Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn

Thanks to Lunedust for the information that UO is planning a complete revamp of the game client, called Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn. There isn't very much information about it out yet, but the website states:

We are completely re-building the Ultima Online client with new graphics and a new easier-to-use interface.
It is an in-place upgrade. That means you will be able to keep your characters, items, houses and everything else you've earned over the past nine years.
We are committed to maintaining extremely low system specs. They will be higher than what UO launched with in 1997, but will still be far lower than almost any other MMORPG on the market.
The launch will happen in 2007.
There are many, many more surprises in store.

In its heyday Ultima Online had 250,000 subscribers, but as it was one of the first big commercial MMORPGs it is getting a bit old now, and subscriptions have decreased by half. Obviously the developers think that this can be reversed by bringing the graphics up to scratch.

Ultima Online has a long and rocky history. When it came out the game offered unlimited, non-consensual PvP, where everybody could attack and kill everybody, and even steal his items. There were player-killers and people who hunted them, thieves and player-run police forces. And a part of the population liked the game that way. But a larger part of the population didn't appreciate being ganked and robbed by some player killer, and lots of players were leaving the game because of that. So in April 2000 the game was changed and effectively doubled in size. From now on there was one PvP half of the world, called Felucca, and one non-PvP half called Trammel. The two halves were identical in size and shape, just the PvP half was painted in a darker look. Unfortunately for the PvP fans, over 90% of the population moved to the non-PvP half. Felucca became a pretty much deserted place. The player killers left because there were no weak victims to be ganked, and the player-killer hunters ran out of gankers to hunt. To this day you can find people on MMORPG message boards grumbling about how the introduction of Trammel "destroyed" UO.

I haven't played Ultima Online for many years, so I can't really say in what state the game is in now. But when I left UO was still famous for being more open-ended than other MMORPG. There are no levels in UO, just skill levels, and skills are capped at a maximum skill of 100 per skill, with a second cap of 700 over all skills. Thus you could max out 7 skills, but then you would be unable to advance any further without unlearning a skill. As these skills could well be tailoring or blacksmithing, it was totally possible in UO to create characters that were pure crafters, without any adventuring skills. With UO having player housing, and the ability to turn houses into shops, the game had a player-run economy, which often was very interesting. But the lack of levels, quests, raids, and other staples of the MMORPG fare are not for everybody.

Electronic Arts, the owners of Ultima Online, managed to announce a sequel and then cancel it 2 years later not once, but twice. Both UO2 and Ultima X: Odyssey never saw the light of day, both cancelled because the original game was still making money, and EA feared a sequel might hurt the original game. The now announced Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn is not a new game, but just a new graphical interface to the old game, and probably some other additions and improvements. A previous attempt to upgrade UO to 3D graphics wasn't totally successful, as the 3D client was buggy and had performance problems. So people are understandably sceptical whether the new client will be better, and whether Ultima Online with new graphics can bring back lots of new players to a rather old game. I personally would have preferred a third attempt at a sequel, and a closing down of the old game. Major conversions of old games rarely work, the "New Game Enhancements" (NGE) conversion of Star Wars Galaxies was a major catastrophe and rather accelerated than halted the exodus of players. But I sure wish the UO development team the best of luck, maybe they can prove that updating an old MMORPG can work.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:53 PM Permanent Link