I found this post extremely funny, as it talks about the possible death of Ultima Online.
UO was one of the best games I had ever played. But that was eons ago. Since then, the company behind Ultima Online was bought out (by Electronic Arts), Richard Garrot (aka Lord British) the main man behind all that was Ultima was given the ax, and most of the origional staff have long been gone.
The game could have still been great even with EA in and RG out, but they had to go and screw with it to much. They wanted to make everyone happy. Which, as most people realize, is damn near impossible.
To me, the game really died when they introduced the mirrored worlds (Trammel and Felucia). One side contained what UO was meant to be, a PVP area… where players peleaced the world. On the other side, you had what became known as the land of care bears, where PVP was almost non-existent.
This sent the game into a downward spiral as the world which we all knew was ratically changed (for the worse). If that wasn’t bad, the 3D interface attempt was a miserable failure, as everyone I know (most of the people from the Catskills shard) continued to use the 2D [original] interface.
As that article also stated, EA has attempted to make several sequels. This is quite true, Ultima Online 2 (which later had it’s name changed and became known as TGFKAUO2 by players) was the first attempt which was canned by EA, and Ultima Worlds Online which was also canned. I’d have to agree with the writer of the article, it doesn’t look like EA’s big wigs have a clue WTF it takes to run a MMORPG.
Truth is, there are still a lot of players to UO and probably will be for sometime. But unless EA does some miracle working, Ultima Online will die. For some, like me, it died a long time ago.