The no longer anywhere near nightly open discussion thread at Ultima Aiera.

The weekend round-up of news related to Kindgoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the upcoming open-world RPG (from Big Huge Games/38 Studios) being worked on by Ian “Tiberius” Frazier of Lazarus fame.

Dominus has posted a question to the Exult forums concerning whether or not he and the rest of the team should continue supporting legacy operating system versions.

Electronic Arts has updated UltimaForever.com with a new section giving a brief history of each game in the series.

Courtesy of Dungy from the Codex of Ultima Wisdom, Ultima Aiera is pleased to present a gallery of Ultima-related advertisements from various gaming publications.

A series of Ultima-related avatars have been added to the profile customization section of EA’s Origin client.

Andy Panthro has updated his Ultima-inspired texture pack for Minecraft to support the latest version of the smash hit indie game.

Taking a break from playing through one of the Wizardry titles, blogger The CRPG Addict does a bit of digital archaeology and discusses what might just be the earliest surviving computer role playing game.

Shortly after I posted yesterday’s news round-up for Scythifuge’s Exult-based remake of Savage Empire, the man himself put up a new article at his project’s Facebook page asking for the help of a skilled pixel artist!

The Portalarium website was updated a while ago, with a slightly refined look and a new section concerning Richard Garriott’s “Ultimate RPG”. There’s not much there, but the logo will be at once familiar and new to Ultima fans.

The Codex of Ultima Wisdom has posted a New Years news update announcing that they have soared past a million page views and added tons of new content.

I changed Aiera’s “down for maintenance” page a while ago, to give it a look and feel consistent with the rest of the site.

Fearyourself has posted a short video demonstrating the latest development he has made in Back to Roots: transitioning into and loading dungeons.

Scythifuge has made a fair bit of progress developing graphics for his Exult-based remake of Savage Empire. He also needs some input from the community on a couple of matters, so be sure to hear him out and chime in!

Pix’s Origin Adventures, an excellent website to visit for documents related to Origin games and commentary on same, has been shut down by Wordpress.com, allegedly for a Terms of Service violation.

A pre-The Second Age RunUO-based Ultima Online freeshard that seems to take a somewhat positive view of things like griefing and PK, and which also seems to feature some interesting game systems and features.

The Ultima 6 Remake Team, in a Christmastime update, have announced the completion of work on two Shrines of Virtue.

A round-up post, much-belated in being published, of my thoughts about Star Wars: The Old Republic after having two more beta weekends of access to the game, in which I was able to play and nurture a single character for much of the time.

Bandit LOAF from the Wing Commander CIC is wondering if the Japanese-language PlayStation release of Ultima Underworld could be modded with an English-language translation.

Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, in an interview with Joystiq about online gaming monetization models, dropped a small teaser about an upcoming free-to-play project that BioWare (or one of their sub-studios) have in the works.