Broadsword Online Games have pushed Publish 96 for Ultima Online to the Origin, Izumo, and Baja shards. (These three shards — it used to mainly be Origin and Izumo; Baja is a more recent addition — receive content updates first, out of all the production shards.)

Beginning with Izumo tonight, Origin, Izumo & Baja will receive Publish 96 during their regular maintenance cycles.  Publish 96 is full of new and exciting features, bug fixes, and new content so make sure you check out the full patch notes here and send us any feedback you have here.  Please continue to send in feedback as we look forward to a tentative World Wide release Thursday, February 9, 2017.

The latest client patch 4.0.56.0 and 7.0.56.0 are mandatory, so please make sure you update your UO client before trying to login.

You’ll note, too, that they suggested a target for the global release date for Publish 96, but noted that it was a tentative thing at the moment. Hence my use of the word teased in the title.

The client patch is necessary, no doubt, because of the new resolution and view window settings that Publish 96 introduces to the game.

It’s also worth noting that Publish 96 saw a few updates in advance of this release to the first three production shards:

In addition to the server side changes based on feedback and bug reports, we will be putting out a new client to resolve the following issues:

• Fixed an issue where approaching names would not display properly in the Classic Client.
• Resolved a crash in the Classic Client when selecting a full screen resolution that is less than the gameplay window size.
• Resolved an issue where some block tiles were not the correct height, which could cause collision and rubber banding issues.
• Fixed issue where the evening gown was not displaying the correct gump art.
• The circle of transparency is now centered when game window size is changed.
• We are working to resolve the issue with new gameplay window sizes when using Korean language support in a future publish.

I still think that Broadsword should just ditch the Classic Client, for all of its quirks and the headaches it sometimes causes. But I guess there are still enough users clinging to it that maintaining it is worth the effort.