The company is china based but I wonder what that means for UO still.
LMAO nonsense. The same poster thinks the former producer did a great job in the last 2 years. Anyone who thinks losing 1/2 your customers in a 2 year period is a great job, is in lalaland.
While the agreement between EA and NetDragon Websoft to develop a new version of Ultima Online does indeed date back to July 2009, I don't think it has died. I just think EA is minimizing any mention of the agreement because of a possible backlash from customers and investors for dumping employees in North America in favor of farming out development work to a company located in China.
It might affect us if that UO is similar to this one or better a lot of players might go to that UO further decreasing the population of the one we are playing now. What will happen to the UO we are playing now if the player-base is next to nothing?
In a twist of fate, that sounds more like a translation for "Origin Systems".
On page 51 of the 2009 financial report for NetDragon Websoft, it says: "The Group [i.e., NetDragon] entered into licensing agreement with EA for the development of its MMORPG based on EA’s Ultima Online™. The Group also obtained the exclusive license to operate and distribute Ultima Online throughout China, Hong Kong, Macau and India."
Yeah, that "very poorly translated article" is a poorly translated version of one of the original announcements from 2009, complete with the same July 22 date.
It's not very savvy for a company to create a placeholder and then leave it sitting empty and abandoned for a year or so. Not very savvy at all.
Well, after having played almost daily for nearly seven years now, with only a three month break, I don't know what else to think to account for the decline in the quality of updates to UO over the last couple of years and the large number of promises and hints about things that were going to be done or new stuff that would be added to the game that amounted to exactly nothing.
This link kind of give me the answers of this new ultima online they may be creating on.....
You're seriously arguing that Stygian Abyss was not a quality update to UO? There isn't a big enough facepalm image for that and I don't even know what to say to that.
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Stygian Abyss was a fine expansion. I spent several months participating in the beta. It was disappointing, however, to see how much SA-related content that could have been released in the months following the release of SA seem to have been held back and then slowly dribbled out to us over the following two years.
Maybe you're right. It was painful to see people like Jeremy, Draconi, Sakkarah, and Chrissay leave. And with the current cone of silence that seems to have descended over the UO team, it's hard to tell anymore whether anyone other than Grimm is even left and still feels any passion for UO or that we will ever have the opportunity again to really explore what they've put together. I'll never forget running into Bruce (Logrus) in the Abyss the last night of the SA beta and chatting with him for a good 15 or 20 minutes. Or Sakkarah coming to my house and riffling through piles and piles of old non-stacking seeds with an engineer in tow to figure why they weren't stacking as they should. I've had the feeling since Sakkarah left in early 2010, that those days are gone and it makes me very sad to think that.
At this point, sadly, I really expect the promise of a high resolution update to just be another mostly empty promise fulfilled with cheap gimmicks, like Cal's promise of an exciting upcoming announcement to be made shortly after the SA release that would bring the wild, wild west back to UO, or the promises of cracking down on all the cheaters that were being tracked in a spreadsheet, or all the promises to have a decision "soon" about setting up a classic shard. Anymore, I look at promises to upgrade UO in the same light as I suppose you and others look at the information about another company developing a new version of UO....tissue thin and obnoxious rhetoric.
Three different people in the past month have said it's coming - the Ultima producer, TheGrimmOmen (an artist working on it), and it's listed as being in pub 73 on the front page of the Herald.
Within the last week or so, something changed on the 91.com website (NetDragon's Chinese language entertainment and information portal) with regard to the UO section of the website. Previously, when you looked at the set of game links on the site, the English translation of the wording for the link for the UO section of the site would show up as "Ultima Online." The English translation now comes up as "Genesis Networks." The link still takes you to the uo.91.com page, which still just leads to a forum that has been inactive since earlier this year. Maybe NetDragon has given the UO project a new working title that somehow translates from Chinese to English as "Genesis Networks" and perhaps that means they are getting ready to start posting additional information.
Not saying it's not coming...saying in response to those who say it's coming is proof we are gonna be here for a while. This was just the example of dev time and new stuffs intro'd right before the cancellation of a game.
I have my theories that it is a similar situation that has happened in the past - something new released, but key people involved with it move on or are laid off or moved elsewhere, leaving the remaining people having to deal with it/get up to speed. It happened with the 3D client and some of the earlier expansions - release, then team turnover, new team members either having to finish/deal with the unfinished stuff, or deciding to ignore it and move on.
The problem is this is endemic to all three Mythic MMOs with the occasional bump in active communication - Warhammer's producer came out of a long hibernation last week, and Camelot is getting some activity because it's the annviersary. We see it as a UO problem because we are UO players and don't necessarily look at the other Mythic MMO forums, but we should be trying to organize with our fellow Warhammer and Camelot players as well, because all three groups of players feel the same way - that we're being ignored/kept in the dark.
If they were going to yank the high resolution update, they would have stopped working on it well before now and the Ultima producer, TheGrimmOmen, and the Herald would not have mentioned it in the past month. Let's face it, without a graphics update, UO is definitely on a timer. I don't care what happens with the Ultima Forever stuff, if they don't try and accommodate people with computers and laptops made in the last five years, it's done. It's not helped by EA probably gearing up to help 38 Studios with a Kingdoms of Amalur MMO.
You're saying that because Netdragon is publicly traded and has investors, competition, potential investors, etc., that they wouldn't let a project die or wither on the vine??
Netdragon started putting Dungeon Keeper Online gameplay videos out in under 26-28 months from the signed agreement. Even before then they were actively talking about DKO - HD2300 was quite proud of that.
