Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn Beta Signups Open

Ultima Online remains, to this day, the most ambitious step towards a truly free-form massively multiplayer RPG. Every other MMO starting with everquest seemed to follow the same virtual MUD level treadmill concept. Playing UO from beta to ~3 years after release was almost the most fun I've ever had in a multiplayer game to date.

That being said, the UO chapter of my life has ended. It coincided with the release of Trammel, even though that wasn't the reason. I don't see myself ever playing this game again. I prefer to remember it as the shining star it was in my videogame history.

The long drawn out death of this franchise is kind of sad to see. I really wish the original UO designers would get together and design a truly next generation extension of the UO philosophy towards MMO gaming.

For those who havent seen the Kingdom Reborn engine in motion, it looks a lot better than in the screen shots. Definitely looking forward to this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N560NCIsaS8

The sheer saturation of colours and overcrowdedness of vaguely shaped sprites makes the older version infinitely more appealing. I mean, if it wasn't because of the before pictures I wouldn't be able to understand what's going on. It's just so noisy.

Does Siege Perilous still have only 100 people playing on it?

Is this realtime 3D, or basically a reskinning of the old game with pre-rendered 3D sprites?

ahhh I have some great memories of playing UO years ago, especially the excitement of placing down a villa when trammel opened housing up.

The screenshots look pretty bad, they look so blurry. Why go from the crisp clean look of the old version to this? What happened to the old 3d client they did years ago do people still use that?

This replaces the original art tiles with new stuff. Same goes for the monster and character pieces.

I'm assuming the 3d was chunked since it was so roundly panned. The engine is otherwise the same. Redoing the uo engine would be a terrifying ordeal. The spaghetti code is legendary, course if you want to know what restaurants the team liked, and what some people though of each other...you could check the comments.

The other reason to go 2d, is something like 75-90% of the player base is chinese. i.e they are playing on vic 20's

I say let it die. And once it's dead figure out if you can hire a decent rpg studio to take the original ultima concepts and do a solid game with them.

Good time for a visit to http://www.spleens.net/

I signed up, I started a new account during the Christmas break. It is fun to jump back in every now and then and enjoy what used to be. While the game is nothing like the original version of 10 years ago, it is still an enjoyable MMO.

I'll be trying out the new engine, even if it does blow... maybe if I am lucky I will be accepted into the beta...!

many people commit suicide while playing this?

just looking at the screenshots makes me depressed.

So do you have to be a current player to get in on this?

And does UO still suck?

As I mentioned in the post the other day about the signups, I went ahead and reactivated just to be safe. I'm going to start on Atlantic since word is it has the largest USA population currently. It'll be a good time to grab some land before the rush of people, so if anyone wants to join me, let me know

pretty graphics dont change the fact that the gameplay is ruined.

People didnt stop playing because of the graphics, they stopped playing because of all the rule changes. Id still be playing this today if it wasnt for that.

I was so excited about uo2 as well, never got over that cancelation.

those look worse than when it was announced for some reason. lack of AA maybe?

Wow, the new version looks uglier than the original. Did they forget the art team?

the artwork is great, its such a shame that only 10% of the artists' talent contributes to the top of some heads.