HomeLAN - The game's action oriented gameplay is a big departure from Ultima Online. Why did the development team decide to go this route for Ultima X?

Rick Hall - Firstly, since Ultima Online is still going strong in its 6th year, we felt that it wasn't productive to make a new game that provided similar experiences and rewards. We'd like to continue growing and evolving UO in its natural direction for as long as players would like. So that really called for UXO to take a fundamentally different approach. Secondly, we didn't just want to depart from the UO direction, we wanted to try something that was an improvement on MMPs in general. We wanted to create a different kind of experience from what's already out there. So working towards a goal of an MMP that really focuses on action and combat and adventure at its core level seemed like a natural.