Enhanced Client

Jeff Skalski’s Introduction Letter for UO – Maybe Tomorrow

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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.

Publish 73 on Origin, Veteran Rewards Added

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Publish 73 has been pushed out to Origin, with additional changes and additions, including Christmas Gifts and new Veteran Reward Items

We’ll push Publish 73.0 to Origin today, Tuesday 1st at 5:00 pm EDT.

Here are are the additional changes:

Publish 73.0.0

Christmas Gifts
* Customizable Welcome Mats (2 styles)
* Vocal Santa Statue
* Customizable House type signs
* Scroll of Transcendence Book

Veteran Reward Items

This year for the 14th year we have added the following in celebration:
* Group Bracelet of Binding – This item allows you to bind with 10 people at once. Handy for those times when part of your group is lost or has issues with running into trees and being left behind.
* Seed Box – This box will identify all seeds put into the box, it will hold and organize up to 500 seeds.
* Shard Shields – We have added this as the 14th year vet reward. These are new art that represence a specific shard. The shield will give you a character transfer token once a month to the shard it represence. The token is account bound, so they can not be traded or sold. If you have a shield in your house and the house decays the shield will disappear.
* Sheep Statue – This statue is a resource giver, it will give you 10 pieces of a random hide or wool. This caps at 100 resources so make sure you collect your items.

Classic Client 7.0.19
* Trial accounts can only join the Help Channel

Enhanced Client 4.0.19
* Trial accounts can only join the Help Channel

Source: UO Herald

Thoughts
They probably worked on Halloween and Christmas items at the same time, which makes sense. Frees them up to focus on other items (high resolution artwork upgrades). The vet rewards – the Seed Box, Shard (transfer) Shields, are very nice. Both of these will be well-received I believe. Now begins the waiting game for Pub 74 and the high resolution wall tile upgrades.

And the new Producer’s Letter from Jeff Skalski is still tied up in red tape.

Additional Reading:
* Additional notes for Publish 73, preview of Publish 74
* Publish 73

Additional Notes for Publish 73, Preview of Publish 74

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There are additional notes for Ultima Online Publish 73, and along with it, a glimpse at the upcoming high resolution artwork update for Publish 74, which is housing/walls.

Additional Notes:

Clean up Britiannia
Added 4 new pigments – Polished Bronze, Glossy Blue, Black and Green and Deep Violet – 1 charge 250,000 points. We will be changing this out each month so stock up while you can

Arenas Go Live
The arenas located throughout the lands will go live with this publish. The arenas are located in the Lost Lands (both facets), Haven, and Ocllo. The following additions and changes have been made after the public testing done on the arenas test shard:

* Match hosts may now choose to allow or disallow Field Spells
* Match hosts now choose to allow or disallow potions, or to allow only non-healing potions
* A bug that caused some summoned creatures to attack their owner in an arena match has been fixed

Moving forward, we will continue to accept feedback and use it to make further improvements to the arenas. In an future publish, look for the addition of a wagering system.

New High Resolution Terrian Art
As I am sure most of you have noticed the difference in the terrain in the Enhanced Client. Just letting everyone know this is just the first of many more to come. Next publish we will be updating the Wall tile art, I think everyone will really appreciate the new look. Below are a few pictures of what is coming:

Details: UO Herald

UO Publish 73 – Test Center, Client Patches 4.0.19 and 7.0.19

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Courtesy of the UO Herald, and it is massive. It also includes the first of the high resolution artwork updates for the Enhanced Client.

Summary/Opinion
I made a pretty strong statement yesterday about 3 things to start fixing Ultima Online and I still stand by those things. They are not things covered by any single publish. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about, I’m hear to talk about Publish 73, and from reading through it, is very comprehensive and has things for old and newer players alike. I don’t have an opinion yet on the artwork – once I try it out tonight, I will. The Dungeon Shame improvements are, I hope, the first of more upgrades/revisions of existing dungeons. The Shame Itemization Upgrade is interesting and will take a lot of time to study, but it shows an awareness of the confusion that new players have.

Shame Upgrade
Dungeon Shame has been revised. The monsters have been revised to be a little bit more challenging and scaled in difficulty for new-to-veteran players. The shame loot system has been revised so you should notice less items with throw-away intensity values on properties, and an overall improvement in the loot generated.

First and second levels will provide a good training ground for journeyman to adept skill levels while level 3 should provide a little more of a challenge. On the first 3 levels there will be a renowned monster that can be spawned at a key point in the dungeon by summoning from an altar to give you a taste of the monster difficulty at the next level.

All the monsters within the dungeon have a chance to drop dungeon crystals which can be used to spawn the renowned of each level. In certain areas there will also be a chance when killing creatures for a renowned version of those creatures to be spawned. Similar to a paragon but not as friendly.

Level 5: The monsters on level 5 are a bit heavier and harder hitting than the other levels.

Overview of Shame’s purpose

Read more

UO’s 14th Anniversary: A Look at 2011 (So Far)

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Yeah, I’m behind on looking back at UO’s history with the expansions – I’m getting in the attic tomorrow to retrieve some missing things from my Renaissance and LBR boxes, since they weren’t were I thought they were.

But I wanted to take a brief moment and highlight some key areas covering the last 10 months or so UO. It’s been a while since I made one of these posts. My overall feeling: cautiously optimistic.

The Publishes
In general, the publishes this past year have been pretty solid in my view. A good mixture of bug fixes and adjustments with a mix of new content. A lot of thought has been put into revamping areas that needed it or had been neglected for far too long. Impressive if you stop to consider that a lot was going on that we haven’t seen yet – the high resolution artwork update, among other things.

The Rustic and Gothic Booster Packs
I have a feeling they were an experiment. If they wouldn’t have happened without being paid content, well I’m glad they happened. We haven’t had any mention of booster packs since then. I still think some things should have been broken out and sold on their own, but what’s done is done.

High Seas and Stygian Abyss
Publish 69 saw the Stage One of the “Abyss Flesh Out” where some of the unfinished Stygian Abyss areas started to be fleshed out. High Seas got a lot of work done to it this year since it came out with Publish 68, but Stygian Abyss really needed to be worked on, since it had been unfishined in many areas. Publish 71 saw a lot of work being done on High Seas.

New Magincia Reconstruction, Virtuebane
The New Magincia reconstruction was strongly reminiscent of something first talked about during the Second Age release – player-built towns. No, I’m not ignoring Luna either. While I saw some would-be Lunas in the making, I also saw some serious attempts at larger guilds making a go at having a player town. It was a unique experiment, one that probably won’t be repeated, but it was long overdue. The planting system for New Magincia was also an interesting experiment, as was the New Magincia Bazaar system. Whether you like them or hate them, they make UO unique. Player populations need to be bumped up on some shards to really make them live up to their potential. As for the events, I enjoyed the Virtuebane events, both the EM and non-EM events. The EMs of the events I participated in were top notch. My only complaint is that they weren’t publicized on UOHerald.com.

Honesty Virtue and Mini-Quests
The Honesty Virtue/quest (aka the “Lost and Found” quest) that arrived with Publish 72 are getting a lot of people out and about and walking around Britannia, in areas that they might not normally otherwise go. I have a feeling this was what Mesanna was talking about in February as far as getting away from the mob-killing quests that have no point to them. This was also a part of the Virtue system that everybody has talked about for years. I like it a lot and look forward to the other virtues having virtue-specific quests built around them.

Account Migration
This is the last UO-specific issue I’m going to mention. This was a major lowpoint of UO’s storied history. It’s painful, it’s caused problems for a lot of people, some of whom are still having issues. I’m even having a few issues. I don’t know what else to say, other than BioWare Mythic really dropped the ball on communicating with us before, during, and after it happeend. I don’t know who first said this, but the fact that they included UO in the migration is a good sign that somebody wanted UO around, but UO players were treated poorly with the lack of instructions and help early on, instead forcing players to rely on one another, even when EA’s customer service representatives didn’t know what to do themselves. And before any DAoC or WAR players jump on me, yes their games were affected by the migration as well. UO’s problems seemed worse though.

Dark Age of Camelot / Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
If you haven’t visitied the Dark Age of Camelot website, do so. It’s been improved. If you read through the stories, you’ll see articles from the developers talking about work they are doing to improve the new player experience. Something is happening with DAoC. Warhammer, I’m not really following the Wrath of Heroes game, which could be seen as an attempt to bring players into WAR. It reminds me of Ultima X in some ways. Still, attention is being paid to the Warhammer franchise.

Ultima Franchise Producer
I’m ending with this one, since it’s the most important one. UltimaForever.com was launched, GOG.com released a bunch of Ultima and other Origin games for players to buy and download at cheap prices. If you’re not familiar with GOG, basically they are wrapping those old DOS games up in a software wrapper to easily allow you to download and play them on modern operating systems. This is generating interest in Ultima. Something is afoot with the Ultima franchise. Last week, Jeff Skalski confirmed he was the Ultima Franchise Producer and that UO was one of the projects under him. What this means for us exactly, I don’t know. I get a sense that things are in good hands.

Yesterday he gave us a brief peek into UO’s future, when asked about EA’s plans for UO:

Continue to grow the game by revitalizing old areas forgotten, add new things to keep players happy & crush as many bugs as we can.”

Now I hope when I revisit this topic at the end of the year, I’ll have even more to talk about, including the art update, but putting aside the migration problems, it’s been a solid year for UO. Last year had a lot of us worried about the future of UO.