On Monday, I mentioned that Ultima Online’s Lead Designer had been laid off as a part of EA cost-cutting measures. Between mentioning the remaining folks on the dev team, as well as an active thread on Stratics (which I can’t retrieve because Stratics went down sometime yesterday or the day before and is still not up as of 7:35 am CST today), it stirred up quite a discussion about UO’s future.

Bonnie Armstrong, the Ultima Online Producer, released a Producer’s Letter yesterday outlining future plans for UO:

I wanted to take a few moments to fill everyone in on a few things we are doing. I have heard rumbling from the community that the sky is falling. I promise that is not true. We still have a team that is dedicated to UO and is excited about what is to come. The Event moderator program is here and still going strong.

As for the future of UO, I would like to share with you some of the ideas we have and want to see happen this year.

• New Theme Pack “The Kings Collection”
• Vendor Search
• New Story Arc
• Revamping Vet Reward – You have to be x age to get it but we are making vet rewards so anyone can use it.
• Revamping Fishing and Pirate Loot
• Adding a Gargoyle Horn Stylist
• Adding Fey Slayers to dungeon loot
• Reopening shard of the dead for Halloween
• Coming up with our Christmas and new Vet Rewards and Anniversary Rewards
• Adding new begging items for Trick or Treating
• Adding additional items to the clean up Britiannia turn ins
• 2nd House option on Siege
• Still working on High Res Art that has not been dropped, the housing wall tiles are numerous and takes a while to redo. I highly doubt we will be able to get this in game this year, we are shooting for the beginning of next year.
• Fix Bugs

I would also like to address the issue of King Blackthorns Counsel on Siege. Originally we did not put it on Siege due to the fact that the towns are Faction towns and we know griefing will happen. If Siege accepts that fact we will be more than happen to add the voting system to Siege.

Next week we will once again put Shadow Strike on Clubs for all the Stealth Macers out there.

We are putting out a publish for a few bug fixes that you will get tomorrow during maintenance:
• Players that are co-owned to a house can once again use house teleporters properly
• Orc Helms now provide the expected 3% LMC.

See everyone in game !!

This was a very surprising Producer’s Letter, because normally they don’t talk specifics so far in advance – some of those things listed won’t happen until September/October or later.

Mentioning that the high resolution artwork update won’t happen until 2014 was very surprising. Back in January, the producer’s letter mentioned that they still had 35+ tile sets to go for walls/housing, and that each set takes 3 weeks (although we don’t know how many people are working on it). I’d like to thank the UO Producer for being blunt about the artwork update. It is something desperately needed for UO.