f13.net

Listening to the Town Hall webcast now.  A bunch of us are at an event in-game and they have us up on screen at the Town Hall. 

*  Stygian Abyss expansion is a go.

*  Kingdom Reborn client being completely retooled from the ground up.  Expansion can be played in either client.

*  New race, gargoyles, and they can fly.

*  New weapon skill, Throwing.  New magic skill, Mysticism.  New crafting skill, Imbuing.

*  New dungeon (obviously) and new homeland for the gargoyles.  New PVP system built into the new areas.

*  Retail box or download?  They don't seem to know yet.  They answered this after I yelled it at them from in-game.

*  To be released "Sometime next year, when it's done, not going to give you a date."

Mythic is running it now?

Yep.

Ultmaundrword: Stygian abyss.

Best game ever. :heart: :heart: :heart:

The developers kept talking about it and how they wanted the feel of that game.  I never played it.  I'm just pleased that the old beast is still undergoing active development eleven years after release.

Well it'll be hard to capture the feel of UU since it was in first-person and 3D.

LOL

So what's essentially a fourth generation 3d client and still going to gimp it by keeping 2d compatibility. (Whether or not 2d is necessary to UO is a different question--but the killer on all the 3d clients has IMHO been the compatibility issues.)

I don't doubt that they'd like to shitcan the 2D client.  They've said as much in the past.  They just can't get anyone to give it up.  Nor SHOULD anyone give it up, since KR was buggy and unfinished and they've decided to save all the fixes up for the expansion and call it a new client.

That said, I really liked some features of the KR client, and if they clean it up I'll give up my 2D.  The UI was extremely flexible, letting you create/move/resize hotbars on the fly (in addition to all the other UI elements as usual) and adjust how much blank space there was around the viewing area to put them in.

KR Client was extremely close to being a win.  Hopefully Mythic can spruce it up and make it functional.

Mythic's running UO now? I might have to stick around after all.

And how do you go back to the 2D client?

EA-Mythic is basically the EA MMO division.  The UO and DAOC teams operate out of the same building now and share resources, from what I understand.  And to get the 2D client...  I dunno, it's gotta be downloadable somewhere.  I have the discs, so I haven't had to look into that.

http://www.download.com/3001-7541_4-10432238.html?spi=64f6390162bbe744648b43eb66fc07d4&idl=n

Dude, you are yellow.

I know, you're the only pink person now, and I have my own unique color.  It's  :awesome_for_real:.

I used the KR client and it was fine. There were a very few things that didn't work right, mostly with buildings and the see-through bubble. (Basically, I couldn't work on parts of my house because the next house overhung it.) There were a couple of other things with building and decorating if I remember. And when I played beetles were hellacious, but I know they fixed that.

I don't mind the KR client too much, but I miss the old one. I'm just more used to it. Now I have to remind myself "Oh yeah, now you have to click the backpack to open inventory instead of using a hotkey." Of course that's a documented bug, but still. Same idea.

(http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/recycled_ideas/uu_view_large.jpg)

First "3d" game if i recall. Before wolfenstein if i am thinking correctly.

God, so many hours put in the game, so many choices to be made, so not liener.

Website is up.

http://www.uoherald.com/stygianabyss/

True to form it's kinda half-assed at the moment, and doesn't seem to work worth shit in Firefox.  None of their fucking websites are ever worth shit.  Someone over there has needed a beating for years.

God it's a dingy little pet peeve, but I HATE how they call it "Sosaria." This isn't fucking Ultima I. It's akin to Ted Stevens calling the Internet a "series of tubes" or Paul Verhoeven calling his Bug Hunt movie "Starship Troopers."

I think the way it's been retconned pretty much forever is that Sosaria is the world, Britannia is a nation.  Like Zento is part of Sosaria, but it was never under the authority of Lord British, having not been "discovered" until after British fucked off to another universe to become a space admiral or whatever the hell he's doing now.

Yeah, that was invented by someone on Usenet and it caught on with a lot of fans who ignored all the "Lord British changed the name of Sosaria to Britannia" that was in every Ultima manual and even the damn intro cinematic to UO. I guess it caught on with a lot of devs who just didn't know any better, too.

Rant rant rant.

Eh, it's a retcon that makes sense.  And to be fair, while I like my oldschool Ultima, there are much larger things that even the later single-player games decided to ignore.  Like okay, Ultima 6 makes reference to Minax.  But the part where the hero traveled to the post-apocalyptic USSR and stole a rocketship to fly to Planet X during his quest to defeat her?  That goes curiously unmentioned.

Garriott naming an entire planet after himself? Makes sense to me!  :why_so_serious:

But yeah it's just weird. Garriott constantly did two things with U4 and up; crammed every reference to U1-U3 he could, then denied they ever happened. "Ultima 1 was just a test to see if I could make a commercial game. It really has nothing to do with the story. Except here's Shamino's castle from the Lands of Danger and Despair. Oh, and Mondain's skull. And a statue where Mondain's soul is kept; he never really died and he even remembers being defeated. But the rest didn't happen!"

After we were done with Lazarus I wanted to go back and remake Ultima 2 and make it a time travel game set on Earth with Planet X, rocket ships and everything, and all the kings from U1 fled to Earth and etc etc, and make it all very Chrono Trigger and such.

AH holy crap there it is. Awesome...yet weird though; I have two UO's installed now. KR is another application entirely.

This would rule.  Approached right, this would rule hard.

Heh, and it would piss off about half the Ultima fan base too.  :grin:

Whatever happened to Fuzzies and Bobbits?  :heartbreak: