The latest news update published to the Ultima Online website seems…significant. It pertains to the release of Publish 86.3 on the TC1 shard, and much of the content of the post concerns the ongoing Trader’s Quest and Vice vs. Virtue events.

However, in and amongst these updates, there are a few news items that stand out as seeming particularly significant:

We are pushing our final server publish to TC1 this evening for Publish 86. We will be putting our a patch and publish to Origin and Izumo the 18th with our new UI!!

It’s no secret that Broadsword Online Games hired a UI designer (Pinco, a well-known developer of fan mods for the game’s UI), nor is it unknown that a new UI for the game has been in the works for a while now. It will be interesting to see the new UI in action once the update goes live.

There’s also this:

Faction System Removal

• All players have been removed from Factions.
• Faction horses will revert to normal pets.
• Faction Greater Stamina Potions, Faction Supernova Potions, Shrine Gems, and Cloaks of Command have been removed.

Factions were a group-based PvP system, unique to the Felucca facet. “The system consists of 4 Factions, 2 good and 2 evil, struggling for control of Britannia. Control is determined by eight Felucca cities (Britain, Magincia, Minoc, Moonglow, Skara Brae, Trinsic, Vesper and Yew). Cities are captured by stealing the town Sigil, taking it back to your base, holding it for 10 hours to corrupt, and then placing it back in the respective town. The town is secured for 3 days until the sigil can be stolen once again. All factions are aggressive towards each other, meaning each faction member can be attacked freely by members of another faction. This type of warfare only takes place in Felucca, enemy faction players appear neutral in all other facets.”

I’m not well-versed in the particulars of the Ultima Online playerbase and their in-game interests, but it’s my understanding that the Factions system was consuming a fair amount of development resources that might have been…out of proportion (in a bad way) to the number of players involved. If so, scrapping the system makes a fair amount of sense. Still…it’s a fairly significant feature removal, and one hopes it signifies good things ahead for Ultima Online now that the system is no longer tying up developers.