 a portal awaits! | After sleeping for 3 hours, I hurriedly awoke to my alarm clock and lept out of bed for a much-needed shower. As I rushed out the door, a portal stood before me! The event staff had taped a poster of a moongate in the doorway of all the attendees. They were so stealthy and quiet - sneaky! It was a nice poster, very glossy, but I supposed because of some fire code regulation or somesuch, a hole was cut where the door handle was. Everyone got a nice poster, everyone got a not-so-nice hole cut in their poster. Oh well. I boogied on down in a rush to sign up for a spot in the size-limited PvP tournament to be held later in the day. |
 a nice breakfast | Let me make mention here of a few things that I was not quite as coherent enough to remark upon last night. The hotel we were in, the "W" hotel, is a very swank spread. The rack rate is like $225 per night. There's freakin hip music playing in the elevator bank of every floor and it's covered with colored lights. All the UX:O events were held in a convention center of sorts just across the street. We had a nice continental breakfast. I slammed a Dr. Pepper and a cinnamon roll to stay awake and drank 3 bottled waters to rehydrate my dessicated tongue from last night's adventures. I would have paid half a mil for a few tylenol at this point. |
 anxiously waiting | As everyone stared bleary-eyed at each other and gulping coffee, the doors to the main hall opened and the wonderful UX:O music could be heard calling us in(already talk of having the music released on CD). That bright rectangle on the stage is actually a plasma screen monitor on it's side built into the podium. Not all my pictures are the greatest. My camera is hardly professional grade and the lighting was beyond my control - just a little warning here. We were shown the very dramatic, exciting and well done trailer again and then there was a short overview of how the game is played in terms of the abilities and interfaces. The 4 huge projection screens on each side of the hall were set to 360 degree panoramic which was really kewl. |
 quest dialog choices, in pan-around conversation mode | Step by step, we got a walk-through of UX:O's interfaces and in-game features. When you form a party, you can elect to go into a "private area" where its like the world is invisibly split off into another reality where it's just the person who created it and whoever they choose to bring into it. Imagine going to a Champ spawn and then creating a mirror reality where only you and your friends are there. Thats the best way to describe it. No one who you dont want there can get in. This is also how PvP is handled. Some people could decide they want to have a little war, or even just a duel, and go into this private area where PvP can be toggled on so they can fight. |
No interference, no griefers, no one except the people you want there. You could do the same when going into a dungeon. There are currently 55 "maps" or regions in the game that make up the world, each one can be split into a seperate, private area. As time goes on, more "maps" will be added to the game to make the world larger, tho not through, say, a weekly download as it was explained each one is usually about 20 megs each. Most likely new maps will come via expansions, the first of which is already in the works before the game itself is even out yet.
UX:O is oriented on doing stuff. Sometimes the action finds you. You could be walking through the woods and a man runs up with an urgent request. Just this easily, a long and epic quest could begin. As was explained today, there are no right or wrong choices. You make choices as you see fit and this affects what Virtue you will advance in. A good example was catching someone stealing bread. Turn them in, and you may gain in the Virtue of Justice. Let them go, and you may gain in the Virtue of Compassion. Like I said, no right or wrong choices, just choices. When you interact with NPC's in questlike dialogs, the screen changes to a cinematic-type camera angle that can slowly pan around or show speech, gestures, etc. If youre in a party, everyone sees the exact same "movie" at the same time. The person who first formed the party is the party leader and actually gets to make the decisions via dialogs where a choice or response is clicked.
 in a party, in a dark forest | The Party System in UX:O is absolutely incredible. Of course, you can tell it's descended and evolved from the UO party interface. I hope at some point they will go back and make the one in UO this organized and slick. As a brief overview of the screenshot to the left, This is the perspective as you see the world, with your character in the center of the screen. The pic was taken in a dark room so its hard to make some details out. In this pic, the char is standing in a dark forest with shafts of light piercing through the branches above. It was really impressive looking! Im not sure if you can change the camera angle to first person or not, I never saw it. Anyway, in the lower left is your portraint in a circle. The left half of the circle is your health in red. As you get hurt, it slowly goes down - when it's gone, you daih!!! |
The right half of the circle is blue and is your "power" but us UO players will be more familiar calling it mana. Just like mana, the more special abilities you use, such as casting a spell or doing a special move with a weapon, will decrease it according to the special ability's mana cost. The smaller portrait icons in the upper right are the same thing, except for the members in your party. When you are in combat, the person or creature you are attacking will have it's portrait shown right above yours, also displaying how much life and mana it has left.
Of course, this means that if you come upon a swarm of people in massive combat, the only way you will know who is strong or who is almost dead is by targetting them. There is no way to tell like in UO where you can just drag off their health bar and see quickly without attacking them first. I made a request to "fix" this little oversight. Whats kewl about UO in this regard is that you could also go ahead and double clicked the health bar you just dragged off if you want to go ahead and attack the monster or person.
Along the bottom of the screen are several circles which you can set up as hotkeys for special weapon moves or spells. You can either click them to use them or hit their hotkey(the left most is F1, the next is F2 and so on).
The two bars at the bottom right are like a mileage indicator for gaining stat and Virtue points. Whenever you do something, like kill a monster, the appropriate bar will increase slightly. When the bar is filled, you gain a skill point to spend(more on that in a second).
The small menu at the upper left is just a set of buttons to activate some system menus, I forget which exactly. One kewl thing they mentioned about UX:O is they want to make it all as menu-drive as possible. In some other MMORPG's, a lot of commands or abilities are activated by typing them in. UX:O goes to great lengths to keep us clicking to do stuff instead of having to remember and type in a myriad of commands.
Lastly in the middle, are two sets of indicators. The ones on the left are Offensive and show how strong your attack is going. Each time you get a hit, it's like your building momentum. If you get 2 hits in a row, youre doing good. 3 hits and youre kicking butt. 4 hits in a row and youre opening a Can of WhoopAss. Some special moves require you to have a certain amount of "combat momentum" before you can use them. In other words, you cant ALWAYS attack something by opening with a Quadruple Somersault Finger of Death Power Stun Move of the Ancients(disclaimer - I made that move up). It just depends on what the special move's requirements are.
Ok, check this, in UX:O, the more you click the left mouse button in combat, the faster you swing/shoot/cast. You could start laying a barrage of hits down really fast, but the faster you do it, the weaker your attacks are. Slow down a bit, and each hit can do more damage. Under the blue indicators is a percentage. If you are attacking too fast, the number will go down to 0%. Wait a few seconds and it will go back to 100%. Maybe your strategy is to keep hitting at a speed where it's 50% - it's up to you and what you think is best.
On the right is a set of defensive indicators. Right-clicking is how you block things trying to hurt you. It's similar to the offensive indicators in certain respects. I was half-awake and hung-over at this point so I didnt mentally record every last detail.
 a profession's menu | Moving on, in UX:O you can choose one of 4 paths - Path of the Blade, Path of the Arcane, Path of Nature and Path of Balance. Once you choose a Path, thats how your character will live. Within each Path, there are 3 professions. You can either spend all your skill points maximizing your expertise in that profession's abilities or spread them out and get a wider variety(but overall lower level of expertise) of abilties and special moves from each of the professions. Let us use the Path of the Blade for an example. In Path of the Blade, there are three professions - Knight, Barbarian and Fighter. You could spend all your skill points on Knight abilties and be a bad ass Knight. Or, you could pickup some Knight moves, some Barbarian and some Fighter. Of course, someone who drops all their points in Knight abilities will be more effective when they use that ability(do more damage with a special hit, heal more damage, etc.). Also, after you have spent a certain amount of skill points in, say, Knight abilties, a new level of abilties becomes available to you of Knight abilties. |
In this screen shot, you can see the 3 professions of this Path - the center profession tab is selected and show's that profession's abilities. The first row are the are the 3 abilties initially available to you. After you have spent 10 points in the profession, you can then start being able to use the special abilities in the second row which are more powerful. The next row of abilities below your current level is always shown so you can get a preview of what is to come to help you decide if you want to spend skill points in this profession. This reminds me a lot of the skill tree system in Earth and Beyond if you are familar with it.
As a side note, here are the Paths and their Professions:
Path of the Blade - Knight, Barbarian, Fighter
Path of the Arcane - Mage, Sorcerer, Tinker
Path of Balance - Bard, Necromancer, Paladin
Path of Nature - Ranger, ?, ? (forgot what the other 2 were, may have been Monk and Shepherd)
 the curtains raised
| Now that we had sat and listened for an hour, it was time to start playing! Curtains on either side and the rear of the hall slowly raised, revealing 15 game stations, each with a huge monitor. Everyone had a gold coin with a number(the number indicated when you got your 20 minutes of play time, players went first, followed by fansite operators, etc. press went last). Every 20 minutes they would announce over the PA that it was time for the current session to end and the next group to play. Each game station had an OSI rep there to answer any questions you had and to suggest stuff to check out. I saw a wide variety of landscapes - frost giant citadel, the misty forest, some swamps, a graveyard, etc. I spent the first 10 minutes of my time reading all the special move menus. Then I spent a few minutes killing frost spiders and yeti's and then turned on my PvP flag(a demo only command, wont be like this in the real game) and laid some love down on the guy sitting at the station next to me. Killed him 3 times, my thirst for blood already growing, hehe. For the record, all the machines were running Windows XP and were 2.8 GHz with GeForce 4's and 512 MB(or at least thats what I was told, didnt pop the hood on any). One of they guys did tell me that he as a GeForce MX and a 1.4 GHz machine in the office and the game still runs fine. |
 Japanese media and reps | Among the guests were 2 guys from Epic. One was the designer of the Unreal Warfare Engine, which UX:O is built on, and the other was the CEO. They were both about my age, but Im sure they drive a different car to work each day of the week. There was also a group of Japanese press. They mostly stuck to themselves and had an OSI interpreter along with them. Last night when I was inebriated, I tried busting out with some of my Japanese from my Hokuto days. They politely nodded and smiled as Im sure I was butchering their language, lol. Also a quick note, Anthony "Sunsword" Castoro was the only UO representative there. Everyone else was UX:O staff, including a number their non-technical corporate staff. I enjoyed the pleasant company of the beautiful and enchanting HR person the night before at the cocktail party, but I was too impeded at the time to remember her name. We were the very last UX:O event ppl to leave that bar. If youre reading this - Hi! |
I also want to drop some shoutouts and greets(once again since it counts more when Im sober) to the awesome dood who runs Turbulent Waters - John Loch. The seas have always been a favorite part of my UO experience and to meet this crusader for the seas was very kewl. Ratarian of the Black Knights was also one of the best examples of a Lady I was fortunate to make an acquaintance with. I also met some great ppl from Stratics(Cynewulf is a regular on the Chesapeake board), the nice lady who leads the Pacific Ranger Council, the IIA(an E&B fansite) and some other MMORPG's most of yall have never heard of, but the ppl were great. I also want to mention Last of the Dragons, a guy who is devoted to spreading information about the original Ultima series. If you ever see someone called something-Dragon, they are one of those people. Sorry if Im getting fast and loose with my descriptions and facts here, its been a long day and my head still hurts, lol. Ah yes, I also met the nice lady to does the RenFest Player Lunches. She's been doing these lunches(not just the RenFest ones, bunches others too!) for years and is a great example of someone who really works for the UO community at large. The only person I really wanted to meet that I thought just might show up was Nieves of UO Powergamers, but I guess it was a no-go for him. I still want to meet the UO devs, esp Hanse cuz he is kewler than finding a stat scroll on the ground at the bank.
 Mr. Turbulent Waters(left) chooses sushi bento - of course! | Just another example of how much effort and class EA put into this thing, lunch was either a choice of sandwiches or, for the stalwart, a bento(Japanese box lunch)! The bento came in a real wooden box and featured sushi, yakitori, seaweed salad, a seared chicken breast, a baby squid, 2 rice cakes, 2 tuna(might have been salmon) sushi and 2 California roll pieces. In a nutshell, lunch was like UX:O - I knew it would be good, but was suprised by how much it still yet exceeded my expectations. As we ate lunch, there was Choreographer's festival in the adjacent park which provided some nice mealside entertainment. |
 UX:O's login screen | After lunch, it was time for the feedback/Q&A session. We spent a about an hour in this session asking questions and making suggestions to the devs. There were a suprising number of guild-related comments and questions. I guess with the ability to spawn off your seperate, private reality, you will certainly have the option to spend lots of time with your favorite ppl. There were also a number of questions about the artwork, mostly about character customization. There will be a number of "heads" to choose from and skin colors, and also some clothing, similar to Earth and Beyond's char setup Im guessing. Some ppl expressed reservations about a lot the walking involved, but if you have a friend anywhere in the world, you can have them instantly teleport you there, like a bracelet of binding. Btw- and Im totally mentioning this in a light which belies it's importance - if you die, you dont lose anything. Not experience, not equipment, not skills, nothing. Just the time you have to spend getting to where you want to be from the last point you "saved" in game(there will be spots to bind at, like moongates for example). |
A few other tidbits - Housing and crafting wont be in the initial release. They are on the schedule, but as they said several times, they'd rather have UX:O launch and do 100 things well, than have 1000 things that suck. I asked about additional server and bandwidth capacity to the head man himself, and he assured me they had learned from the past(*cough* Trammel Housing Day *cough* AoS Registration). No word on how much UX:O will cost, how much the montly will be or how many servers. I think I did hear 9 chars per account(!).
Lastly, it was time for the UX:O PvP Tournament. Considering no one had gotten more than 20 minutes of play time, no one really had a good idea of "what worked" in combat, esp at our relatively low levels of character development. It was at this moment, Cynewulf walked up and introduced himself. He was really kewl and during the match he encouraged me and cheered me on which was nice esp in front of over a hundred ppl cuz I didnt want to look like a newb(which is ironic since we all were in this game, hehe).
Character type was random. If your gamestation had a mage, you were gonna have to play a mage for the tournament. There were 4 heats battles of 5 ppl. The winner of each of the battles went on to the final match of a 4 person free-for-all. In my first match, I killed 3 of the 4 other ppl and relatively quickly.
The final match began with the 4 of us, 3 warriors and 1 mage. I gave out my battlecry which was shown on the overhead displays of "VICTORY OR DEATH" which was kewl. Well, the mage cast some sort of fireball spell and kept running and casting. I charged him while the other 2 warriors fought each other. Well, I maybe caught up to his backpedaling once and gave him a good whack before he dropped me. At this point, the warriors were dogmeat having weakened each other. He finished one off when it was suddenly found out that someone's PvP flag wasnt on so we had to start the match over.
Once again, I charged the mage. You would think the other 2 warriors would have done the same given how he was hard to catch and kept casting his one-trick pony show fireball. Well, they didnt, they chased each other around. I got a few more whacks on him this time before dirtnapping and so he went on and finished them off.
He was the GM of some guild called The Syndicate and he sure had some attitude. When the first rematch was called, I thought he was gonna throw a fit by the way he was yelling "I won it, I won it" trying to avoid the rematch and so forth. With his second running victory, he was again pretty selfsure and for all his valor, he won a t-shirt.
It was a lot of fun to play to an audience. Everyone in the tournament got a silver ankh-dagger.
With a few closing remarks and surveys handed out, the event was at a close as people started saying their goodbyes. Turning in a survey got you a nice color print of a creature from UX:O which came in a black folio which the devs were lined up to sign with silver paintpens.
The weather outside was absolutely gorgeous. Mid-80's with no humidity and a very pleasant breeze in the middle of the day. Hardly the sweltering, nuclear inferno which is Houston in August. People actually socialize and frolic outside here. They dont have to worry about heat stroke, hehe.
In conclusion, I think UX:O is unlike any other game out today. Sure, there are similarities to other games in certain respects, but not the overall package, and none come close to it's beautiful grafx or fantastic music(best game music ever, IMO, altho E&B was pretty good). Do slick grafx and music make a game?
Hail Noe!
First thing I did when I first bought UO over 4 years ago was turn off the music. And 4 years ago the graphics were already aged.
What UO had was depth and originality. Often imitated, never replicated. It's still going strong. EQ didnt kill it, AO was a chuckle, NWN had ppl trying to make a UO-replica! and Ive not heard kind things about Shadowbane. Theres a slew more that I wont bother considering. UO is still around. It's uniqueness sets it apart enough to keep it alive and thriving(quick aside - the next UO expansion will be announced in the coming month, no other info available).
Can UX:O live up to it's namesake, the Ultima legacy? So far it looks good. It's def more action oriented, not as much idle socialization. (And Im not dogging tamers when I say) No tamers eithers. However, I did experience an alpha, not even a beta yet(altho everyone who came is invited to the closed beta), so Im anxious to see what NPC's and more of the quests will be like(over 300 coded already and counting) as well as towns(some, but not all of the Ultima towns will be in UX:O). My only other reservation is they have this class/profession/path thing so tightly wound and planned out, it would be moving heaven and Earth if they want to expand it beyond the canon lore.
I will certainly buy UX:O when it comes out and I recommend everyone do the sameand give it a try. It's different. It's not UO. From what Ive seen so far, it is fun. I think the biggest challenge for the UX:O team will be to keep things new and interesting. If ppl just log in every night and retreat with their handful of friends to kill MonsterA in hopes of getting MegaItemA, the fun will start to age after a few months. I know thats a very generalizing statement, and I certainly dont mean it to sound as simple as that, but when you boil it all down, that is the key - to this game or any other. Successful MMORPG's need to keep pace with a pregnant woman. All the popular ones have been doing it. The ones that havent arent really around anymore.
The most frequent fear I hear is that ppl think UOX is UO's successor. It's not, but at the same time, I barely have enough time to play UO. UX:O looks like fun. Whats gonna happen 2 weeks after Ive been playing UX:O straight and I gotta decide if Im gonna keep going or go back to UO? It's not an either/or situation for everyone, but with my limited time, I like to stick to one thing and Im apprehensive about when that day arrives.(On a sidenote, they said they will make it worth UO player's to give UX:O a shot, maybe a free month or somethin?)
Now that the serious stuff is out of the way, let's take a gander at the loot! Arr!
First, my T2A map, signed by Sunsword, Jalek, Stellerex and Krall, ppl who have been part of UO either now or in the past.
In the upper left is the program schedule for the whole UX:O event. Everything actually started on time! Signed by as many UX:O devs as I could get.
Just below it, the card that came with the 2 suprise cookies that had UX:O images airpainted onto them. The cookies didnt live long enough for a pic. The card does make the first mention of the name of the land where UX:O will take place - Alucinor - arent you glad you kept reading? I hadnt seen the name mentioned anywhere else prior.
Just below it is the ankh-dagger I got from the PvP tournament. Nice little souvenir. I got up early and I still almost didnt make the cut-off for the tournament sign-up, space was very limited.
Below the ankh-dagger is my nametag, proudly proclaiming my representing the Fellowship of Virtue. On it is a small pin that shows the Virtue of Valor. Other ppl had pins for other Virtues, it was random. It'd be kewl to have a complete set methinks.
The CD was given out for press ppl originally but then everyone grabbed til they were gone. Has the trailer shown at the UX:O event as well as background info, screenshots and logos - like a fansite kit really.
Ah, the gold coins. Someone came up with the clever idea to get gold chocolate coins and have them embossed with the UX:O logo, very kewl. Hope they dont melt before I get home. The little velvet bag was given out to everyone upon arrival with their nametag and Virtue pin. Some people wore the bag around their necks, altho Im not sure why. Arr, now serves as me coin stash!
Last, but not least, the coveted stone medallions. Everyone got one. I went back for seconds after registration. And thirds. And fourths.... and fifths... I got more than what's pictured, Har! The stones have a hole drilled in them for the leather tie to put around your neck. There is the UX:O "X" logo etched into the stone, its NOT just written on there, it's actually etched! Very kewl. Will give one to anyone who emails me and isnt a wretch. Will also handout at UO Meetups and the UO RenFest Player Lunch in October if I still gots em.
Not shown - the nice poster with the not so nice hole cut into it.
Also not shown - the glossy print of an Orc render in a black folio signed with silver paintpen by most all of the UX:O devs. A nice parting gift altho I'd a-been happier with a tshirt, Har!
Also, also not shown, the score of empty glasses from last night. The glasses remain behind, but I took the contents(many, many vodka sours) and the fine memories with me - thx EA!
Well, it's time to finish this off, been writing for hours. I had a lot of fun and met a ton of great people. Thanks again to EA for having me out, they were great hosts, could not have dreamed it possible to be any nicer. UX:O looks great and I feel optimistic overall about it. If anyone wants to email me, the address where my broadsword and I can be reached is in the About Us section.
May the Virtues Travel with You,
Tancred RedStar