This is the probably last update of the Mysterious Sosaria website. After some initial hesitation I eventually made the decision to discontinue the work on these pages.
As many of you had already noticed, not much happened here for more than a year anyway - partially due to my own private reasons but also simply because of fading motivation and what I call 'Ultima weariness'...
The actual reason why I started this project at all some 3 years ago, was merely to shorten the waiting for the next installment of my favourite roleplaying game series. Back then I devoted almost all of my limited spare time to the creation of this website and here in particular the graphics. It was a great inspiration and opportunity to build up my skills and actually worked out quite well - for a while at least. Of course neither I nor anyone else would have thought at that time that the waiting would carry on for all in all 5 years or even more... Consequently, with release dates constantly being pushed further back, all the bad things regarding UO, UIX lead designers etc. as well as the lack of any real news I eventually reached the point where I really couldn't find enough motivation and time anymore to keep this site going, not to mention updated. Naturally, a lot of things have also changed personally for me since then, priorities have switched - and I know a lot more still need to be changed. Some time last year the old passion flared up for a short while when the first serious 'official' statements regarding Ultima 9 surfaced in form of a website which caused me to busy myself once again with creating new graphics and improving old ones in the hope to come back into gears again. The result you can see here.
Meanwhile however, this regained enthusiasm has gone completely and rather turned into frustration when I realized that in fact nothing has really changed, Origin's back to being awfully quiet again, already revealed facts about the game are rather disturbing than interesting and the release dates are pushed back in the usual way.
Not surprisingly all these things of course also affected the once so strong and vivid Ultima community over the years. At the moment it can not really get much worse, in my opinion it has finally come to a point where it is safe to say - it's fallen apart, dead - almost at least. There's none of the major websites left anymore, all the people and friends I met went on long ago and a short glimpse at one of the former centres of the Ultima fanbase on the Internet - the Ultima Dragons newsgroup - truly reveals how little is left of it. So in conclusion, I cannot say I will never come back here again. Maybe when a new Ultima *does* actually see the light before the end of the millennium it will also bring back the interest but for now I personally have given up 'waiting' for it - I just did for too long. The time has finally come to concentrate on other, that means currently more important projects of mine.

--Telavar, February 1999