*rubs eyes* …maybe Sunsword leaving was a good thing?

A brand new client and UI is in the work for the classic Ultima Online:

We won’t be releasing more details for a bit, but we do want to let you know a few things:

1. We are completely re-building the Ultima Online client with new graphics and a new easier-to-use interface.
2. It is an in-place upgrade. That means you will be able to keep your characters, items, houses and everything else you’ve earned over the past nine years.
3. We are committed to maintaining extremely low system specs. They will be higher than what UO launched with in 1997, but will still be far lower than almost any other MMORPG on the market.
4. The launch will happen in 2007.
5. There are many, many more surprises in store.

The Ultima Online development team has been working hard for the past eight months to make real the vision of a thriving, vibrant Ultima Online.

Darkscribe
Producer – Ultima Online

Screenshot 1 – Screenshot 2 – Screenshot 3

Still nothing about the UI, though.

This looks like a 2D client with all the art assets redone and rescaled a bit. If it’s true I’m quite impressed because redoing ALL the art of the game is definitely a daunting task. Redoing all the wearables, all the locations of the game, all the monsters and animations. That would be HUGE.

Technology-wise I’m glad they stick to 2D. I think they didn’t have many choices about it, either. Redoing the world in 3D would mean building an odd tile-based 3D engine so that all the environments of the game could be quickly assembled. And even creating 2D scenery that isn’t based on old tiles would still be something nearly impossible.

I’m quite suprised that they aren’t using 3D for the characters and monsters. The old 3D client was really bad, but it was mostly a matter of execution gone wrong.

The question now is if this new client is going to replace the other two, or if EA will have to continue to maintain all three. The players may scream aloud if you steal them the familiar look, but the compatibility with the older clients could become a significant obstacle for the development of the game and the UI.

The graphic looks decent, but I’m not so impressed. The new textures/tiles aren’t too bad but I’ll have to see all that moving to have a better idea about it. The avatars are the part that worries me more and the result will depend a lot on how well they are animated, along with all the wearables that they’ll have to convert.

If I didn’t know already it was Ultima it would have been quite hard to recognize it in those screenshots. At the same time, if you take the screenshots and don’t know what game they are about you couldn’t say that it looks so great that you want to play it now. It has a vague amateurish feel, but then again the artists were forced to match the exact tyles of the current game. So it’s from that perspective that things should be considered.

As others have commented, the game needs much more than that. Redoing the UI could be a significant step forward as UO has never received a true development on that front and the old UI was really clunky with bugs left in there and never addressed (hello corrupted text and health bars not updating). I think it’s also the time to remove the dependence from 3rd party programs like UOAssist. What the player needs should be integrated in the game, not requiring the purchase of an external program.

Sticking with 2D will also mean trying to solve the problems linked to that choice. For example the varying resolutions. The area of the world that is visible shouldn’t shrink or enlarge based on the resolution, but that would also mean developing a system to rescale the tiles, that would have the side effect of blurring out the graphic or making it too blocky. Looking at those screenshots and observing carefully along the tiles you could notice some odd jags, and that’s probably because they have already an auto-scaling system in action.

I hope the graphic window on the world will be full screen and that the UI will also be scaled in proportion with the resolution and get layered on the graphic window like the recent 3D games, instead of being pushed out of the margin of the window as in the current UO client.

This has the potential to reawaken and renew this classic game after the relative staticity of the last years. Dropping the old clients completely so that the client can loosen its constrictive legacy would be a too daring choice that I don’t think will be made. But it’s still a decent “beginning” that, in any case, would be interesting to follow.

A note from the devs:

This was in production before EA bought Mythic.

(originally I thought that they slightly lowered the angle of the camera as you can see more toward the top of the screen. Then I noticed that the angle didn’t change, it’s the avatar to not be centered. The “new” screenshots is shifted toward the top, the “old” one shifted toward the bottom. What fools you is the little pool at the bottom right that seems to have the same position in both screenshots. If you notice it’s not a change of perspective, in the new client that pool has been moved *physically* on the left. Confrontate it with the walls at the other side.)