Welcome back to another year of Spam Spam Spam Humbug. This year, to ring in 2016, episodes for the month of January will mostly be focused on re-capping the news pertaining to Ultima, including Ultima Online (which, at least for now, is the only game still in active development that is carrying on the Ultima namesake), various Ultima fan projects, and also different games that have been inspired by Ultima (including Shroud of the Avatar and Underworld Ascendant, as well as — possibly — Shards Online and Crowfall).

This week, we will be looking at what has transpired with Underworld Ascendant over the course of 2015. This was a pretty big year for the project (which first came to light in mid-2014); it had a successful run on Kickstarter (although for a while there, there was room for some doubt as to whether it would make its base goal), its setting was confirmed to be something near and dear to — or dreaded by, depending on your point of view — Ultima fans’ hearts, and a tie-in with Richard Garriott’s Shroud of the Avatar was revealed. Later on in the year, we even got our first look at an area of the game, at least in prototypical form.

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