Basically, Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn (UO:KR) is helping to celebrate the ten year anniversary of Ultima Online by rebuilding it. UO has 7 expansion packs, 5 continents, 55 skills, hundreds of monsters, dozens of dungeons, and in the words of the team, "hella phat loot". That's not including fully customizable housing, businesses, and a powerful crafting system.

UO:KR doesn't change any of that.

What UO:KR offers is a complete upgrade to the engine and user interface of UO. It's EA's most significant investment into UO since launch. It's not mandatory (yet – they’re going to see how quickly people adopt it before deciding when to end of life the old client), but rather an in-place replacement that will still work on very low spec machines - in fact, they believe that you cannot buy a new machine that won't play it.

Oh - and it's free. Just download and go. There'll even be a free fourteen day trial for people coming in to check it out.

What you'll basically see (check out the “before and after” shots that were provided) is a significantly improved resolution, as the new engine is a 3D graphics engine "tricked" into looking like a 2D isometric game. You'll have more screen real estate, from the shots they showed us.

They're going back to the original design documents, too. For instance, earth elementals currently look like mud elementals. The design docs said they were made out of boulders - well, now they look like they're made out of boulders. Some things like that were not possible with 1997 technology, but like the Bionic Man, with today’s technology we can rebuild them. Every single texture, graphic, etc. in the game is being replaced - and a lot more detail is being added.

The UI is also being updated and upgraded. A lot of things that took multiple clicks in the past will now take only one; the hotbars and radar are moved around - it basically looks more standardized, more like other MMOs.

Then there's Ultima Online: Stygian Abyss. Stygian Abyss will add in the largest dungeon in UO history, plus new monsters, crafting, skills, magic, pets, epic quests, and housing. Humans will be able for the first time to reach the gargoyle homeland, and gargoyles will become the third race able to be played by people - they're intended to be stoic, noble, and a bit gruesome. They can shape stone and manipulate energy.

The new expansion will be available for the new client only and will be $29.99. The monthly fees for UO will remain unchanged. (I asked Aaron about the possibility of having a combined fee for UO, DAoC, and the upcoming WAR, much like the SOE “Station Pass”, but it looks like for now you shouldn’t hold your breath.)

What the design team is hoping to do is pay back the loyalty of their long time user base - they want the world to feel new again. It's hard for new players to get past the graphics and UI, so this should help, plus they're adding in a new "new player" experience and land with the new client. They'll still be adding in new free content, and doing events 1-2 times a month.

That’s an important thing, though, that the team wanted to impress upon us, and so I feel that I should reiterate. In many ways, UO:KR can be seen as a reward for the faithfulness of the fans of UO.

We were given a chance to play the new Kingdom Reborn in its pre-alpha state. As someone who has never played UO before, I found that I picked it up fairly quickly. It helped that we had a fairly powerful character.

Despite the preventions put into the characters, I did manage to get mine killed so thoroughly that I discovered a new bug – but that’s why there’s testing. I had a great time doing it, though, and getting a reward for finding that always helps. (Which reminds me – a big shout-out and “thank you!” to PR person extraordinaire Eddiemae Jukes for picking up my bag with said reward when I stupidly left it behind at the hotel!)

The new player experience should be able to help people like me get into the game when UO:KR is released. Not only is it a new land that helps walk players through the learning curve of a game as old as UO, but it also provides more of an idea of what the skill-based system will lead to, rather than just blindly investing in skills without an idea of what the end is like.

One thing I can say that I hope for is a bit more of a standardized control scheme. When I spoke with Aaron Cohen today, that was one of the things we talked about. Currently, UO controls much like older isometric games such as Diablo – click where you want to go, or use the cursor keys. WASD keys have become the standard in most first person or close third person games, but would require re-doing the hotkeys that come by default in a game like UO. (One suggestion I had – which I’m sure they’ve already thought of – was providing an alternate keyset when installing the client the first time, much like Dark Age of Camelot had when it released.)

On the other hand, the control scheme seems like the kind of thing that might work well on my laptop – thus making UO a more convenient game to play on that platform.

If you’ve played UO before, UO:KR looks to be a great excuse to check out the game as it is now. If you haven’t, a fourteen day free trial of the new engine might be the impetus to try out one of the classic MMORPGs.