Something like Dragon Age but with Ultima lore would be great.

Ugh. That would be my worst nightmare personally. Dragon Age is a great game - but it's pretty much the exact opposite of the Ultima design philosophy. It's a lifeless world, with no interactivity whatsoever and solely focus on the plot.

It a new Ultima RpG ever comes around, it HAS to have an actual "virtual world" - this is one of the major aspects of the series since Ultima V that is totally inexistant in Bioware games. I'd rather have Pyrannha Bytes or even Bethesda (yes!) take a shot at a Ultima than Bioware unless Bioware would be willing to try a vastly different design philosophy

-Sergorn

To revitalize the franchise it would be a good move. I agree with the virtual world part, but I don't think Bethestha would do that well. Ultima had the best of both worlds, a virtual enviroment and a good story. Bethesta works well creating big virtual worlds, but the story in them is not that good, not to mention the writting is really bad and repetitive (I'm talking of Oblivion mostly), whereas Dragon Age works with less interactivity and more plot with better writting.

I thought Bethesda is doing an oustanding world in terme of virtual worlds - both Oblivion and Fallout 3 are a testament to this : the world feel alive, NPCs move around and don't just sit there all day, there is a lot of interactivity. Oblivion also went to the point of creating quite a bit of quests depending on the character schedules and time of day, which is something very Ultima-ish. Admitedly Bethesda games tend to be ridiculously too big, but I was surprised to find some very Ultima-ish aspect in Oblivion, especially the whole virtual world aspects (and this coming from someone who HATED everything Bethesda had produced before Oblivion and considers Daggerfal to be one of the worst RPG in videogame history). In some ways it's even better than Gothic and Risen which are more scripted, altough PB's game have the advantage of having a trully seamless world and a more Ultima ish feel.

Regarding writing, it's true their writing could do with some improvement, altough I feel they've been doing a good job in Oblivion and Fallout 3. Note that while I enjoy Bioware's writing, I wouldn't really trust them to write a good Ultima either considering they don't know the word "subtelty".
In fact if I had to choose ONE developper to write a new Ultima story, it would be Obsidian.

In a perfect world, a new Ultima will have big seamless and alive world a la Gothic, with quests à la Oblivion, a party à la Bioware, and Obsidian quality writing. Boy that could be awesome heh

-Sergorn