Ultima Goes "Offline"

The owner of a Toronto-based Internet publishing and new-user consulting company is about to implement his own solution to rampant Pkilling and oft-discussed lag time encountered in Ultima Online.

RyNet Computer Services President Ryan O'Sullivan and Origin Systems are hammering out the details Monday of the anticipated Tuesday beta launch of O'Sullivan's "The Ultima Offline eXperiment."

Using the shareware program of a 19-year-old German named Marcus Rating - something Rating calls UOX3 (the latest version of a server emulation program first written by Denny Zuko) - O'Sullivan will put 100 beta testers waiting in the wings into an Ultima Online-like world that O'Sullivan has built.

Using Rating's server-emulation technology, O'Sullivan will provide an Ultima-like playing field with certain tweaks that may or may not appeal to current UO users.

Pkilling will not be as rampant, and there will be human-guarded jails. And those are just two of the tweaks gamers will find in Ultima Offline.

O'Sullivan says Origin has nothing to worry about as only registered users of UO will pass the gates into Sullivan's UO (that's Ultima Offline) universe.

GameSpot News will keep you posted on the future of Ultima Offline.