We’re going for a record here, clearly! This will mark the third time we’ve needed to write about Ultima Online this week, what with its 27th birthday and the final test phase of its New Legacy beta and all. This time, it’s even better news for the ancient MMORPG: It’s actually tackling the classic client.
Let me give a little background for folks who haven’t been following the technical debt of UO for over two decades. The caretakers of Ultima Online have tried, repeatedly, to update the game with a new client. We had the Third Dawn client, then we had the Kingdom Reborn client. I actually used both of these. Kingdom Reborn eventually gave way to the Enhanced Client, as the teams tried valiantly to update the game’s decaying graphics and offer things like built-in hotbars and macros to compete both with sometimes-shady third-party tools and with the evolution of the genre’s interfaces and visuals. But adoption of these new clients has never surpassed 50%, meaning a big chunk of the playerbase is still using the same ol’ client from 1997.
That’s true for the official servers, anyhow. Rogue server emulators and modders have been generating tools, sideloaders, and benign client hacks for years, and as our readers might remember, back in July Broadsword announced a major crackdown on some of these programs, owing to the fact that many of facilitate unvarnished cheating and aren’t just helpful utilities. In response, the community threw an absolute fit for a range of valid and invalid reasons, with the best of them arguing that New Legacy was doomed to fail if the old-school client isn’t rescued.
Well, your concerns have now been answered, as Broadsword announced last night that it’s actually working directly with one of the modding groups to do just that.
“There is no mistaking the iconic aesthetics of the Ultima Online Classic Client are irreplaceable. Since its release in 1997, players have come to appreciate the performance and quality of life upgrades that are now a cornerstone of an enjoyable gameplay experience. As such, we are extremely excited to announce that we are working with the developers of the third-party client ClassicUO with the goal of making available an officially sanctioned version for use on all shards! We also want to make sure that the official Ultima Online Classic Client meets the expectations of our players from a performance standpoint. To deliver this performance we will be upgrading the Classic Client renderer to support higher frame rates and a larger play window.”
Broadsword ends by promising more info. It doesn’t mention the Enhanced Client here, but as the team has said half of its players use it, we assume it’s not going anywhere either. Still, it’s a big win for the studio, the players, and the ClassicUO modders. Good guys win for once.
