Ahh, Ultima Online! Do your joints creak when you get up out of chair? Are you finding recent music releases to be noisy and inaccessible? Do you find yourself looking back fondly on days of yore? I suspect you do, because you are quite old, but don't worry, because in MMORPG terms, this makes you a winner! And our venerable Uncle Ultima is about to get yet another new lease on life with a new electric scooter expansion titled Stygian Abyss.

Stygian Abyss will be the eighth expansion to Ultima Online and brings with it the usual slew of new content, the most exciting of which is a new playable race, the Gargoyles. Although playing a vital role to the series' storyline, gargoyles have never before been an option for players who like sitting on cornices and straining rainwater through their ears.

Actually, in the Ultima Online world, gargoyles are a pretty distinct species, with unique skills like Throwing, Imbuing and Mysticism. The gargoyle's homeland, Ter Mur, will be added as a new environment, and other new locations include the Stygian Abyss dungeon, which will be the largest ever in the game, and will include PvP areas as well as new bosses of super difficulty like the Medusa, Primeval Lich and Stygian Dragon.



Sounds great, but goodness... Ultima Online? Is that still relevant today? Mark Jacobs of Mythic Entertainment, the ever-optimistic team behind Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning and Dark Age of Camelot as well as Stygian Abyss, thinks so:

“Ultima Online has a unique place in the history of online games – it was the first truly successful MMORPG and it showed that there was a real market for these types of games ... UO is still going strong and we can’t wait to throw open the gates to the Stygian Abyss."

The Ultima Online Stygian Abyss expansion will be available via digital distribution sometime this winter, reminding us of the old maxim "old MMORPGS never die, they just... well actually, they do, but Ultima Online is immortal".