The first State of UO Address held by the team at Broadsword Online Games went off with seemingly no hitches last week, ably hosted by the team at Stratics. And while I’m aware that Deckard is pulling together his thoughts on the Address (which he’ll be sharing with us in due course), I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Massively’s brief summary of it in the interim:

On Friday, Ultima Online Producer Bonnie Armstrong and the Broadsword Online Games crew took to Google Hangouts for an informal state of the game address and player question-and-answer session. The event marked one of the first times we’ve heard from the Broadsword team about its plans for the game since its pseudo-acquisition a few months ago. The highlights?

• The artwork update is still on the way, as are new housing tiles.
• A resurrection of the old MyUO.com website is planned, along with a revamp of the new and returning player experience.
• The team hopes to resume putting out one expansion or booster every year.

On the downside, the team isn’t currently working on new housing areas, new items for the cash shop, or storage expansions, and there’s no ETA for the bug-free return of vendor search, which was implemented and promptly went kaput just a few weeks ago.

An interesting factoid pointed out by Stratics poster Nails Warstein: The player split between the old classic client and the newest enhanced client is now 50-50.

As well, Massively’s Game Archaeologist recently interviewed a couple of well-known (I gather) UO players about the current state of the game. That might be worth a read.