I agree with Petra Fyde: The new EC graphics make my eyes hurt after a few minutes. The EVs are especially badly drawn, and the bright white light in the spell effects gives me a headache. If "Improved" means something that makes your eyes bleed, it's not really an improvement.
I think the EC developers were really good at software engineering; the atlas is great. So are the zoom features, the ease in making hotbars, the ability to scatter them at any location on the screen, the compartmentalized monster and treasure chest loot, the ability to use customized mods and skins, etc.; from a technical point of view, it's pretty awesome.
However, from an artistic point of view, it sucks. A lot. Hurts the eyes, uneven graphics, ghosts are a few tiles out of sync, EVs both hurt the eyes and look terrible, a blindingly bright white light whenever you cast spells, ugly bright yellow backgrounds for all the hotbar buttons, grass that looks weird, everything looks really grainy when you zoom in, the small numbers in the hotbars aren't easily readable, even with a large monitor. I pity anybody who's trying to read them with a 17 inch monitor.
It's like a project where they brought in a multi-million dollar engineering crew to make the new client functionally fantastic, then ran out of money and hired Mrs. Kinsey's 4th grade art class to do the graphics.
UO is still the 10th most popular MMO on the market, and the only EC product I saw in the top 10. (Sims and Warhammer were conspicuously absent from the list). While it has dropped from its #1 spot that it had held for the 5+ years prior to the AOS debacle, it's still a very popular game.
I mostly play Atlantic; I was at Miasma yesterday, and there were like 10 people there. And I wasn't the only one who dropped in, saw how crowded it was, and left. The Lurg cave was packed, too. So was Luna. Unfortunately, Brit bank was about deserted. But that's because bank sitting there isn't a profitable profession anymore. There were so many people spamming their wares in the tiny Luna bank that I couldn't even see what they were selling. Luna bank just wasn't made for like 25 people to spam their wares in.
There were even a few PvPers who managed to walk by my Fel tower, out in the middle of nowhere, while I was imbuing stuff.
UO does need to put some effort into making the EC better. It may very well be the future. However, until it is at least as usable as the CC, people aren't likely to switch. When the "makes my eyes bleed" comment is a common complaint, the EC still needs a LOT of work to improve the graphics enough that the majority of the player base will say "wow, that looks a lot better than the 2D client. I wanna switch!". And that's besides some of the bugs that it has. And the fact that it needs a toggle to turn pathfinding on and off, and that there isn't a way to adjust the radius of the circle of transparency, and there isn't an option to resize the hotbars, there isn't an option to lock the taskbars, there isn't an option to have compartmentalized loot but keep the eminently useful 2d type of chests, backpack and vendor pack. If I was using EC most of the time, I would still have to switch to 2D to put stuff on my vendors; if you do so with the EC, it's all right at the top of the vendor's pack in 2D.
Having played both WoW and UO, I will admit that WoW has better graphics. I also like the battlegrounds. I can play in a PvP environment when I just have a few minutes to play, and not worry about losing anything. However, UO doesn't force you into a pre-set character. It has houses. It has a lot of depth and versatility. It has players who are over the age of 12. It has a whole online world to explore, not just a bunch of dungeons to fight in. In PvP, I do have to suffer penalties when I die. Or when I let my guildies down. There are consequences to my actions. Crafting has regained its position as a big part of the game again. We can make our own furniture, clothes, weapons, armor. We can make a house that represents our personality and our game style. And we can stock it with all of our trophies. UO has a lot going for it, if it just plays to its strengths.
Its weaknesses are that its main client is 12 years old, and all 3 efforts to make a new client have been less than successful. Nobody could play with the old 3D graphics while most of us were on dial-up; it just lagged too much, while the old 2D one barely lagged at all, even with a 33K AOL connection. I wasn't here for KR; I left just before it was introduced, and just came back in time for EC. But from what people have said, it had almost the exact opposite problem from EC: It was graphically superior, but it failed from an engineering point of view. The technical difficulties killed it before it could get off the ground.
