Origin Shuts Down Ultima Forums

Late last Friday afternoon, Origin officials announced that the Ultima IX message boards for discussing spoilers and hints, technical issues, and technical solutions have been shut down. As it stands now, the boards' message threads are still online and available for reading, but cannot be posted to.

We spoke with Origin's director of communications David Swofford, and he expressed that the decision was made to close the boards after the company released its third and final patch for Ultima IX: Ascension. Origin feels that the game is now in “good shape” and needs to shift the resources spent on maintaining the message boards towards other Origin projects that include Ultima Online and Ultima Online 2.

Swofford also told us that Origin is unlikely to reopen the message boards, since they've already served their purpose, and is now instead pointing Ultima fans towards a third party message forum located at Horizons. Ultima IX owners can still get official EA tech support from the company's website, linked to the right.