It has been a busy few days for Broadsword Online Games; as of late last week, Publish 99 for Ultima Online has been released to the Origin, Izumo, and Baja shards:

We are pleased to announce Publish 99 will be deployed to Origin, Izumo, and Baja occurring after 1:00pm ET March 29, 2018.  We will be manually taking down these shards at approximately 12:30pm ET.  This release only includes the following features,

• Towncrier update & related quests
• Global Chat (Please note this feature will require a database update and will not be immediately available when shards are back online)
• Miscellaneous bug fixes

Endless Journey access will not be available until Publish 99 is deployed world wide.

While Origin, Izumo and Baja are being updated Vendor Search, Character Transfer, and Housing will be unavailable on all shards for approximately 2 hours.  Following the release of Publish 99 to Origin, Izumo, and Baja characters will not be able to transfer to or from shards not updated to Publish 99.

The latest client patch will be mandatory, so please be sure to patch up before logging in to any shard.

They have also released the Stygian Abyss expansion — which, you may recall, was pulled from the Origin Store recently — for all UO players:

The worldwide release of Publish 99, meanwhile, is expected to take place this week (bringing the Endless Journey free-to-play version of the game with it):

We anticipate Publish 99 will be going World Wide on April 5, 2018.  This update will be done manually, and not during regularly scheduled maintenance.  Regularly scheduled maintenance for all shards will be cancelled beginning on April 5th and will resume on April 6th.  Shut messages will commence at 10:00am ET and shards will be brought down at 10:30am ET.  We anticipate the downtime will last approximately 3 hours.  Keep an eye on UO.com for updates on publish status.

Beginning at 10am on April 5, 2018 the Account Center will be brought down in preparation for Publish 99.  The account center will return at the time Publish 99 is released world wide.

Additionally, the latest Ultima Online newsletter is, as you might expect, primarily focused on addressing questions about the upcoming Endless Journey free-to-play component of the game:

The second part of Endless Journey is now on TC1.  Please check out the updated notes in the Wiki.  Special thanks to everyone who has helped test the restrictions, your feedback is really important!  Please join the conversation on our UO.com forums or send in your feedback!  We are looking at a world wide release of Publish 99 in the beginning of April  depending on how smoothly things go with our upcoming release to Origin and other early shards as well as feedback from players.

I would like to address a few emails that I have received regarding Endless Journey restrictions,

1.  Due to feedback, we are going to allow EJ accounts on TC1 however you will not be able to character copy with an Endless Journey account.

2.  Currently Endless Journey accounts are not eligible for Power Scroll drops, this was done per feedback we received from players.  Remember though, this does not mean Endless Journey players cannot otherwise obtain power scrolls.  For example my player was in a guild that did a lot of Champ Spawns.  At the end of each spawn we dropped all the scrolls in a chest, and we used the Lucky Dealer NPC and rolled for the scrolls and items collected.  This could be great for guilds that enjoy doing Champ Spawns and are looking to grow their ranks with returning Endless Journey players.  Players on Endless Journey accounts can also steal power scrolls and loot them from the corpses of their victims!

3.  We will be allowing EJ accounts to log into Siege.

4.  We know there has been a lot of discussion related to the amount of storage that Endless Journey accounts will have access to.  We are still actively developing means of allowing Endless Journey accounts access to some level of secure storage.  These options will not be part of the initial release of Endless Journey and may come at a later time.

…

Please also remember when we release Endless Journey we will be taking actions against multiboxing users.  We will be posting once a month on UO.com the number of warnings/bannings actioned against violators so you are aware we are catching people.  We will need your assistance with this and we are asking that you page on the players you are witnessing using multiboxing.  Just know no one will be coming back to you with any type of response though as it is our policy to not discuss specific actions taken against offenders outside the information we will be releasing on UO.com.

Also, the newsletter contains some details about Publish 100, which — despite the significant number — will be a relatively unremarkable update:

As we’ve mentioned before, our goal after Endless Journey with Publish 100 will be a bug push where we concentrate on fixing as many bugs as possible.  If you have a bug that you would especially like to see fixed please send it to us here.  You can also post bugs in the UO.com Bug Forum.  Note that unless we need more information from your email we generally don’t respond.  For forum posts you may not receive an immediate response but we do read them and will ramp up on this in Publish 100.

Here are some current bugs and minor feature requests that are going through the process of getting resolved (note this list is subject to change)

• Addition of level 5 and 6 maps as rewards from the Hag quest
• Updates to the Seed Box that allow you to remove a quantity instead of just 1 or all
• Ability to dye Time of Legends items with natural dyes
• Fixing an issue with mannequins and talismans not equipping or becoming “owned by” properly

If you’d like to receive these roughly-monthly newsletters for yourself, you can sign up for them at UO.com.