The Syndicate Townhall
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There were actually two UO Townhall meetings this past week. There was the one in Seattle on Saturday but there was also one on Friday at EA. The Syndicate held its annual guild conference from last Thursday through Monday. This year we picked San Francisco as the location. The major highlight of the conference was a tour of EA and a special Townhall hosted by Dragonhead. We wanted to share the highlights of that with the community:

* Touring the UO Development area and meeting many of the development team face to face reinforced to us that EA remains committed to UO. There is a great deal of work going on. There are lots of motivated, passionate, energetic people working on the project. When you walk into an office and it has no character and the people working there seem to hate what they are doing you can sense that and it doesn't give you confidence in the product. Conversely when you go to an office where people like talking about what they do and the office clearly has character and personality and a positive vibe about it, you can gain confidence. We gained confidence in UO and in EA from our tour. In fact, we even gained a number of converts to UO from WoW due to what they saw and heard and experienced.

* Sodas only cost 25 cents at EA and Candy is only 35 cents. That really has nothing to do with UO but it was cool. I was amazed how many people will buy a soda just because its a quarter regardless of whether they are thirsty or not.

* The KR client does not get enough praise from enough people, in my opinion. Nick/Dragonhead piloted his way through the client like an expert and seeing him use it that way really gives you an appreciation for the power of it. Yes, it does run slower on some older machines. But on modern machines, it runs really well. And the features that are both in the client and that are coming really give it a major leg up over 2D and bring in more in line with modern MMOs. Some of the coolest things, that not every player realizes include (and none of this is really news to those following KR but alot of players dont follow it as closely as they could):
1) You can pull up a big map of a town. On that map you can see labels of all major locations. You can add your own waypoints to the map and inside the game itself, those waypoints will show up. So you can get visual markers, in the game itself on where to be and where to rally at. That is a really useful feature.
2) Skinning of the game is great. Within 6 hours of that feature going live, a player released a very cool backpack skin that they have already incorporated into one version of the client. So a great deal of cool look and feel features can be added in.
3) The macro/hotkey system is very powerful. It even has built into it the ability to repeat a command 10 times with 1 press so that helps automate many things even more than before.
4) The new female paperdoll is major improvement over the old ones.
5) The Friends List, the ability to send tells and the new chat system bring UO in line with the 'standard' of the industry and give long awaited functionality (now if we could just get Wilki to add a Guild Message of the Day, hehe).

Those are a few of the more cool features of KR. I realize that many of the veteran UOers have years of "muscle memory" on the 2D setup and it is a real pain to overcome that. I am still trying to do that myself. But overcoming it can be worth it to gain the new features. And with each patch they add more features, make it run even better and remove more bugs.

* Stygian Abyss looks to be VERY exciting. I can't wait to see that. Looking at the pictures of the monsters that are likely to be added, you can tell its going to be alot of fun. There are really cool new monsters ranging from easy ones to very hard boss ones. There are new skills coming. There are new weapons and armors coming. We saw one picture of a weapons display that looked really cool. There are new pieces of eye candy for your house like tile sets and displayable items. There is, of course, the Gargoyle Race which also looks very cool. They were evasive on the question of whether there are new rideables likely because decisions of that sort haven't been fully fleshed out and, lets face it, we players take every "well, possibly" to mean "we WILL get this! woohoo!" so being cautious is a necessity.

There are new skills coming including something that crafters will REALLY like. They wouldn't say specifically what it was but asked a question or two about what we would like to see. The implication of the questions and the comments was a skill or a way that allows crafters to create items with powers on them that we want versus the random chance from a runic that exists today. Of course no one flat out said that but reading between the lines that was the way the discussion was headed. Is that vague but specific enough? hehe I don't want anyone to say "but EA promised!" but it certainly sounded like that was an upcoming feature that we would probably see in SA.

And finally there is the new dungeon itself. It is massive. How massive? they wouldn't say. But massive. I get the impression its more like taking an expansion pack sized area and putting it underground more so than it is making a dungeon. I personally think of it almost like taking T2A and all of its events and areas and sinking it below ground. They said it will have linear areas (like say.. a peerless fight where you move through collecting key parts to reach and fight the boss) and nonlinear areas where you can farm.

Any way you slice it, it looks to be truly massive and a very fun expansion. When is it coming out? Some time after the 10th Anniversary but they wouldn't say more than that and from what I heard I couldn't venture and wouldn't want to venture a more specific guess than that.


Thanks again to everyone at EA for allowing is to come and visit. We really appreciate your hospitality and taking time out of your workday to show us around. One funny addendum is that after the tour we were formed up on the grassy field in the middle of the EA campus with the Second Skin movie crew filming and taking a group photo and shouted "Long Live the Syndicate" for the camera. That happened to be right as the president of EA was walking behind the group. Draconi had to stop and explain to him what was going on and why 100+ visitors were shouting on his grassy field.