UXO Overview - UXO Compendium

Overview of Ultima X: Odyssey:

So, to state the obvious, the X, is a roman numeral. Yes, this is Ultima 10 people, it continues the story arc, and if you watch the new demo real you'll understand what happened. If you know Ultima lore, in 9, the avatar and guardian went up in a bang. They went poof and everyone thought that was that, good canceled evil, and evil canceled good. WRONG, you see now, they are both on an ethereal plane, constantly fighting it out, and the avatar is not winning. So to aid the avatar he creates a new world, Aluncenor, that is based on the virtues, to teach the virtues, to create those who will follow in the path of virtues and aid him.

That is why UXO does not take place in Britannia (and it's not the first Ultima game to take place elsewhere). And to make the demo realer make even more sense, the guy you see in the beginning is the Avatar, and the location of Alucenor is in his mind. Yup, and at the very end you see the guardian change places with the Avatar, anyone notice they look close to the same? Well the Avatar and Guardian, as I understand are either the one and the same, or are merging right now.

The overlying theme of UXO is to have your character gain in the virtues, you do this by doing quests. And the neat thing about quests, is they come to you, you don't go to a board and find that a princess is in the need of rescuing. No while you are out adventuring you come across someone, or they run up to you, in need of aid, etc. Via these quests you gain in the virtues. By launch UXO will have at least 300 quests. And these are not your standard linear quests al-la other games like EA and DAoC. Via cut scenes that everyone in your group can see, you have many choices to do in the quest. Think of the quests kinda like the books you may have read as a kid, you know the ones, where you chose what to do, and depending on your actions you flipped to a different page in the book. So this way if you have a character you want to play as the ultimate justice type character, you know, brash and the law is the law, you can do so. If you want to play a character as compassionate, you can do so, and by your choices at the end of a quest you'll earn different points in the virtues. On a note, during the Q&A session with the dev team, Cal stated that those 300 quests are quest types. So a quest in one region to go kill 5 frost giants, is the same quest type as in another region where you have to kill 5 beetles. The quests I saw were rather interesting, someone was trapped in an amulet, but turned out to be something you'd rather keep locked up. And another quest where you had to free someone from the frost giant citadel.

Back to the virtues and storyline of the game. Your purpose is to help the Avatar, so you quest a lot and gain lots of virtues, and max out in all eight. What happens then? Why you Ascend of course! And then you start a new character. But wait, it's not as bad as it sounds!!!! Because your new character is a follower of your first character (in fact there is a special title your followers get). By being a follower that character gets special abilities based on the main virtue of your ascended character, only characters that are followers of previously ascended characters get these abilities. And it goes on, you Ascend your next character, well your third gets to have the abilities of two of the virtues, again picked based on the results of your last two characters. This continues till your ninth character, who has all 8 special abilities based on the 8 virtues, gained by the previous 8 ascended characters, is available to play. At this point, once you max out the virtue abilities for this character you do a full Ascension to aid the avatar, but they didn't say exactly what would happen, that's a secret for us to find out eventually.

So there is the overlying storyline, now lets talk about game play. UXO is not turned based. I keep reading this and I don't understand where people get this idea. Here's how combat works, by clicking on the left and right mouse buttons you raise your attack value and defensive value. By focusing more on attack you lower your defense, and visa versa. By doing this it lowers your power attribute, which does regenerate. This ads a tactical point to PvM and PvP that I thought was quite interesting. You also no longer engage in combat and just automatically swing. You only swing or cast, or use abilities when you tell the game to. You swing as fast as your weapon swing speed and dexterity allow. But once you swing once, you may want to hold off a second or two and swing, thus making your swing count more, or you may want to keep swinging as fast as you can, making for weaker hits, but interrupting your opponent more. It's your choice, and it feels quite natural. As in all games, connection will matter some, but now it is much more about how you handle fights and the tactics you use.

Furthermore, UXO moves fast, you always run, and it feels GREAT! It's kinda arcade'ish in this aspect and I love it for it. You slide on ice, can get blown up to higher elevations in some maps, and more. The game looked great, and the controls and interface felt so damn smooth it was hard to believe it was just pre-alpha.

UXO is a sister game to UO. It's not for the same player base, it will steal some customers (probably me for one), but not everyone will go over. Think about it, UO has like 240,000 players right now, in a market that has DAoC, EA, AC, (kinda) AC2, and more. Yet UO still thrives, and that with a 2D program, and a 2D/3D program. Why? Because UO is a very different game from the others, and UXO is very different from UO. UXO is about taking a single player feeling and adding your friends to it, but also having thousands of others around too. You get the feeling of single player games, where YOU are the one who matters most, but at the same time you get everything else a MMOG gives you, it's rather hard to explain, but when you play the game, see how it works you'll understand. I don't have a hard time believing that EA/OSI can sustain both games, they are two different beasts.

EA/OSI does have a history, and when I read peoples negative feelings about UXO I contribute these feelings to that. Though I have read just as many positive posts about UXO than I have read negative. Anyhow, I only touched the surface of UXO, but let me tell you, it was a very smooth and crystal like surface. Imagine it's 6am, you're out on a lake, about to go knee boarding, think of the best water you could ever want, so damn smooth it's like a mirror, it's a wonderful feeling, and that's the impression I got from UXO.

Only time will tell what UXO gives us, it's scheduled for a Winter launch, which is only 4-6 months away. It really is a different type of MMOG, it takes the best from single player games and puts them in a PSW so you can share that with your friends. So when they say it's a sister game, it really is.

I still have only scratched the surface of what I learned about UXO, but I hope this answers some questions for you.

Reporting Horizons News since January 24th, 2003.

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