@geldon – I hope you don’t think my previous post was referring to you.

My bad.

We have once again increased the maximum available player slots.

Don’t wait any longer and join the fight.
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Sad I wept a little on the inside when I read that. I played on a free UO shard for a little while, but I had to stop a few years back. Some things should just die while the memories are still good.

@geldon – I hope you don’t think my previous post was referring to you.

Boanerges :Browser based, huh? Reminds me of another game from the people who will soon revolutionize the MMO industry. Any day now. Stop laughing.

Are you for real? Please let me assure you that you know absolutely nothing about what you are talking about.
[...]
Please, stop talking about things you have no knowledge of and have obviously done zero research into.

I’m sorry, could you be a little more condescending? Your utilization of something you’ve linked something titled “possibly a Lord of Ultima screenshot” and a bunch of NDA leaked rumor mongering wasn’t applied to adequately to make this completely self-evident.

geldonyetich :

The trouble with your analysis is that by all accounts this game appears to have zero Ultima lore. I would be all for an Ultima RTS game. This isn’t one. This is merely a generic fantasy RTS with the name Ultima stamped on at the end.

On what evidence do you base this? It’s not like they’ve shown us so much as a screenshot of the game yet.
It’s not that “lore” is all that large to leverage into any game. It’s basically just a choice of dressing.

Are you for real? Please let me assure you that you know absolutely nothing about what you are talking about.
A screenshot has been avaliable for awhile. Posts on the UHall (you do know what that is, don’t you?) have multiple reports from beta testers that there is ZERO ULTIMA in the game. No Britannia, no moongates, none of the characters, monsters, enemies, locations, — essentially none of the “lore” one would expect from an Ultima game. It is a generic fantasy RTS that has nothing to do with Ultima except the name which was attached at the end of development.

Please, stop talking about things you have no knowledge of and have obviously done zero research into.

screenshot at:
http://www.ultimaaiera.com/blog/lord-of-ultima/

As you said, we don’t have enough evidence to judge whether it will be respectful of the franchise. But so far we have nothing to indicate that it will. First, that it’s a browser game, though that is starting to mean less and less; second, that there is nothing from the short description that could indicate it wouldn’t be a Travian/Tribal Wars/etc clone; third, that there is no guarantee that it will include the staples of the Ultima franchise (the Britannia setting, etc.). Rather, it seems to be a last-ditch effort to milk a franchise that has been inactive for a decade, hoping it might have recovered from its major disappointments (Ultima IX) or cancellations (UO2). At worst, it appears to be a generic browser game EA was planning and had yet to come up with a name, until it remembered it had this intellectual property with an overall respectable pedigree gathering dust in a dark corner.

Ultima IV, by the way, was one of the rare games I owned for the NES. I loved every minute of it.

The trouble with your analysis is that by all accounts this game appears to have zero Ultima lore. I would be all for an Ultima RTS game. This isn’t one. This is merely a generic fantasy RTS with the name Ultima stamped on at the end.

On what evidence do you base this? It’s not like they’ve shown us so much as a screenshot of the game yet.

It’s not that “lore” is all that large to leverage into any game. It’s basically just a choice of dressing.

But when you have a brand that has been left to languish like the Ultima brand, you aren’t “expanding” the brand any more. You are engaged in slash & burn marketing. The only point of the “Ultima” label is to hope to trick some poor fools out of their money – purchasers who will, one will note, end up angry at both the Ultima brand and the new game.

This feels like someone was reaching into the IP dustbin to pull out some random IP to slap on the game – a few centimeters to the left and it would have been Lords of Wing Commander instead.