Ultima Online is a very old and fairly small MMORPG nowadays, but even so you probably knew that it has a thriving emulator community, which is generally left alone by the developers. What you probably didn’t know is that it also has a strong modding community, which has led in recent years to the promulgation of third-party clients that work with the official game, not just with rogue servers, offering a host of modern conveniences as well as features that are widely considered cheats. And now, with New Legacy on the horizon, Broadsword is cracking down on them.
The indie studio made the announcement last week ahead of the launch of the New Legacy beta, characterizing the “war” as one intended to combat botting and exploits. The company says it will focus first on non-subscription (EJ is Endless Journey, the F2P access option) users of these third-party clients before presumably moving on to paid accounts.
“We wanted to give you an update on our next step to crush the unapproved automatic gameplay in UO. At this time these changes will only apply to EJ accounts. If you are flagged, you will not be able to log back in the shard once you log out. When you try to log back into that shard you will see a message such as this ‘Your access to this shard is currently suspended due to a violation of our terms of service. Our review process may take up to 72 hours to review the ticket but know that EJ accounts that are caught cheating or exploiting will be Perma banned.’ This is the first step we are doing to help stop the cheating in UO. Please know additional measures are on the way.”
Community reactions to the announcement have been mixed. There is a sizable contigent of Ultima Online vets who very much want Broadsword to keep cracking down on cheaters and botters; the destruction of the game’s economy thanks to years of dupes and sandbox-hostile design changes is a big part of why I packed up my own Atlantic house and canceled a few years ago, for example. Others point out that PvP has taken a turn for the worse as more and more people feel they can’t compete without the third-party clients and so want them taken out. And obviously, actual cheaters are pretty darn mad that their toy is being threatened.
But there are also plenty of folks in the middle who use the player-designed clients for modern conveniences, functional resolutions, and basic accessibility options, and they would be fine with third-party clients going away… as long as Broadsword provided something as good or better for everyone.
“Both of the existing first-party clients are embarrassing ill-maintained abandonware garbage, and neither constitutes an acceptable commercial product in 2024,” said one player in a now-locked thread on the official forums. “No, not even by the standards of a quirky throwback game with retro pixel graphics.” Still another welcomes the “massive amounts of tears” coming from abusers about to lose their client – and begs Broadsword to rethink the F2P access that has enabled cheap botting in the first place.
This uproar might just have become a footnote in the history of a classic MMORPG were it not for the fact that Broadsword is wrapping up a three-day open beta test for New Legacy, its alternative ruleset server meant to attract fresh blood to the game. Proponents of third-party clients argue that new players will be turned off by the existing clients, though it’s not clear how newbies would know to hunt down a third-party version anyway.
Thus far, public feedback – from UO vets in the test, not from new players – on New Legacy has run the gamut, from folks who like the new spin on gameplay and are glad it’s not just a “classic” UO shard to those who believe it was a huge waste of resources taken from the live game and spent on a largely single-player experience that has nothing to do with UO.
