Some biggish news from Broadsword Online Games: the Ultima Online team has grown by one:

The Broadsword Ultima Online Team is very proud to announce the continued support and dedication to our Japanese players. We’re investing in our Japanese community and have hired an Assistant Producer fluent in Japanese to help us improve all support and communications. We are also making plans to redo UO.Com so it will be bi-lingual in English and Japanese. It will preserve all of the information currently on the Japanese website. We recognize the value of all the information and will archive it so nothing is lost and will always be available to you. In 2 weeks, we look forward to introducing our newest Assistant Producer team member (natively from Japan!) that will be joining us here at Broadsword in the US!

Okay, we don’t know who the producer is yet, but still…this is a pretty significant development. Changes to the Ultima Online team in recent years haven’t tended to be of the…additive variety.