Britannia News Network
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The Britannia News Network (abbreviated: BNN) is the official news network of Ultima Online. It appears on the official website and documents various in-game events and supporting fiction. Articles are written by various development team members, sometimes written under their own developer handles, but usually written under various pseudonyms meant to be fictional, in-game characters.
Recent Articles
The War of Shadows
- BNN: From Rags to Riches - Janurary 9, 2009
- I'd Like a Drink If You Don't Mind - November 5
- Mistress of Darkness - October 31
- Dungeons and Flagons - October 20
- Hope for the Future - July 11
- Valvakka - June 27
- A Short Time Ago - June 25
- The Six - June 23
- Andrew - May 29
- Military Arrives in Moonglow - April 3
- Blackrock Detector Fails! Mages Reported Missing! - April 2
- Blackrock Detector to be Unveiled! - March 27
Town Cryer
The original name of the BNN was the Town Cryer. The Town Cryer was started as a sort of "newspaper" of in-game events during the original alpha and beta stages of Ultima Online as a way to get potential players more involved in the future of the game. Development team members as well as various leading volunteer testers contributed stories about various in-game events from a roleplaying point of view, when in reality most of the events being written about were merely staged to stress test critical game systems.
The word "Cryer" in Town Cryer was intentionally misspelled. As Middle English, the dominant language of the basic area and time period of which Ultima Online was originally modelled after, featured a wide variety of words making use of the letter Y that are now spelled with the letter I instead, such as "hym" (him), "tyme" (time), and "womynn" (women), it was thought that spelling "Crier" with a Y would evoke a feeling of medieval times.
Transition
The Town Cryer was renamed sometime after the move from OWO.com to UO.com. Focus shifted from merely featuring newspaper-style write-ups of in-game events, to providing backstory and local histories, as well as corollary tales for the purposes of further immersion.
The Town Cryer's transition to the Britannia News Network was meant to signal a larger-scale effort to provide in-game fiction that would require more than just a simple newspaper format to cover. Articles were written as on-the-spot reports, character histories, backstories for upcoming events, and calls to arms.
BNN Audio News
See: List of BNN Audio News Broadcasts
Leading up to the announcement and release of Ultima Online: Renaissance, the BNN began a daily, and eventually weekly, audio broadcast. These broadcasts featured live reports on location, interviews with prominent in-game characters, and amusing in-game advertisements. BNN Audio News was meant to simulate the news being broadcast through communication crystals in homes throughout Britannia, with these same crystals being used as the "microphones" of the reporters.
List of BNN Articles
This is a list of pages, by year, containing lists of all of the currently known Britannia News Network articles in reverse chronological order.
2009
See: List of BNN Articles (2009)
2008
See: List of BNN Articles (2008)
2007
See: List of BNN Articles (2007)
2006
See: List of BNN Articles (2006)
2005
See: List of BNN Articles (2005)
2004
See: List of BNN Articles (2004)
2003
See: List of BNN Articles (2003)
2002
See: List of BNN Articles (2002)
2001
See: List of BNN Articles (2001)
2000
See: List of BNN Articles (2000)
1999
See: List of BNN Articles (1999)
1998
See: List of BNN Articles (1998)
1997
See: List of BNN Articles (1997)