There’s more Ultima Online news today than that Richard Garriott will be returning to play Lord British in the game later this week! Broadsword Online Games have — or will soon have — released Publish 86.3 onto the Origin and Izumo shards. They’ve made a few changes to the Publish versus the version that was pushed to TC1 recently; hit up their news article about the Publish for details.

And speaking of TC1, those of you who frequent that shard may also want to review these patch notes, which detail changes that were made, again quite recently, to the Test Center shard.

Finally, in what’s probably the most exciting bit of news covered here, Broadsword have also announced that with Publish 86, Advisors will be added in to Ultima Online. The Advisors are really the 2.0 version of the old Counselor program that was featured in Ultima Online between 1997 and 2000. Like the old Counselors, Advisors will be dressed in blue robes, and will serve a similar in-game function:

If an Advisor is logged in you will be able to open your paperdoll and click on the help button, at the top you should see Contact an Advisor, click on this and write up the issue you wish the Advisor to help you with. Please keep in mind Advisors are NOT GM’s they do not have the powers to help you like a GM does. Advisors can move monsters that spawn out of reach, move corpses that die in out of reach locations, help new and returning players with information about the game that they don’t know or might have forgotten, and direct players to information sites that might be helpful. If an Advisor gets a call that she/he can’t handle they will forward it to a GM to keep the player from having to place two pages.

This is a welcome feature to see return, and it bodes well (I think) for the vision Broadsword has for Ultima Online’s future.