I’ve never played Ultima Online, but even in that ignorance, I’m well-enough aware of the affinity many of the game’s remaining players have for the game’s Classic Client, the original client that was released with the first edition of UO back in 1997…and the degree to which those same players will tend to get into a bit of an uproar about changes or modernizations thereto.

But hopefully, this recent news from Broadsword regarding a planned upgrade for the Classic Client will not be met with much negativity:

There is no mistaking the iconic aesthetics of the Ultima Online Classic Client are irreplaceable.  Since its release in 1997, players have come to appreciate the performance and quality of life upgrades that are now a cornerstone of an enjoyable gameplay experience.

As such, we are extremely excited to announce that we are working with the developers of the third-party client “ClassicUO” with the goal of making available an officially sanctioned version for use on all shards!

We also want to make sure that the official Ultima Online Classic Client meets the expectations of our players from a performance standpoint.  To deliver this performance we will be upgrading the Classic Client renderer to support higher frame rates and a larger play window.

It’s worth calling out the action plan here: because Broadsword is such a small team, and likely don’t have the bandwidth to do the work of building an improved Classic Client in-house, they are working with the developers of ClassicUO. What’s interesting about ClassicUO is that it supports more platforms than just Windows; builds are available for Linux and Mac OS, alongside a web-based client. There is the potential here — should Broadsword opt to take advantage of it — to bring Ultima Online to these other platforms in an official capacity.

Which, it should be noted, would certainly be one way for them to make good on their 2020 promise to bring the game to “the largest audience ever“. (It’s probably too much to hope for a mobile client, but I suppose this too isn’t out of the realm of possibility.)