As noted previously, the Ultima Return team roster was recently updated with some new members. Sergorn Dragon has gone ahead and formally announced the roster changes in a news post at the project site.

It’s been a long time indeed.

Way to long, and we apologize for this. The sad truth is that website updates are just not our strong point, though we’d be lying if we said that everything had been going smoothly over the last year.

Indeed since we want to be honest, the last few months had been going very slowly to the point we can consider the project had pretty much been on hiatus! But we’re not dead and we’re still dedicated and for the last month, things have finally been picking up, thanks notably to the arrival of new team members to join us !

Emmanuel Henné, our 3D artist, has returned to our team and his hard a work on our very own Gazer Concept. It’ll be a while before we share it in public I’m afraid, but let’s just say we are very pleased by the way it is shaping up and hoping you will enjoy our unique take on this traditionnal Ultima creature !

James Trujillo, has joined us as well and will be bringing his professionnal writer’s skills into editing and polishing our texts and dialogues to the best possible quality!

The talented Daji San has joined us as a Pixel Artist, and is hard at work in creating beautiful looking icons for our inventory items and spells icons. We’ll be sharing some of his work very soon!

And last but not least, we are delighted to have Andrea “Saphireena” Fryer amongst us as a portrait artist, and since images can be stronger than word, we are pleased to the share the very first portrait she has crafted for Ultima: Return : a beautiful sorceress in our Prologue.

A cropped version of the portrait graces the top of this news post; click on through to see the full version. More of Andrea’s work can be seen on the project site’s also-updated Media page…and is it just me, or does one of the character’s she’s sketched out seem oddly familiar?

It’s good to hear from this project; I’m sure some of you were worried that it had faded into oblivion!