Posted by Just Michael on 21, 2001 at 7:33 PM:
Here is what I read on the UO2.com site:
Electronic Arts and Origin Systems have announced a plan that will increase their focus on Ultima Online and halt production of UWO:ORIGIN (UO2). The reason is simple, rather than creating UWO:ORIGIN (UO2) as a parallel world competing with UO, we've decided to put those resources into growing and improving the core offering for Ultima Online's 230,000 loyal subscribers. In the near future and with the release next week of Ultima Online: Third Dawn, players will see new lands, new creatures, and a world that is continually evolving within Ultima Online.
(rant mode on)
As a gamer who has played the Ultima series since I was a teen this is really sad. I quit UO because I got sick of all the things they changed. I got sick of all the exploits that were continually reported and were totally ignored (I was even threatened with being banned for reporting a bug in the game.) The only way to get them fixed (if you were lucky) was to report them to one of the various cheat websites and get everybody exploiting them like crazy. One thing that truly ticked me off was GM hours. They run a 24/7 game but only have help available during certain hours?? I had a friend who was stuck (inside a mountain) for a week because he was only able to play during certain hours. I also "loved" how stuff was going to be added "real soon". They were going to add more items you could make with carpentry and tinkering real soon about 1 year before I quit. About 6 months after I quit, they finally got added. If that is their "real soon", I think my grandkids (my kids are still kids) would be graduating high school by the time a "in a while" or "a ways down the road" feature would be added. In all UO was an awesome game when it came out before all the changes. It is just so sad to me to see such a thing spoiled like EA has done.
(rant mode off)
I was personally looking forward to UO2 and hoping they would have fixed some of the problems they had with the 1st one. Well I wonder what will be the next big online game?