Other Ultima News

Ultima Online – Death Penalties, Shards, and Originality

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Who says Ultima Online doesn’t get attention on the various MMO websites. Okay, usually it’s being discussed in the past tense, but nonetheless, plenty of people are still reading about it.

First off, Massively has put together the perfect death penalties as part of their ‘Perfect Ten’ series. Ultima Online clocks in at number four:

Nothing like putting in a hard day’s work and seeing the physical rewards of that work in the form of loot — and then having all of that stripped away from you after you are killed and humiliated by a roving band of player-killers! What joy! What fun!

While the odd recent game like Darkfall is trying to bring back full-body looting as a consequence of death, this feature by and large remains a relic of the cold, cutthroat days of Ultima Online pre-Trammel.

And we get a bonus mention on another Massively article, this time when talking about the MMO industry and how it rolls out servers, err shards and how they are structured in terms of single shard vs multiple shards:

Sometimes it feels as if almost every MMO development studio just defers to the choices made by the creators of other successful games without doing its own research. This is particularly visible when comparing server models, as most MMO coming out on the market are still using Ultima Online-style shards. I think we’ll see more games released using a single-shard server structure in the coming years to create a cohesive community.

Meanwhile, over at Life on Aggramar, a World of Warcraft-oriented website, Delin Quent has put together an interesting article that is worth reading, MMO Originality: Ultima Online (via Ultima Aiera), that discusses the sandbox that is/was Ultima Online, and it’s influence on other MMOs. This is actually part one of a multi-part series.

Delin takes a look at resource gathering, which is still a lot different than most other MMOs:

The mining, lumber and cloth gathering in UO is vastly different to any game I have played. First mining, there were several ore types you could mine depending on your skill level and mining is as simple as having a pick or shovel and finding any rocks in the game and start mining. No looking for a mining node on screen somewhere, but find a pile of rocks, which mountains were prevalent, and start mining till you mine out that spot and move on. Lumbering was the same, look for a forest and take your axe and start chopping trees to fill your pack with logs. In later expansions they added more wood types, again determined by your skill level. Cloth making had to be the most unique, yes, you could go to a tailor and buy bolts of cloth, but those truly immersed in the game would go out in the world and gather cotton or wool from sheep’s to spin into yarn and then into cloth.

Lord British’s New Britannia is Announced

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Back in February, Richard Garriott discussed plans for a spiritual successor to Ultima and we now have more details, including the working title you see.

He is actually planning on two games with a focus on social networking. One is called Ultimate Collector, and the other, the one that’s of interest to us, is called Lord British’s New Britannia. The two games were unveiled at this week’s South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, which happens to be Garriott’s home, and where he is seeking funding for both games. Ultima Collector is a social networking game with a TV show tie-in. The other is obviously based on Lord British.

Garriott does own the right to use certain aspects of his past work with Origin, which was sold to EA, namely the Lord British character, and Lord British has appeared in other games outside of the Ultima and Ultima Online series.

Lord British’s New Britannia is not simply an MMO tossed onto a social gaming platform. In Garriott’s words:

the virtual world game is not just an ultra-light MMO shopped on social media. I think that would be a failure.”

Unfortunately, very few details were released.

Full story: Gamasutra

NetDragon to Hold 4Q/FY 2010 Call on March 25th.

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Remember back in the middle of 2009 when it was annouced that NetDragon was working with Electronic Arts on a new Ultima Online game? We weren’t quite sure if it was actually new or simply the existing UO modified for the markets that NetDragon was working in. NetDragon had/has the rights for operating and marketing the game in India, China, Hong Kong, and Macau. This was not going to be tied to EA Japan or any other entities in Asia, it appeared that NetDragon was going to handle all aspects.

Not much has been heard since that time, but on Friday, March 25th, 2011, they are going to hold their 4th Quarter and Fiscal Year 2010 financial/earnings call.

I’m only mentioning this because they are still listing Ultima Online as currently being in development on their current press release. UO is not listed on their games page nor is it listed on their upcoming games page in regards to investor relations. In fact I don’t see much about it anywhere. A lot happened to UO since the summer of 2009 including layoffs that hit Mythic and that may have impacted this relationship.

Might be interesting to look at any documents that are released to determine what, if anything, they are going to do with UO.

Somebody may want to tell NetDragon to fix their URLs – a lot of links take you to a us.netdragon.com/link when the us. links don’t work. If you replace “us” with “www” they start working again. They may also want to tell them to take UO off of their templates for their press releases if they aren’t actually developing it any more.

Anyways, here’s the full press release: PR NewsWire

A Little Bit of UO Nostalgia

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Massively has an article up asking readers how long they’ve been playing MMOs/MMORPGs. Plenty of their readers did get their start with Ultima Online.

There is a very interesting article at Gamasutra (short version and long version) with Rich Vogel who was an associate producer at Origin in the 1990s and who is now working at BioWare Austin on EA’s next MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic.

What was your role on Ultima Online?

RV: I was an associate producer and my job was to get the game together in a shippable state and make sure that it had everything it needed to be an online game. At the time Origin didn’t really have the experience of ever making an online game before. So there were lots of things that were not there when I got there and needed to be there, such as all the customer support tools and making sure the game mechanics looked good and forward advancement.

We were kind of pressured on time. I wish we’d had a little bit more time. We could have actually put some of the things we wanted to put in that game. But unfortunately when you have a game like that you have core mechanics that are very difficult to change once launched.

The full interview is a good look at the other side of UO – how Origin and the developers saw things, how they worked against them, how they knew there were problems with certain things such as PKing or economics.

Richard Garriott Plans a Spiritual Successor to Ultima

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Update: Lord British’s New Britannia Announced.

Kotaku has a lenghty article up discussing Richard Garriott’s future plans, as well as a look back at the start of Ultima Online and how it went from an adventure game into a “social experiment” that saw the influx of players who were interested in non-combat pursuits:

“Most of the games at the time were about combat,” said Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series. “But Ultima Online was a place where people made careers that had nothing to do with combat.

“It was a bit like some Ville-style games, there was shop keeping, farming, managing pets and displaying things in your house.”

Garriott talks a bit about some of the “Ville” games, such as FarmVille, FrontierVille, CityVille, and what he thinks of them and where he plans on positioning his next game from his company Portalarium. He was a bit cagey about what it would be about, saying that it was as “smallish game”, but that it would have a niche within social gaming and would be original. Once that game is finished, he has plans for something that interests a lot UO players:

“Once we get that game built, then we’re going to move on to the next grand Lord British game,” he added, referring to the name of his in-game persona for the classic role-playing games he’s made in the past. “It will be the spiritual successor to the Ultima legacy.”

Read: Kotaku
Image: Wikimedia Commons