After a long 20 month hiatus, we’ve gotten some news from The Ultima 6 Project, the ambitious remake of Ultima VI for Dungeon Siege.  It seems they are ready to release their long-awaited version 1.1 on July 1st.

Team Archon is going to Beta on July 1st with their long-awaited 1.1 release of the Ultima 6 Project. More than just a bunch of bug-fixes, there are major portions of the game that have been completely redesigned, with the result of a much better overall experience. Our goal was to produce the definitive re-imagining, something that will stand as a testament to both our efforts, and the Ultima name. We hope that this lives up to our goal.

In their the project forums, Zephyr gives a small list of some of the improvements expected in this new release.  He also expresses the need for beta testers to help look for final bugs before release.

I have some exciting news. We are preparing to release our next Beta of the Ultima 6 Project, which is for the upcoming release of Version 1.1. There are many very major changes; I’m going to list them here, but this list is neither exhaustive nor necessarily 100% correct. Still, pretty cool stuff.

• Brand-new Moongate subsystem that now scales – things don’t break later in the game any more
• Generally better performance – major optimization of various components and special effects
• Huge enhancements to the dungeon map system – new “helper” pins and better maps to make our immense dungeons easier to navigate – or optionally, just as hard as before if you disable the helper pins
• Dozens of bug-fixes
• Far more accurate world map coordinates

I’m sure I’m leaving a ton of stuff out, and my compadres will almost certainly ask me to correct and enhance this list. Meantime, we are looking for a few volunteers to help with the testing. All you have to do is play the game, and post your findings here.

Please note – there are a lot of problems that have already been reported that we could either a) not fix for various reasons, or b) we’re not going to spend the time to fix, so please don’t be upset if we don’t fix the bug you found. We’re trying to wrap up this project and put it to bed; unfortunately that has to happen some day, so some bugs will indeed go un-fixed. The plan is to only leave those bugs that we can live with, or just can’t fix for whatever reason. But we’re pretty proud of this release, so there you go.

Anyway, PM me (Zephyr) or post here if you want to help out. We’re aiming for a July 1 “go” date on the Beta release. We will not be posting a public link for the Beta – yet – so please don’t share it with people as we don’t want it to end up in the wild just yet. Our servers won’t be able to handle it.

Thanks all, and please knock on some wood that the release won’t be all that buggy

This is great news!  I’ve been waiting for this announcement for a long time.  After a catastrophic hard drive failure half way through version 1.0, I’ve been waiting for their next release to complete my playthrough.  Here’s hoping they meet their goals, and they’re able to find the beta testers they need.

Go check out The Ultima 6 Project!