I was given this domain several years back and thought I’d do something interesting with it. That’s not going to happen – I’ve been offered a chance to work on another Ultima website (update to come). As there is so much that would need to be done to this domain to make it viable, I think I’m going to archive what little is here and offer it to another site.

I will then probably redirect UltimaCodex to Ultima Airera as Ultima Airera is what UltimaCodex.com should have been, or offer it to them if they are interested.

That marks my brief return.

A day or two ago when discussing my return to Ultima Online, I mentioned running UO under VMWare Fusion (and Parallels Desktop should run just fine based on my experience with it and Fusion). Earlier today I upgraded my memory and downloaded CrossOver Games for Mac which is a much better way to run Ultima Online under Mac OS X, since it’s much better performance-wise.

I’ve run it with both the Enhanced Client and the Classic Client and both run well. The Enhanced Client runs at native PC/Windows speed from what I saw in comparison with a PC I had. I played around on LS today running CrossOver Games and the Enhanced Client – probably 5-6 hours, and never had a crash or a slowdown.

I’m going to be doing a full write-up with screenshots this weekend for running Ultima Online under both VMWare Fusion and CrossOver Games. CrossOver Games is much more affordable and doesn’t require an actual Windows license. It also seems much faster and more intuitive.

I was going to add this to the last post, but the last post was already really long, and it deserves its own post.

A friend saw my little rant/post about returning and started talking about Siege and how EA should push the rules back to pre-Trammel days and how Trammel killed UO and that if every shard/facet was PVP it would bring people back. First of all, this is the oldest and dumbest argument that can be made about UO. It’s like Mac vs PC, Ford vs Chevy, Marvel vs DC. It’s an argument that will go nowhere and will not change any minds. That boat sailed with UO: Renaissance, the genie is out of the bottle, and he’s not going back

Second of all, World of Warcraft has 12 million subscribers and many are playing on non-PVP servers, so the theory that PVP or lack thereof is the problem is wrong. If it was the problem, then Blizzard would not be making literally billions of dollars every year from WOW. They would only be making 700 million a year from WOW The majority of popular MMORPGs now offer both. That’s the way it is – companies have found out, thanks in no small part to UO, that not everybody wants to play the same way.

If you want nostalgia, but you won’t play Siege, then ditch your insurance, and ditch all armor and weapons except for what the NPCs are carrying. Just Do It. Nobody will stop you.

UO Renaissance launched early in the Summer of 2000 or (late in the Spring). Blizzard announced World of Warcraft almost a year and a half later. Even though WOW wouldn’t ship for another three years after that, the clock had already started ticking. Lest we forget, EverQuest launched before UO:R, and within a few years it had nearly double UO’s subscriptions. Asheron’s Call launched before UO:R as well. It wasn’t as popular as UO or EQ but it certainly didn’t help UO. Dark Age of Camelot launched a year and a half later after UO:R and it passed up UO fairly quickly.

Then the hammer dropped in 2004 with WOW, and Blizzard never looked back.

It’s interesting bringing up Asheron’s Call, I just checked and it’s still around. At its peak, it was not close to UO in numbers, so it’s a good sign that UO could be around for years to come.

All of UO’s major competitors between 1999 – 2004 were released with non-PVP options and other than Asheron’s Call, they all beat UO on the subscription numbers at some point.

UO was blessed to have the run of the field for a few years, and while nostalgia is a wonderful thing at times, everybody tends to forget that those MMORPGs that passed up UO did it not by going PVP-only. They did it by offering more eye candy. It’s a shame, because many in my view didn’t offer the depth that UO did (and still does).

Don’t get me wrong, I love the old-school 2D client, but it does not scale well on today’s displays and the artwork can be difficult to produce and change. As I said in my previous post, EA shot itself in the foot by running two different clients side-by-side. They should have either moved to 3D only or they should have ditched the 3D and worked on keeping the 2D client looking good as the computers of typical players changed.

We have players that want to remain in 1997 and we have EA wanting to remain in 2003.

I’m pretty sure we are not all running 2003-era computers.

As I mentioned earlier, I was pondering returning to UO, and was doing so with a 14-day trial. The 14-day trial run lasted all of about 10 minutes, before curiosity got the better of me and I re-opened my main account.

It maybe worse than I thought – I lost a lot of stuff, but I expected that, but I won’t know the true damage until I check all of my characters as well as re-open my alts. It doesn’t bother me as much as I thought, because I’ve probably forgotten a lot of what was in my houses, and I usually kept the most valuable/important stuff in my bank boxes on the chance that I would close my accounts. I just didn’t expect to completely walk away like I did so some cool stuff was lost.

So I log in with my main account and main character. I’m at the location of my former house in Skara Brae, just behind a small hut and right off the main road. Low and behold where I had a 2-story house, like a 12×10 or something, I can now place something a lot larger – there was nothing there and the house that had been next door was gone.

So I mark the spot on the map (waypoint) which is something I like with the new EC – I wish it went a lot further and allowed you to differentiate between points. I always thought they should hire the UO Auto-MapPlaying – hardware
If you’re curious, I’m playing the UO Enhanced Client through VMWare Fusion on a quad-core iMac (Mac OS X 10.6.6 Snow Leopard) and it runs fine. It’s bizarre as hell to be running UO in 1920×1080 and I could run it at a much higher resolution, but it seems I still don’t have much screen real estate Runs as well as the classic client. My problem is memory – I’ve only got 4GB on the machine in total and there were a few times where I noticed some lagging and I looked at the activity monitor and was down to a few hundred MB free thanks to me running several other things at once. I’ll have that fixed soon. This is a far cry from what I was using several years go at the peak of my playing. I think the last time I seriously played was on an AMD Athlon XP with a small bit of playing on a Pentium D (dual-core). Either way, this is much much faster, regardless of which client I use. I’m in the process of mucking around with CrossOver Games, which will remove the necessity of running a full-blown Windows environment through VMWare Fusion.

That brings me to this: I can’t handle the classic client anymore even though that’s the one I want to use. I need mapping, etc., and that appears to be broken, so that leaves me with the Enhanced Client. The EC, while it runs smooth, just feels really outdated at this point. I really liked the look of the classic client and I would still be using that if it had mapping etc. The EC….I’m almost afraid they are liable to turn it into a browser-based game like all of those ones you see the ads for on the MMORPG websites. More on that later.
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Having started playing UO in late 1997, I took a long absence and then it turned into completely leaving/shutting down my accounts in 2007. I let my houses decay – in retrospect, I should have cleaned them out and banked a lot more stuff – mementos and other such things. I really regret that. Actually I may have banked a lot more stuff than I’m thinking I did, but it’s going to cost me like $90 or more to activate my accounts and see what all I banked, and I’m not sure it’s worth it.

For now, I’m going to log in with a 14-day trial, look around, check out the enhanced client, and who knows.

And looking around with the enhanced client, I’m not too happy so far.

Over the next few weeks, we will be rebuilding the site – so far we’ve been concentrating on UOCodex.com, but one person has committed to working on Ultima Codex and getting it up and running. If you want to see an example of some of the things we will be doing with Ultima Codex, check out UOCodex.com.

Thanks

The French version of Ultima V: Lazarus for Windows has been released, according to the official notice on U5Lazarus.com:

The French version of Ultima V: Lazarus has been officially released for the Windows platform. Check out our DOWNLOADS page to start playing! The Macintosh version should be available soon. Many thanks to our beta testers who helped make this possible.

La version Française d’Ultima V : Lazarus est officiellement disponible pour Windows. Rendez-vous sur notre page de TELECHARGEMENTS pour commencer à jouer ! La version Macintosh devrait être bientôt disponible. Merci beaucoup à tous les beta testeurs qui nous ont aidé à rendre ça possible.

Ultima V: Lazarus is a free modification of the Dungeon Siege engine.

EA Replay for the PlayStation Portable will be released November 7, 2006. What is EA Replay? It contains 14 classic games including Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Wing Commander and Wing Commander: Secret Missions. No word yet on the Ultima VII expansions.

Full Press Release:

EA Embraces 90′s Nostalgia with EA REPLAY
14 classic console games from EA will be available on the PSP

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – September 1, 2006 – Electronic Arts announced today that it will release a compilation of EA games from the 90’s exclusively for the PSP® (PlayStation® Portable) system under the EA™ brand. The game is under production in Vancouver, B.C. by EA Canada, EA’s main hub for PSP development, and will ship to retailers November 7, 2006. Let EA bring you back to a simpler time when the dawn of gaming’s golden age took hold. EA™ Replay is a throw back to what you loved about videogames in the first place.

“We’re very excited to be offering PSP consumers an unprecedented glimpse into EA’s past,” said David McCarthy, executive producer on the project. “EA Replay is a rich compilation of classic EA IP that stays true to the original experiences, while offering modern gamers additional features geared towards on-the-go game play.”

EA Replay promises to deliver a great console experience on-the-go for all 14 games including hit franchises such as the Strike series, Road Rash™, and Wing Commander™. Go head-to-head with friends in multiplayer on select titles, unlock original game art, and save your game at any point. Let the memories come rushing back and take the fun of the 90’s wherever you go with EA Replay. The complete title list is as follows:
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