ULTIMA ONLINE: THIRD DAWN [Author: lum]

So I’ll do it. 🙂

On October 4th, Origin Systems Inc. registered the following domain names:

– UO3D.COM
– UO3D.NET
– UO3D.ORG
– UO-3D.NET
– UO-3D.ORG
– UOTD.ORG
– UO-TD.COM
– UOTHIRDDAWN.COM
– UOTHIRDDAWN.NET
– UOTHIRDDAWN.ORG
– THIRDDAWN.NET
– THIRDDAWN.ORG
– THIRD-DAWN.COM
– THIRD-DAWN.NET
– THIRD-DAWN.ORG

On March 30th, Jack Heistand, Senior Vice President/General Manager of
Origin, declared in an e-mail sent to his employees and published by Lum: “Rick Hall will become the producer of an exciting new sku, which will be the most powerful new UO release to date.”

On May 18th, Kirk “RuneSabre” Black, just after he left the UO Live team, declared: “My future is firmly with UO. Of course I can’t give you details of what the future of UO I will help bring about are, but, I can assure you its going to be very cool!”.

On May 30th, Gordon “Tyrant” Walton, Vice President of Online Services and Operations of Origin, declared in an interview given to Jinx: “More people are working on it now than there were at the peak of UO:Renaissance.”

On October 11th, Paul “Sage” Sage declared: “I honestly believe that the next few months will be the most exciting months ever in UO history”.

A lot of rumors were floating around the fan sites since April. It looks like we will soon know the truth.
I can be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that:

– A new extension to UO will be announced soon (before November 11th).
– It will be named Ultima Online: Third Dawn
– It will included a 3D client (hence the acronym UO:3D)
– A demo of this 3D client will be shown at the UO World Faire
– RuneSabre leads the project (if not as the producer as the lead programmer)
– It will be out before April 2001

The only real news here is the name of the extension. But by putting together all the informations released or leaked I think we get a better idea of what’s going on.

The future of UO is slowly taking shape… 🙂