and then saw delay after delay last fall has never happened. DAOC players didn’t receive much of a bump in improved community relations as a result of the website makeover. Jeff Skalski, the Ultima producer, said he would look into UOHerald.com moving back to UO.com, and everybody that plays UO knows that UO’s website needs a facelift.

The problem is that the same person or persons responsible for the other websites is also responsible for UO’s website and nothing has changed since around this time last year, although the community team may have in fact went down a headcount. I’m not sure, but having followed them for the past year, there are one or two people that I no longer see being actively involved with any of the BioWare Mythic games.

Of course, last April, BioWare Mythic got a “web journalist”, but we’ve only seem him once or twice. He was probably moved over to an MMORPG that has something to do with George Lucas’ vast empire.

Recently, Ultima Auctions asked Jeff Skalski in a twitter message about the community relations team and if they were separate. Jeff responded: “Our community team here is a seperate group who works with all of our projects.”

Still, you would think that there would be a lot more community relations going on, and that over time the websites would improve.

In reality, over the past few years, the UO, DAOC, and WAR websites have went backwards. Sure, Dark Age of Camelot got a much-needed domain name change and a makeover, but as a whole, all three websites have lost functionality.

Normally, over time, gaming websites gain functionality.

That is, unless you are one of BioWare’s MMORPGs that doesn’t have “Star Wars” in the name. If you are one of those BioWare Mythics that don’t have “Star Wars” in its name, your websites will in fact lose functionality over time.

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UO 2012: The Once and Future MMO

Update: Back in October, I made a post, Three Things to start Fixing Ultima Online, which were:
1) Act like BioWare owns it.
2) Raise the level of communications.
3) Talk to us about the short and long-term plans for UO.

This article mostly concerns #3, and covers what I said last October, which was:

Don’t act like the plans for UO are to be written on a scroll tucked away in some secret vault within the Vatican. We know UO players are a bitchy lot and that some flip out if some deadline isn’t met, but we don’t need dates, just details. Right now a new or returning veteran would take a look around and assume that UO is continuing to die, and quickly leave. Talk to us, and make sure that those plans are posted in a prominent place on UOHerald.com or UO.com.

Don’t give us buzzwords or vague goals either, because that’s bullshit.

It’s 2012. UO is facing it’s 15th anniversary later this year, the first major MMO to do so.

I just want to toss this into the mix: Some took last week’s huge IDOC festival to be a bad sign. I did not. While there are bad signs out there about UO’s future, this was not one of them. It does represent players who have left the game in the last 6 months, but players are constantly leaving the game and coming back. Besides, this represents several months of players who had left, but whose houses had remained thanks to the new account system that kept the houses from decaying. If things had been working normally, the IDOCs would have been spread out over 4-5 months, and they would have barely registered to most players.

4-5 months worth of IDOCs going down on the same day distorts your perception. What you need to worry about is whether people are replacing those IDOCs in good locations with new houses. Given that some people on Atlantic are bitching about housing shortages, I don’t think it’s a problem.

I think frustration is running pretty high with UO in some quarters from some of the emails and comments I have received over the past few months, and from my own experiences, as well as threads I’ve read on Stratics and UOForums. While I had real-life responsibilities that kept me from writing a lot about UO over the past few months, I have to admit that I started feeling that familiar burned out/disappointed sensation as well.

It’s not helped by the fact that the high resolution artwork update (Stratics) has now been downgraded in importance. Even though that’s a recent development, it’s probably the single most disappointing thing I’ve read in the past 6 months. I wanted to register a Stratics account just to bitch in that thread, but I have a blog so I don’t have to worry about being censored or banned, and I know my comments won’t be heard on Stratics or here anyways.

I can’t help but think this is a huge mistake and a really bad sign of things to come. The high resolution artwork update is one of the things that was being done to attract new players and make UO look a little purtier on our big ole monitors (translation: it should look better on our larger displays). The timing is bad – we received the terrain update last fall, but the mobiles (animals, npcs, players) as well as the buildings, plants, items, etc. are going to probably be the most time-intensive components to upgrade. Given how long it took to get the terrain update out, I fear that the game will not have a complete high resolution makeover by the time the 15th anniversary rolls around.

Let that sink in for a moment. Even on the “Enhanced Client”, the resolution of most of what we see in UO right now will probably still be the same as what we had in the first five years of UO by the time the 15th anniversary hits.

There was a thread on Stratics that has since been closed (Update: Okay, it’s now open again), discussing the state of the game or problems people have with the game itself. One comment jumped out at me, not because I know the poster (Woodsman), although I do, but because I think it summed up the state of the game based on a gut feeling I have:

My problem is this:

January of 2011 – UO Producer: “Big things are promised, but we are going to be vague as Hell and can’t tell you much. And big things that were promised last year and that we started working on are now delayed.”

January of 2012 – UO Producer: “Big things are promised, but we are going to be vague as Hell and can’t tell you much. And big things that were promised last year and that we started working on are now delayed.”

That is slightly jumping the gun, because Jeff Skalski is supposed to release a producer’s letter next week and we don’t know what he will say. Like so many other producers’ letters, it’s been passed around to get the approval of whoever tells Jeff and the others what to do. In the past, this led to very watered down and vague producer’s letters.

But I wanted to post that comment, because I think it’s a very valid concern, and it’s a sentiment I’ve seen echoed numerous times over the years, and that is still being echoed today, on Stratics, UO Forums, in emails and IM conversations I have with others.

Let us hope that Jeff knows that vagueness will do UO no good.