It has been a while since we last heard from Team Return, but as of today they have launched their redesigned website, and have even added some new content to it.

We’ll get to that in a moment. But first, here’s what Sergorn Dragon had to say about the project’s recent state of affairs:

First I can only begin by apoligizing : about a year ago, the website suffered an attack that essentially crippled it, as well as deleting all our media content, meaning everything had to be rebuild, we’ve had a splash page for many months and barebones website for a while, but with no updates, and as Team Leader, the reponsibility is mine for the lack of update.

Let’s be blunt : Ultima Return haven’t been doing much progress in the past year – the main reason for this is that we decided last year to essentially start from stratch. Those who follow twitter and the Ultima Codex might already be aware of it, but we decided to drop the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine, and switch to the Unity engine. There are multiple reason for this that we will expand later on, but the core of it is that we feel that due to the amount of time such projects are taking, tying them to a single existing game tend to be a bad idea in the long run and thus this will allow our project to be released as a stand alone game eventually.

And, indeed, we have been making some progress in getting ramped up with Unity. Here’s what I was playing around with today, for example:

It’s not much, I know. I was primarily interested in seeing if Unity could import the old heightmap of the Serpent Isle I had built to serve as the foundation for Ultima Return’s overland map back when it was still being built with Neverwinter Nights. Indeed, that’s the reason for the absurd amount of empty space along the edges of the map; in NWN2, most of that space would have been non-walkable; it was necessary to squish the continent into the middle of the available area in order to avoid having parts of it inaccessible to the player.

Unity imposes no such constraints, of course, but I haven’t had time to build a new and better heightmap of the Serpent Isle that takes advantage of the new engine’s lack of constraints. So I made do with this, for a test. What you see above took about ten minutes to set up…including placing the trees.

Anyhow, I digress. In addition to the new website, there is some new soundtrack music available to listen to at the Ultima Return website:

Now we’ve released some tracks before : you will all remember Grotto Dragon’s epic rendition of Stones, the beautiful Main Theme he conceived for us and last but not least, the Character Creation theme which hearkened back to Ultima VI will bringing our own musical vibe into it. There were only but a few of the music that Grotto has written to us for now, and we have decided to release the remaining tracks for your enjoyments, all of which will be featured in the Prologue and the main game.

So there are four new tracks now available in the media page : “Battle”, “Exploration”, “Moonbay”, and “Dungeon”.

You’ll find it on the Media page.

So…Team Return has returned (heh) to the Internet, and have resumed work on Ultima Return. Or, well, have resumed telling us about their work on Ultima Return. There has been some stuff going on in the background; systems development and story rewrites, mostly. But now the team is ready to publicize their work again; hopefully they’ll have more and better to show you in the months to come!