The Ultima Online Development Tracker is live at uodev.UltimaCodex.com.

What is the UO Development Tracker?

Newer MMORPGs, like BioWare’s own Star Wars: The Old Republic, all have development trackers. It’s one of those things that is now considered a standard.

UO set that standard back in the 1990s. You read that right. UO was the original standard bearer for communicating with players about what was going on with UO. Back in the olden days, the UO community had the Update Center and Development Cycle pages to give us an idea of what had just happened, what was in testing or in concept, and what was going to be deployed into the game.

It’s been over 5 years since we had this, going back to before UO.com was replaced with the Warhammer-inspired UOHerald.com, which was designed without the features necessary to keeping the players updated on what was actually happening with Ultima Online.

In September of 2010, the UO team stated they wanted to …to come up with a method to update you more consistently about goings on with the team.

In September of 2011, Jeff Skalski, the new (at the time) Ultima Franchise Producer, again raised the issue, saying I hear everyone from Stratics and the other UO forums that the communication level has been poor. It’s one of several items I’ll be discussing with our Community team as we work on ways we can improve that for everyone.

Fast-forward to July of 2012. Some of us were discussing how hard it can be to find out about the bigger things going on with UO. Sure, we can read Publish notes, but that doesn’t tell us about the direction of UO, and as the UO team in 2010, and Jeff Skalski in 2011 both stated, they were having a hard time communicating with UO players and talking to us about the future of UO, and it’s still a problem, even here in August of 2012.

We know that UOHerald.com is going to be replaced with a redesigned UO.com website that is supposed to be focused on Ultima Online, and not trying ot mimic Warhammer Online, but we don’t know if there will be a development tracker or anything like it.

So we made one.

It’s our gift to the UO Team and to the UO Community. So even if the UO team and Mythic community management people are having difficulties coming up with the time to keep the UO community up-to-date on UO, we as a fansite will try and help out. It’s the least we can do as we head into UO’s 15th Anniversary!