To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Ultima 4‘s release, Shattered Moon has released an updated game client for Classic Ultima Online, the project once known (long ago) as Ultima 4 Multiplayer. When paired with the Ultima 4 game files on your hard drive (a free copy of Ultima 4 can be obtained via GOG), CUO allows you to take on the Quest of the Avatar…with your friends, or with complete strangers.

Naturally, you can grab the game client at the project entry here.

Additionally, Shattered Moon — with help from David Baity of MegaWars — has spun up a new server for the game, which can be accessed at ultima.shatteredmoon.com:58888. The game client should be configured to point to this server already, but if not, it’s trivially easy to edit CUO’s INI file to correct that.

Despite being in an alpha state — expect it to be buggy, expect that certain features may be missing, and expect that the occasional server wipe may prove necessary (so don’t get too attached to your character!) — this project is still a remarkable achievement, and David Baity will be keeping the game server up for the foreseeable future. The server software will also be released at some point, so that others will be able to spin up Classic Ultima Online servers.