Ideal Dragon readily admits, in one of his most recent messages to the Ultima 8: Exult channel on the Ultima Dragons Discord server, that work on the project has slowed down somewhat over the last week or so…but for good reason:

• Another quiet week from my end as I’ve been deep in research speaking to some developers of the original Ultima 8.
• Agentorangeguy is updating some code which will make mapping & prototyping geography much faster.
• theGreyWanderer is doing fantastic work implementing the U8 spell system and has some really cool ideas being tested for implementing some of them.

However, he did drop this little tidbit as a follow-up message, which news will be greated with either great joy or much groaning, depending on just how big of a fan of Ultima 8 you are:

Oh also, jumping is hotkeyed now, so you can just run around & jump everywhere hahahaha

note: there will still generally not be any jumping required for important stuff, and any jumping will be simple and easy. And if it doesn’t play that way in testing, I’ll alter or remove it haha

Ideal Dragon has also been chatting with a number of former Ultima 8 developers in recent weeks, and they evidently haven’t been shy about opining on ways to improve the game:

Cool little bit of news from my discussions & research chats with LB & U8 devs – a few have voiced support for adding party members. I’m even going to get some suggestions from one of them which is cool

I still need to make a point of beginning to post some of the other information and comments that Ideal Dragon has gotten from various former Origin Systems staff, but it’s neat to see that some of them are having a bit of influence on the direction that this particular remake effort is heading in. Adding a party to Ultima 8 would be a very interesting twist on the game, to be sure.