Looks like the UO team is updating their visuals again. I know the team has long wanted to do so, and it’s gratifying that they’re moving forward. The screenshots are pretty nice – especially when you consider they’re attached to a 9 year old game.

The first question I have, as a player, is what will happen to the pianos and other random furniture pieces that players have created? This bizarre branch of creativity was one of my favorite parts of UO.

The more interesting question to me, as a developer, is whether or not they will force everyone to use the same client. UO3D wasn’t well recieved by the community, and as a result, the team continued to support both clients (2D and 3D). This created a development nightmare, with multiple clients that had to get new features integrated into them, multiple QA paths, and additional complications to customer service calls (not to mention the need to get both 2D and 3D versions of all new monster and character art in expansions).

Forcing everyone to go to the 3D client would have vastly simplified things, but made have lost them a lot of hardcore users. It will be interesting to see what they decide to do here, and how well the community responds.