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R.I.P Ultima Online ?

Posted by Zonk on from the going-down-for-the-fourth-time dept.

petrus4 writes "Terra Nova has posted my article about the possible impending death of Ultima Online. In it, I talk about why I think UO is in serious long-term trouble, and what can be done to possibly reverse the trend and rescue the game." From the article: "Admittedly when something is very large, its demise often takes a considerable period of time...The Titanic took something like four hours to sink after initially striking the iceberg. But there are a couple of reasons why I believe that from a long term market share perspective, the game could be in trouble."

1 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Article is wrong by ASayre8 · · Score: 5, Informative

    First off, lemme make a lil' disclaimer: I'm one of the Core developers at http://www.runuo.com/, the largest Ultima Online emulator around, so I may be a bit biased :)

    Anyways, the article seems to have been written by someone who hasn't kept up on the latest UO news. In the past month, EA/OSI released a new expansion with a large landmass, the "samurai empire" expansion. Also, just in the past week infact, They opened up a brand NEW shard, compeltely clean with no players on it. If UO was dying,it wouldn't make economic sense to invest money and time in putting up another server.

    In the article, it also lists as a 'reason' for UO's demise as the lack of stores in which to purchase The latest expansions or Gamecodes without the use of a Credit Card. A little searching shows this page listing EB-Games austrailia as a place t' buy 'em.

    Another thing that the author didn't take into account is the popularity of free shards. RunUO, in addition to providing highly customizable software, also sponsors 3 shards, all from differing time periods. Combined, they have over 50,000 accounts. And these are active accounts. we purge unused accounts every 90 some days.

    Hybrid, Our biggest shard with about 37000 accounts, is based in the Pre-AoS era, with peaks ov over 2000 online at any one time.

    Our other shards, Rebirth and Demise, are a super old school shard from the Pre-T2A area, and a Shard from the current era of ultima online, AoS/SE respectively.

    Those are just 3 shards. There are MANY more out there which help keep UO alive.

    Long live Ultima Online!