Broadsword Online Games have a couple big pieces of news for us. The first is that Publish 99, the latest content update for Ultima Online, has been pushed to the Test Center shard:

We are pleased to announce the first of several TC1 Publish 99 releases will be available for testing on TC1 by 2pm ET February 28, 2018.  Publish 99 is full of new features, so make sure you patch up your client and head over to TC1 to check out the latest update.  Please note that some features will not be available on TC1, check the notes for full release details.  As always, we look forward to your feedback.

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Please note that the latest client patch is mandatory, so please be sure to patch your client before accessing TC and production shards.

Additionally, they have launched new forums for the game:

Finally, we are pleased to announce the launch of our new official forums!  You must have an active subscription to login to the forums, and can do so here using your Ultima Online game login credentials.

To my mind, this is almost bigger news than the test release of Publish 99. How long has it been since Ultima Online had its own official forums? Stratics has been the de facto official forum for the game since at least 2003, which was I think the year that MyUO was shut down. And really, Stratics was kind of the forum for Ultima Online that most players — to say nothing of the developers themselves — frequented prior to that date, at least as I understand it.

So for there to be official Ultima Online forums hosted at the game’s official website is…kind of a big deal.