RPS Feature Revisiting The Ancient MMO
Later this year, Ultima Online [official site] will turn 18 years old. In the genre of MMOs, that makes the game positively ancient – and it’s even more remarkable when you consider that it’s still funded via a subscription model.
I’ve never played an Ultima game, much less one that’s nearly my age. I wanted to find out what the game is like to play today as a newcomer, and to ask people why they’ve continued visiting Britannia for nearly two decades.
Big business announcement day, then. EA will merge Mythic and Bioware to create a new MMO and RPG division. The new division will apparently be headed by BioWare boss Ray Muzyka, while BioWare’s other co-founder, Greg Zeschuk, will become Group Creative Officer. Mark Jacobs, the outspoken boss at Mythic, will apparently be leaving the company, and has made no announcement about future plans.
This internal rejiggery will not affect any of the Bioware games currently in development (Dragon Age, The Old Republic, Mass Effect 2), but it clearly has some broader implications for the future. Not least of which is that someone is getting quite serious about taking on Blizzard in that millions of dollars of MMO subscriptions business. Hmm.
If you’ve not yet grasped the squig and tried Mythic’s Warhammer Online for yourself, then now might be a good time. The main website has just launched a 10-day free trial for the game. But Europeans are excluded from the offer. And, ah, okay, I missed this completely: Euros have a separate offer entirely.
So that’s good.
