New UO Producer’s Letter Teases More High-Res Artwork

Bonnie “Mesanna” Armstrong has published another producer’s letter, in which a few more pieces of high-res artwork for UO get shown off.

Pretty walls.

She also discusses some of the current issues with Ultima Online, and what all the recent “extended maintenance” has been about:

As I am sure some of you might have already noticed we are moving off the old servers onto the Cloud. With a game as old as UO it has been challenging but we are working hard to iron out the kinks. Both the East Coast and West Coast servers have been moved in addition to Europa, Oceania, and Drachenfels.

Current Issues

• Please be cautious of buying spellbooks from vendors that might look like this xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxDemon Slayer. It is not a valid Demon Slayer book and has just been engraved to appear this way. We are fixing this so all engraved text is hued in some fashion in the next publish.
• Please do not try to resize your house immediately after placement. There is a known issue that you will not be able to please wait till the next maintenance cycle to attempt to resize. We have not worked out all the details that cause this so any additional information would be helpful.
• Please know that fighting your pets to drop pools of blood to block house placement is being viewed as a griefing tactic. If a GM is called he will warn you, if you do not stop you will be removed from the area. This will be fixed in the next publish.

In addition to the high-res art update, she also details some upcoming changes that UO will see…including revamped weapon, armor, and player council/city voting systems. She also gives a rough indicator as to when the high-res artwork might begin rolling out into the game:

We still have many wall sets to update including doors, signs, and the roof before any high res art will be released. Please understand its taking us 3 weeks from start to finish to get each wall set type in the game. So yes this is slow going but we are going to finish it *grins* Remember now there are 45 wall sets total and we have totally completed 7.

Let’s hope that Mythic is able to pick up the pace a bit, because at the rate outlined above it will be 2015 before the high-res artwork is pushed to the servers.