UO Developers

New QA5 Series for the UO Developers

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There is a new series of short interviews/questions asked of the UO team that has been posted on Stratics.

First up is Bonnie “Mesanna” Armstrong who is UO’s Associate Producer and head of the EMs, and here’s the first question:

For those of us who don’t know, what has your “career track” been with the gaming industry?

I started in 1999 working for Origin as an External Test Lead when we were allowed to have volunteers with approx 20 testing volunteers. Origin then built a structured team with 10 testers and myself. I worked as a Contracted External Lead over the external testing program for years, then I was hired full time in QA after UO was moved to San Francisco. When UO moved to Virginia, I was offered a different position as associate producer so I packed my bags and left San Diego and moved to Virginia with the team.

Now then, reading through the discussion thread on the issue, it has been clarified that this is NOT the official discussion of the game, this is about the developers themselves. A few Stratics’ posters were concerned that this was going to be the communication about the game, and raised the issue that this is more about the UO team members than the game itself.

Source: UO Herald
Read: Stratics

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.

Site News, Out and About, Frank Gibeau, Steve Jobs

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So I’ve been AWOL from the site the past week and a half or so. I’m still going to finish my 14th anniversary celebration, and it’ll be done before the 15th anniversary, but real life and a huge project took over my life for the last few weeks.

In that time, a lot has happened and I will be catching up. But for now, some quick notes, some UO related, some not.

Archer Season 1 is on Blu-ray at Amazon. Why didn’t anybody tell me this? For those of you who don’t know what it is, you can catch a handful of episodes for free at Hulu depending on where you live. Warning: It can be raunchy, and just as important, for those of us who are “older”, there are references made to years past that we’ll appreciate but that may be lost on younger people. If you have Netflix, Season 1 is available in HD. I just wanted it in Blu-ray and at some point recently that happened in September.

But wait Deckard, why are you babbling on about adult animated series on FX, is there Ultima or Ultima Online news? Yes there is. Some I will catch up with this weekend, some I will catch up with now. This was one of the more interesting things I noticed:

This was posted on Twitter last night:

Great day with Frank Gibeau today. Proud of my team.

Frank Gibeau is the head of EA Labels. Which is over the entirety of BioWare. Which is over BioWare Mythic. Which is over the Ultima Franchise. Jeff is the Ultima Franchise Producer, which includes both Ultima Online and other Ultima projects. The only team that he officially has is the Ultima Online, but he probably has an Ultima-related team as well. Who knows what it means for UO, but it is interesting nonetheless.

I’m going to conclude this quick note on a downer by saying Steve Jobs’ passing really bothered me in a way that I didn’t expect. Celebrity deaths generally don’t bother me. They are celebrities, and while I’ve met a few here and there, none have ever bothered me. The thing is that he is not simply a celebrity. He, along with Steve Wozniak, are both directly and indirectly involved with me getting involved with computers at an early age, and not just because they started the personal computer industry. The first programming I did was on my school’s Apple II. One of my favorite game series, the Ultima series, was developed on the Apple II by Richard Garriott. At home I was a Commodore 64 guy, because that’s what we could afford, but were it not for the Apple II, there may not have been an Ultima series, which I played on my Commodore. As I moved on through life, while I took the opportunity to use Macs when I could, they were usually out of my price range, and later on I wasn’t too fond of the UI, but something always drew me to them. Then Steve Jobs came back to Apple, not too many years after that Mac OS X was introduced, then cheaper Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads. Somewhere in the past 7-8 years I’ve become an Apple fanboy. It probably helped that I spent several years using or supporting products on Palm PDAs, Pocket PC (Windows Mobile), and Microsoft’s desktop OSes, but something kept drawing me to them. The move to Intel was perfect – I could play UO either in Bootcamp or in a Windows VM, so there goes the need for a desktop PC.

It’s ironic. I’m typing this on a Mac, I first heard of Steve Jobs’ passing on my iPhone. I occasionally play Ultima Online on my Mac as well, and I play Ultima IV on my iPad and Akalabeth: World of Doom on my iPhone. Things have come full circle in a way.

A Peek at the Future of UO from the Ultima Franchise Producer

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Updated: Read the full sequence below.

In response to the following question from rlakies on Twitter:
“Whats your plans for Ultima online? Will EA invest and make the game a hit again? or is the 2D where its at forever?”

The new Ultima Franchise Producer, Jeff Skalski, responded:
“Continue to grow the game by revitalizing old areas forgotten, add new things to keep players happy & crush as many bugs as we can.”

I then asked:
“Does that include the high resolution artwork update?”

And Jeff responded:
“I think high resolution artwork would make players happy, right?”

A fitting statement given that the 14th Anniversary is days away. Looking forward to the artwork update.

UO’s 14th Anniversary: The Second Age – Delucia in the Papua

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Yesterday we covered the launch of Ultima Online and today we are continuing on with the quest of looking back at all of the expansions and major events of Ultima Online, as we head towards the 14th Anniversary. That brings us to The Second Age. The Second Age rolled into UO in October of 1998, but a lot happened between the original release of Ultima Online and T2A. I’ve included some specific highlights in this previous post if you’re curious. It must be noted that not long after T2A launched, UO would grow to reach 100,000 players. These were pretty heady times for UO.

Ultima Online: The Second Age (Box Front)

Note: Click on images for larger versions or visit the entire flickr set of T2A

So how was it being sold? With a similar message as the original UO, but adding in all of the accolades it had received (Game of the Year type of stuff), as well as emphasizing the social aspects. It also emphasized things that had been added since the original UO launch – guilds and vendors.

From the back of the box:

Ultima Online: The Second Age - Back of the Box

Thousands of Players
Potentially thousands of players online day and night from around the world, each character as indivdiual as the person who created it. A vibrant player community, hundreds of websites, hundreds of guilds to join. Are you with us?

A Persistent World
Your actions have a real, lasting impact on this fully simulated world. Regular and ongoing automatic updates to the game snure that it remains fresh and exciting.

Endless Possibilities
Ultima Online offers an unprecedented degree of freedom for you to seek out your own destiny. Craft weapons, tame wild animals, build a house, run a shop, quest for treasure, delve into dungeons – true role-playing where your only limitation is your imagination.

The Second Age
Ultima Online truly enters a new age, with over a year of gameplay refining, increased land mass, new creatures, towns, and terrain, enhanced interface, extended chat features, new in-game language translation, and a new tutorial.

The Best-Selling Role-playing series of all time has revolutionized online gaming again with Ultima Online: The Second Age. Interact with thousands of players simultaneously in this breakthrough Internet fantasy world. Get online and immerse yourself in the adventure of a lifetime..

Inside the flap/cover of the box, you got a very nice display showing some of what was going on. If you don’t look at this and grin, then you have no soul:

Ultima Online: The Second Age - Inside of Box Flap

Click for a large/readable version

As the first expansion, what did T2A bring? Quite a bit:
* The Lost Lands, a new land for us to explore, with jungles (also new)
* Delucia and Papua
* Better chat features
* New dungeons
* New Monsters
* New language translation for players in-game
* New tutorial
* The Big Window Client

Now “Quite a bit” is very subjective obviously. If you were doing the upgrade price, it was a steal.

What was in the box?
Note: This is for the full version of the US retail box
* The game on a CD
* Ultima Online: The Second Age Install Guide
* Ultima Onilne: The Second Age Reference Guide
* Ultima Online The Second Age Playguide
* Reversible map – one side was Britannia, one was the Lost Lands
* EULA

Ultima Online: The Second Age - Everything

So what about the contents of the box? If you purchased the upgrade, you didn’t get the box, you just got a CD and the guides/documentation – pretty good for I think it was $7 or $8. I picked up a copy of the retail box for another account, which is what I’ve scanned. Looking back at the original UO boxes, retail or charter, the install guide for T2a was actually expanded to explain in more detail the in-game support. The Reference Guide was shortened, most likely because of the Playguide. The Playguide. Simply amazing, probably 150-200 pages, very hefty. Two steps forward, one step back – the map was paper and reversible – one side was the Lost Lands, one was Britannia:

Ultima Online: The Second Age - Map of Britannia

Click for a huge version of the map

Ultima Online: The Second Age - Map of the Lost Lands

Click for a huge version of the map

As much as I liked the cloth maps, I don’t have as much of a problem as these were pretty detailed, more detail than you get with cloth, as you can see from my scans above.

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