the Gaming Realm™

With the recent acquisition of Mythic Entertainment, Inc. by Electronic Arts, the Ultima Online team will start to work with the people behind Dark Age of Camelot who are busy developing their 3rd MMOG Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, Mythic’s 2nd MMOG was Imperator whose development was postponed indefinitely on July 13, 2005.

Quoting Darkscribe from the UO website announcement:

I’m thrilled that the UO team and Mythic will work together to forge Britannia’s future.

Follow up:

With that, some regular events were temporarily stopped and an announcement that they were going to make this week was postponed.

There is much to talk about with our new partners, and it will take some time to review and finalize our plans. Because we need to take that time, we are postponing the announcement that we were going to make this week. The in-game fiction cycle will take a break for a bit and will return soon.

For the developers from Mythic Entertainment, this is great news, as they will be able to influence and be part of the historically first Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game or MMORPG, the game that changed the face of virtual worlds. For the UO fans (like me), we hope this is all for the best. As it sounds, UO is here to stay.

But I can’t help to speculate, though these may be wild speculations, but could it be they are going to release a major continuation of UO? Anyone recall Ultima X: Odyssey (UXO), Ultima Online 2 (UO2) and Ultima Worlds Online (UWO)? Projects EA decided to drop to concentrate on the development of UO itself. Personally, I have not much problems about the developers from Mythic, I like Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) and it is one of the MMORPGs that I regularly played (before World of Warcraft and Guild Wars came), if those great minds will be part of the influence behind UO from hereon, then UO will gain back what it lost since the Origin Systems, Inc. (OSI) or Richard Garriott’s team left. About time to give the pioneering game fresh new and great minds from a company they considered a competitor for years - the Mythic guys.