
Why Are People Still Playing Ultima Online? - danso
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/06/30/ultima-online-retrospective/
======
dejv
UO Online was my youth. I didn't had access to the internet back in 1998 when
it went live, so I obsessively read (and re-read) all the stories in game
magazines and hoped that one day I will be able to play this game.

Few years later, I finally get my 56kbps modem and spent decade playing the
game on so many different unofficial servers as well as being GM and developer
of few more shards.

I would say that UO was Minecraft of our generation: especially on unofficial
RP servers you had awesome game systems scripted by community as well as
sandboxed world where you can do basically anything. During my stint in game I
was beggar joking around other players, owned farm, baked my own bread and
make beer, been drunken sailor as well as competitive PvM warrior.

It is "real" world, that tends to create nice community of players, some like
to chat, some like to joke around, some hunt dragons and another are just pure
evil killing noob players, stealing everything they own and then troll them
till they cry and leave the game forever.

Try that in your "bring-me-ten-wolf-teeth" click grind MMO game.

~~~
shiftpgdn
One of my favorite "UO was a real world" stories is that when they launched
the game animals were to reproduce and prey on each other. The designers
hadn't accounted for the fact the players would simply kill everything in site
and suddenly they had a world without animals.

~~~
dejv
It is also only game, that when randomly meeting some people from old game
days you still have urge to talk about thing that happen in game 15 years ago,
trading stories and jokes.

It is the only game that you play with people and where the people you play
with are the most important element of the game that creates the game itself.
In other mmorpgs you just play around hordes of people that you don't really
care about: you just click and click and click.

~~~
jib
I disagree on it being the only game. There are people I played EQ with from
10 years ago who I am still in touch with and would consider friends, and we
spent a lot of time in the game talking about just about everything.

I also had the same experience with people in quake that I played with - I am
sure if I caught up with some of the guys from the swedish QWCTF scene back in
the day we would have a bunch of things to talk about, same with the community
around the webgame Utopia.

I think it depends on how much time you put into the game and how engaged you
are with it. Communities can develop around all types of games, but I agree
that UO was a very engaging game and I still remember the people I played UO
with 17 years later, even though I am not in touch with them anymore.

~~~
dejv
It is hard to explain this, you might have community outside the game, but UO
is probably only game when you have community inside the game. You really have
neighbours ingame, you meet them often, maybe some other guy you see on market
from here and there will steal something from you.

I still remember one guy, which I considered to be my friend, to betray the
city, making the portal that leads to small house full of PK, quite a few
people get killed and robed out of equipment that you need to spend weeks of
full time dungeon going to get to. There was greed, noble characters and also
evil ones. You lost your precious equipment forever easily, you build ingame
friendships and hatred by seeing same people every day.

There was also another guy, who by playing his role pretend to be mentally
ill, but was actually using greed of other players to steal out of them. Just
by talking, little bit of using known bugs (for hiding his name), using
different clothes and stuff like that. He wrote it up when he did his act and
it can be great book, but it actually happened in game and you were part of
it.

These stories are 12 years old, tell me about your frags ;)

~~~
pests
I played a similar game. Originally released as Subspace in 1997 as a MMO
asteroid-type game by Virgin Interactive Entertainment. VIE later abandoned
server hosting duties but server software was available so the game became
player ran on community servers. Eventually the client needed to be replaced
due to cheating, which was done by a player named Priit Kasesalu, known for
Kazaa. Years later the server software was also replaced by the community as
well.

The game split game types into "zones" that were 24/7\. The zone I played, and
eventually became a "sysop" of, would regularly have only 40-80 people tops at
any given time. Maybe 500 unique people. Not sure exact numbers because we
didn't track stats like that.

Anyways, can totally resonate with playing with the game group of people every
day for months or years. I had an arch-nemesis who, while we were cordial,
always ended up playing league matches against each other. The rivalry was
fierce but so was the friendship.

The game has been Steam Greenlit after many years of problems (copyright
issues with original company, no source code for client, etc) and is about to
make its debut:

[http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=144913...](http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=144913037)

You can play today at [http://getcontinuum.com](http://getcontinuum.com)

~~~
kingmanaz
My brother still plays Subspace and he was on the beta in '96\. Something
about that game brings out the meanest streak in humanity, though. The
comments are often hilarious, you can almost hear the other guy snap his
keyboard in rage.

Great, balanced mechanics, though perhaps that's changed. I'm thinking of the
old Chaos and Capture the Flag zones. Can still hear the sound effects as I'm
typing this.

~~~
pests
I'm glad someone replied who recognized the game. I started in around ~2001
when its spiritual successor game (SOE Cosmic Rift) went pay-to-pay and killed
off its dedicated beta player base.

I login every so often to check my ?messages and see if any old friends are
online. The zone I eventually sysoped in is dead these days but the community
is still strong.

The game honestly started my programming and tech career with things like bot
and zone/squad website dev. I plan to check in tomorrow for the Steam launch.

> "you can almost hear the other guy snap his keyboard in rage."

This made me chuckle as it 100% spot on.

Do you know your brothers alias or would you be willing to ask him if he was
ever involved in SS[*] RedStar or knew me? (game alias same as hn account)

------
jerf
It was really a recurring theme with Origin at its height... games that
simultaneously combined being staggeringly ahead of their times with bizarrely
broken mechanics, and at release time, generally code that barely ran on the
best computers of the time.

The Ultima 7 games, for instance, are both fantastic role-playing stories with
deep adult stories that could stand with anything made today, and are also
enormous recursive fetch quests of the worst kind that I could never play
again now.

There were many great studios at the time of Origin's heyday, but Origin has
to be one of the most _interesting_. Almost every game they made was like
somebody time traveled back from the future and was desperately trying to jam
a future game on to the primitive machines of the time. (The Ultima
Underworlds also come to mind for that. Graphically more primitive than Doom
in most ways, but in terms of the _world_ and what you can do in it,
staggeringly ahead of their time.)

UO is very much a view into the world that could have been, if WOW hadn't come
along and MMORPGs became driven by addiction mechanics instead of depth. (I do
not necessarily mean that as a perjorative... I take my own hits on the bong
of grind-based (J/W/T)RPGs sometimes. But it's a fair description.)

~~~
warfangle
> Graphically more primitive than Doom in most ways

They didn't use a raycasting engine, though - the maps were full 3D (and so
were some of the environment pieces - benches and the ankhs come to mind).
Because of hardware limitations, your viewport was limited to about 1/4 of the
screen...

In a lot of ways, they were technologically superior to the Doom engine -
except they were slow. The same engine ended up being reused for System Shock
(and 2, if I remember correctly).

~~~
veli_joza
System Shock 2 did not use the same engine - they licensed Looking Glass
Studios' engine used in Thief: The Dark Project. There's a great post mortem
for this game here:
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131813/postmortem_irra...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131813/postmortem_irrational_games_.php)

~~~
warfangle
Ah, you're right. Same studio, but Looking Glass abandoned the UU/UU2 engine
for System Shock.

------
brentvatne
Since playing this from 2000-2002 I have all but quit gaming. Ultima Online
ruined other games for me in the best way possible. I have tried to play
various MMOs since but none of them come close to having the same freedom that
UO offered.

There were gangs, rivalries, people would cast invisibility spells on
themselves outside of your door to try to break into your house when you open
the door, you could be put in prison if you were an asshole or exploited a
bug, you could hunt down miners and if you managed to take them out before
they entered a city's boundaries (where guards would appear and protect them
from "murderers") you would be able to steal all of their clothes, armour,
weapons, ore, etc. GameMasters or Counselors (GMs with limited abilities)
would host PvP tournaments - round robin duels, capture the flag, etc.

I used my limited knowledge of programming as an early-teen to host a custom
"shard" with SphereServer and had an average of about 200 players on at a
time, from all over the world. It was a lot of power for a kid to have. Of
course the software was unstable and increasingly so with more users and
eventually I had to shut it down because it crashed too often. The name was
Alphanine UO - named for the web hosting company that decided to give a kid a
free server to host a video game server.
[http://web.archive.org/web/20020923181726/http://uo.alphanin...](http://web.archive.org/web/20020923181726/http://uo.alphanine.com/)

~~~
KVFinn
>Since playing this from 2000-2002 I have all but quit gaming. Ultima Online
ruined other games for me in the best way possible. I have tried to play
various MMOs since but none of them come close to having the same freedom that
UO offered.

The genre of games that is the successor to games like UO would be the open-
world survival stuff. DayZ and Rust being the most popular but 100s of them
are out now.

For a large scale MMO Crowfall looks interesting. They get around the problem
of a small group accumulating all the resources on the server by wiping the
server and resetting the world frequently. And of course there's Eve Online.

>There were gangs, rivalries, people would cast invisibility spells on
themselves outside of your door to try to break into your house when you open
the door, you could be put in prison if you were an asshole or exploited a
bug, you could hunt down miners and if you managed to take them out before
they entered a city's boundaries (where guards would appear and protect them
from "murderers") you would be able to steal all of their clothes, armour,
weapons, ore, etc. GameMasters or Counselors (GMs with limited abilities)
would host PvP tournaments - round robin duels, capture the flag, etc.

I've had all of these experiences on a Rust server, including the PvP
tournament and going to prison for exploiting a bug. Plenty of action packed
heists involving lots of coordination and subterfuge. Here's an example of
people talking about the crazy adventures in the game:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmH7JI4FEoo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmH7JI4FEoo)

[http://rebelfm.libsyn.com/rebel-fm-
episode-202-01-18-14](http://rebelfm.libsyn.com/rebel-fm-episode-202-01-18-14)

[http://rebelfm.libsyn.com/rebel-fm-
episode-201-01-10-14](http://rebelfm.libsyn.com/rebel-fm-episode-201-01-10-14)

In particular there's a great story about a powerful group fighting a
decentralized weak group that can only use terrorist style tactics to strike
back, and how the powerful group started to try and win hearts and minds on
the server to root out their enemies.

------
mrbgty
UO had a great risk and reward environment. I remember feeling emotions of
anxiety when hunting due to the chance that real people might show up, kill
me, take everything I have on my body and move on. It meant using strategy to
decide what to keep in your backpack out in the wild and what to leave in the
bank or in your private house. Houses could be broken into if you lost your
key which meant more danger.

The fact that real groups of people were out in the world hunting each other
also meant for a lot of fun and dynamic battles to re-claim property, etc.

~~~
mentos
>UO had a great risk and reward environment. This is it.

Playing this game with my best friend when we were 12/13 was a magical
experience in my life. There was this awesome sense of
freedom/adventure/opportunity/risk that no other game I've played has been
able to capture. Though I imagine it is probably due to me outgrowing MMO's I
still like to believe a game could come around and sweep me off my feet again.
Maybe VR can provide that novel experience again.

The emulation community for UO was what introduced me to programming and now
15 years later I am grateful to say I'm working on my own game in UE4. I owe a
lot to Ultima Online.

~~~
jdwithit
Same here regarding emulation. When I was about 16, I took over project
management for the UOX3 emulator for a year or so when the original author
abandoned it. I sure as hell wasn't a good enough coder to have written it
myself, but I knew just enough to be dangerous. I made bug fixes and added
minor new features (the one I remember best was implementing the "page a GM"
queue). And most importantly, got other much smarter--and older--people
involved contributing impressive pieces of code. Who for some reason didn't
have any problem working on a project being managed by a teenager :)

Ironically, now that I've gone down the sysadmin path as an adult, there's no
way I still have the C++ chops to even read the code I wrote back then. Let
alone recreate it. Kind of hilarious that some of the best code I ever wrote
dates from high school.

One of my most vivid memories of that period was spinning up a new build,
posting it to the website, and then leaving for school. When I got home, I had
a number of emails saying "hey moron the new build instantly crashes on
startup". Sure enough, it did. That was an excellent early lesson in the
importance of testing!

(btw, I went by the incredibly terrible handle of "Anthracks" in those days,
if that rings a bell for anyone. Still turns up a small number of hits!)

------
rimunroe
Funny, I actually just reactivated my account a couple months ago. I've put a
few hours into it, but haven't done much. But within _five minutes_
(seriously, I checked the clock) of logging in to the Chesapeake shard (which
is not even a terribly high population one) I ran into two friends I had last
played with in ~2003/2004!

~~~
jeremyis
I plays on Chesapeake. Did you ever hang out in pax lair?

~~~
cache7070
I remember pax lair! I use to terrorize it when I was a teenager. Every few
years I end up talking to people I used to play with.

------
potato_mochi
My fondest gaming memories are all from Ultima Online.

EDIT: I forgot to share my very first experience with the game and I have to
share because it's short and hilarious.

I made a new character and started in Moonglow. Barely a few minutes later I
walked out of the gate with all of my starting items and gold on me. I think I
made it 10 steps out of the guard zone before a group of guys jumped me and
took everything I had. I was in shock. I had no frame of reference for what
had just happened to me.

I made a new character, started in Britain this time, and got to work building
him up so I could go back and get those guys. After that, I was hooked.

I converted from The Realm (Sierra Online, anyone?) to UO:T2A and never looked
back. Played on Chesapeake with my brother, a neighbor, and a middle school
buddy of mine. Was pretty heavy into PvP in the form of guild wars, Test
Center, Britain graveyard fights (in the 30 mins between server saves and
shutdown) and anti-PK. Then I learned about Shadowclan via the official UO
game guide, rolled a new 'toon on Catskills and I became a hardcore UO RPer.

I roleplayed an orc, then an undead, and an evil mage in the Crimson Alliance.
Then I joined up with various other guilds of the day such as The Free Corps,
the Yew Militia, the Paladins of Trinsic, the Goblins (so much fun annoying
the Shadowclan Orcs), Kingdom of Winterfell, VvV, the Romans, the Wahju (a
tribe of traitor orcs), and probably a few other groups I'm forgetting, all
over the span of roughly 8-10 years.

In college I migrated to private RP shards: Teiravon, Khaeros, and even got
involved in founding one of my own with a group of guys I played with called
Requiem.

Ultima Online is the game that taught me about story, roleplay, community, and
true sandbox gaming. I've never found anything that's come close since and,
given the way the market is going, it's likely I never will.

~~~
swozey
I feel like I wrote this. I came from The Realm, don't even know HOW I
discovered that game. I remember being so excited to become a Helper and
getting my green Helpers bardache. I used to run around killing (jumping) Gus
Clan members because I was a firebrand little 10 year old who didn't like
newbies getting attacked. I also had hacked stats, but I digress. I had a
phase where I'd sneak into peoples houses using belts/boots of invisibility. I
was such a little shit.

Then I got the UO Alpha and Beta. Man, the game was a serious Alpha.
Eventually discovered Catskills and Siege Perilous when it was color wars. It
was amazing. I'd hop on and RP on Catskills, mostly Paladins of Trinsic or the
Undead, then I'd hop over to SP to get my action fix. Then they turned Siege
Perilous into a regular test server. Absolutely broke my heart.

You would laugh your ass off if you knew how simple it was for me to hack my
stats in The Realm. They eventually fixed it, but man, I was a little 10 year
old whose computer experience at that point was running a couple Quake servers
and making Doom wads.

All of these instanced MMOs break my heart. GW2 is fun.. but its so simple, or
I've just never played it enough. The instancing kills it for me.

~~~
potato_mochi
Ah, the Realm. I eventually stopped actually playing the game and just hung
out at the East Gate in the starting town whose name is now escaping me.

I got caught up in the "Lil" naming craze, where everyone made minified alt
versions of their mains and called them "LilSomething".

I never got any of the special or unique baldrics and I think the highest
level I ever made it to was 50.

Still, was a hell of a good time.

------
Shivetya
Similar to why many play Asheron's Call. The levels of customization
available, the time invested, the friends made.

Both these MMOs were highly player customizable compared to later MMOs where
everyone is cookie cutter. Even the world was in a way less cookie cutter.

Plus in some ways developer interaction had been much more personal then. So I
would say that investments made early have their pay offs. Get the community
built and it can sustain itself. Reinvent yourself a few times along the way
will help and hinder at times, but if you give players a means to establish a
good community they will stick with it.

Finally, not shutting down when other games would call it quits is big too.
Both Origin and Turbine attempted spin offs but neither made it, I don't even
think any Origin follow up even launched. Players had their comfort level and
moving on isn't all its cracked up to be

------
fiveoak
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Ultimate Online's private servers
(though I guess their legality is probably a gray area at best). Most of the
people still playing UO are on those servers where they're running an older
version of the game without many of the later expansions, some even add
significant amounts of custom content. Last I checked there were servers that
have hundreds, or even thousands of active players.

~~~
potato_mochi
The private servers are technically in violation of the game's EULA/TOS but
Origin/OSI and now EA have been happy to let them go unmolested as long as
they don't charge players to play.

Of course many servers have gone around this barrier by incentivizing them to
donate money to cover bandwidth and server costs and offering in-game benefits
in return (skills, items, titles, etc.).

------
praxxis
[http://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima-
online/](http://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima-online/) has a bunch of blog
posts from Raph "Designer Dragon" Koster, one of the original designers of UO.
It's amazing to read about how "world like" the original game was, especially
compared to the direction that EQ/WoW took the genre.

~~~
rudolf0
Raph Koster is now one of the founders of a company developing a new MMO,
Crowfall. The devs claim it will take a lot of inspiration from UO.

[http://crowfall.com](http://crowfall.com)

------
lotharbot
I actually still play a couple of PC games that are older than this:

Descent, 20 years old (source port setup instructions at
[http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php](http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php)
; 20th anniversary LAN party, July 16-19 in Denver, at
[http://descentchampions.org/20th/](http://descentchampions.org/20th/)), and

DooMII, 21 years old (source port at
[https://zandronum.com/](https://zandronum.com/) ).

What keeps me coming back to these old games? They strike a balance between
simplicity and complexity that leads to more interesting emergent gameplay
than I've been able to find in newer games. DooMII single player has just
enough balance between puzzle elements and raw combat, and with the majority
of enemies firing non-instantaneous projectiles, dodging and weaving between
waves of incoming shots becomes something of an art form. Competitive Descent
is all about using the space, outthinking your opponent, using small elements
of position and orientation in order to force engagements on your term. A
high-level match is like a combination between chess and poker, all inside of
an FPS (see
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb63KIotMMM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb63KIotMMM)
).

There are some other factors that helped, which both games have in common and
some of which UO also has. They had _fantastic player communities_ and player-
run organizations. Both were open sourced a few years after release, allowing
the communities to _maintain and update_ the games -- keeping the fundamentals
the same while building modern capabilities (like game trackers) around them.
Both had relatively easy-to-use _content creation tools_ ; making new levels
for DooMII or Descent didn't require a high-end PC or a 3D modeling suite, but
simply downloading the level editor. And the game makes no particular demands
of you -- you can play it on a wide variety of difficulty levels, against
computer-controlled enemies or with or against other human players, in new
levels or old, for a few minutes or for hours. And for those who played with
other people, it was possible to develop deep friendships -- I actually met my
wife in Descent, and we named our son for another player.

~~~
Shorel
Great to know it.

I just subscribed to descentchampions.org

------
jib
I played UO 98-99 on Europa. Back then I enjoyed being able to play a game
where I could do smithing almost exclusively. Just hanging out with other
people who enjoyed a very small aspect of the game, and being able to service
others. There was a nice feeling of earning the trust of a community (people
had to give you their things for you to fix, and you could theoretically just
keep them, but play enough and your character built a reputation as a reliable
person in the community, rather than having it rules based or anything) that
hasnt been in place in other MMOs that I've played.

I went back to play it last year I think, and it was still an enjoyable, but
thoroughly broken game world. For me it was mostly nostalgia, and after a few
months of playing it vaned, but the content still held up surprisingly well,
especially as it was never really meant to be balanced.

~~~
jeeva
Neocron was the last game/MMO I remember that I remember handing over hard-
earned items to community-trusted folk for repair / construction.

...I do miss that sort of thing.

~~~
Malstrond
Insert generic 'me too' post here:

Hah, with both us here, we probably gathered 50% of the ex player base.

It's still alive, with little players though. But there is a community team
that keeps it running and tries to untangle the decade old spaghetti code to
balance it and fix old bugs.

------
debaserab2
UO was an amazing game and a huge part of my adolescence. I couldn't even
begin to tell the stories and lessons I learned playing the game. Making
macros was my gateway drug into programming. As the article says, it is one of
very few MMO's where you can truly live an alternate life.

It completely ruined all MMO's for me. I haven't been able to play an MMO
since because they all feel like single player games that you're just playing
together, not an alternate universe full of risks and rewards. I tried WoW
during it's beta and gave up within 2 weeks.

~~~
cache7070
I played UO 1997-2003ish. It ruined pretty much every game after that for me
too. Occasionally I try to get into other games but they just aren't fun. I
wonder how much of it is that I'm older now and don't have time to invest in
these sorts of things. But occasionally over the years when I have free time I
try to pick up a new game but lose interest before it gets fun.

------
romaniv
My favorite gaming magazine had a monthly column about Ultima. It was an
interesting read. Then I bought a disk with Ultima around... probably 9 years
ago. I don't remember whether I played on the official servers. But my first
experience was clicking on a dummy a hundred times to raise my attack skill.
Then one of my friends gave me a set of better armor. And then I was randomly
killed by some higher-level player. And then I stopped playing. Then I quit.

Frankly, I don't understand why all those "interactive world" features people
keep talking about cannot be decoupled from grinding and crappy PvP system.

Though the thing that completely cured me from online gaming was a certain MUD
I was playing at the time (for several month, for at least an hour most of the
days).

~~~
TylerE
I think they really can't be. Else you get WoW where 90% of the population has
something that's within 2% of the best gear available after 3 months.

~~~
jegutman
I've never been an MMORPG player, but know lots of people who have played UO
and WoW. Hasn't WoW been pretty successful at keeping people engaged?

~~~
TylerE
Not really. There is a LOT of churn in the subscriber base. People will come
back when a new expansion comes out, play all the new content and then unsub
after a few months.

------
drawkbox
It was one of the first real MMOs. You could also turn your players into jerky
for energy.

 _" If memory serves, when you cut up a corpse of another player the body
parts gained would show which player it was, just like the head does, it
should read "a torso of Soma", "a right leg of fwerp", etc, as it is right
now, it just reads "a torso" or "a right leg".

Also, if you carved up the body parts further, you would get human jerky which
also displayed the player's name, I can't exactly remember if this was in T2A
but I do remember that human jerky was the majority of my character's
sustenance."_

UO was a griefers paradise unfortunately but it had many fun elements.

[http://forums.uosecondage.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7738&view=...](http://forums.uosecondage.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7738&view=previous)

------
bittermang
One of the simple reasons: because they can.

One of the biggest reasons a lot of people missed about the early days of WoW
and the record high subscriber counts, too. 15 million people worldwide played
World of Warcraft, because 15 million people worldwide were able to install
and competently run World of Warcraft. It originally ran on a Pentium III or a
Mac G3. That opened up the amount of people who could even come to the table
and consider ponying up a subscription fee.

So when looking back on Ultima, it would literally run on anything. It is a
relic approaching the opposite end of the spectrum, from a digital
preservation standpoint it's becoming more difficult to run it on things. But
you still can. So people do. That's really step one, in my opinion.

------
aklarfeld
UO took over much of my life as a youth. I still have yet to discover a game
that has the depth that was found in UO. Every once in awhile I find myself
playing on the free shards. The complete customization of everything was what
really intrigued me. You could buy a house. You were able to permanently
impact the game landscape with this house - you controlled a piece of the
game! This concept blew my mind. The economy was also incredibly complicated.
I remembering being a part of a player-run auction guild. It was essentially a
part time job. I had to build relationships with people in order to secure
this job - just like real life.

~~~
sehugg
The economy was described at GDC 2000: [http://www.mine-
control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html](http://www.mine-
control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html)

------
jnem
I always feel it's my duty to chime in whenever the subject of original
MMORPGS comes up-- anybody remember Meridian 59? Y'know the mmorpg that came
out BEFORE Ultima online?

A great many people love UO because it's organic feeling community (and I'm
one of em ), but nothing tops the experience of interacting with people in an
online game for the first time. Checkout an article I wrote about it awhile
back: [http://mmocadet.com/being-a-rookie-for-the-100th-
time/](http://mmocadet.com/being-a-rookie-for-the-100th-time/)

~~~
Macsenour
I played that... what I loved about it was that we all looked alike. Cracked
me up! I think maybe we could have different colored clothes, but the faces
were identical. It might just have been that there were few face options.

~~~
jnem
I loved how negotiable everything was, how organic the relationships were. For
example, in the case of dealing with PKers. You could go out and band together
to just outright kill the PK--which was dangerous because if you accidentally
hit someone else, you would then turn yellow(neutral) and then red (pk) if you
hit them to many times. Alternatively, you could gather a posse, corner a PK
and "arrest" them (an informal arrangement). You would negotiate the arrest,
and escort that person back to the jail. The PKs friends would then organize a
rescue attempt on the way, often resulting in a pitched battle on the
jailhouse steps. Good times.

------
Daenks
No mention of Meridian 59 in this comment thread? Derp! Come see/play merdian
at the Open Meridian Project
([http://openmeridian.org](http://openmeridian.org))

~~~
jnem
YES, THIS. Meridian is still my fave MMO of all time. I import the soundtrack
into all my rpg games.

------
59nadir
I used to talk a lot to Petra Fyde when I still played. She had a shop
together with her husband where I bought my everyday bags of reagents (8
different kinds of fuel for casting spells). Seeing her name in this article
was surprising and just gave me a wide smile instantly.

While I haven't played on OSI (the official servers) in forever, my username
here is an homage to The Nadirian Horde, a guild that existed back in the day
on Europa (the main european 'shard' (server)). The leader of this guild, like
Petra, was a teacher of the highest degree.

I love UO, but the times I'm talking about, around Y2K, were different than
what UO became later. UO is one of those games that very quickly became
watered down once EA bought it. It may have found a nice place now, but coming
from what it was back then and being right in the middle of the transition was
horrible.

Luckily, however, there are a multitude of freeshards to play on that will
adopt the older rulesets so that you can still play the same game. They're
usually very liberal in the development they do with the game itself too, so
it's not uncommon to have them rework some stuff that isn't necessarily
perfect in the old ruleset, but keep the general idea there.

(Epidemic from Pink Hat Thugs @ Europa, if anyone from EU's here. :))

------
brianstorms
Only 18 years, huh? Hmm, if that is ancient, what would 30-40 years be? Lots
of people are still playing Avatar (release 1979), EMPIRE (1974), Oubliette
(~1977) on PLATO. I still enjoy a good old game of Mahjongg (1983). You can
see of these at cyber1.org.

------
jron
The RunUO code is a testament to how great the game was:

    
    
      http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.62  T=11.67 s (285.5 files/s, 47086.1 lines/s)
      -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Language                     files          blank        comment           code
      -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      C#                            3319         103315          12969         422223
      XML                              9              1            296           7097
      MSBuild script                   2              0              0           3517
      ASP.Net                          1              0              0             10
      -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      SUM:                          3331         103316          13265         432847
      -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    

[https://github.com/runuo/runuo/tree/releases/2.5](https://github.com/runuo/runuo/tree/releases/2.5)

~~~
oopsies49
What is RunUO and what makes it so great? It looks like it is a utility that
launches the game?

~~~
noneTheHacker
RunUO is a fan made server-side to UO. It let's you host your own private
servers (shards in UO terms).

------
fweespeech
UO was honestly the best MMO I ever played and I still get back into it from
time to time. I honestly wish I hadn't sold my account shortly after UO:R came
out and I started to get bored.

------
viiralvx
I think Ultima Online was one of the first MMORPGs that I played. I think
Ultima and Ragnarok Online. I loved the entire feel of Ultima Online, it had a
great community. Same with Ragnarok Online (I still help code for my friend's
private server, actually). I fell off playing UO once I started getting more
into RO, but to be honest, UO and RO are the only two MMOs that have been able
to captivate me for long periods of time, never really got the appeal of WoW.
This makes me want to find some shards to play some Ultima Online this
weekend.

~~~
viewer5
> I still help code for my friend's private server, actually

What are you working on? I assumed everything was already in place to make it
work.

~~~
chucky_z
Not the above, but I can chime in. Ragnarok Online private servers are (now)
an entirely different beast than any of the official servers.

Automatic events, large custom maps, all sorts of fun player oriented stuff;
custom classes, custom gear, new sprites for players and monsters, new colors
all over the place, different balancing... All built on top of this ancient
engine that's been ported and rebuilt a dozen or so times now.

Reading a bit of Ragnarok Online's private server history is very interesting.

------
Wyndsage
I pre-ordered Ultima Online back in September 1997 (well my parents did) but
did not participate in the beta. My friends were all playing by the time I
received the giant box filled with the cloth map, a dragon poster and the
installation discs. I remember my first day just strolling around passing
people outside Britannia and saying "Hail sir". What an amazing world it was,
oh what are these 10 red names running at me? You are dead. Back then a lot of
stuff was "broken".. my friends and I used to sit inside a building in town
and steal items repeatedly from a spawning chest, selling them for much in-
game gold. As the game progressed I remember many "exploit" sites and yes I
too tried them out, gating around the outsides of houses with 4 of my friends
until we were able to hit the right spots and be teleported inside, free to
loot the contents. I also remember many times angrily losing my entire house
and/or possessions to a simple thief hiding outside, waiting for the house
door to open and the best chance to run in and kill me. There were many fun
bugs for years until they managed to patch quite a few... and started to crack
down on macroers and gold dupers. I owned a castle, many dragons, had
countless PVP battles against 100s of foes at once (remember server downtime
anyone?) and nothing will come close to it.

------
theklub
Cool thing about UO is the macros you can make. Using programs like UO Steam
and Razor you can have the program do most of the mundane tasks (sorting,
targeting) that no one wants to do.

------
personjerry
My question is, Why Are People Still Playing World of Warcraft?

------
Globz
risk vs reward, this is what made this game so great.

Only a handful of games have come to life with the same original "spirit",
Asheron's call, Darkfall Online and Albion Online to name a few.

UO is a real world with consequence, your actions really matter and the people
around you can be a threat at any given time or help you in unimaginable ways,
this alone is the best feeling you can get from playing an MMO. Players are
the content not the scripted AI.

------
cryoshon
UO was an absolutely fantastic game which I started as a child in 1998, and
played as a teenager in the early 2000s.

UO really captured the intensity of utter anarchy-- there was the free market,
the danger of being murdered, the castle-doctrine seriousness of defending
your turf (with all your hard earned loot or crafts!), and the huge world,
filled with monsters, murderers, scammers, and jokers. I am told that Eve was
somewhat like UO, but I could never quite get into Eve because its mechanics
weren't entertaining to me.

UO's mechanics were extremely clunky to be sure-- anyone else remember having
to shuffle shit around in your backpack all the time in order to prevent
thieves from stealing from you while you were in town? The mechanics really
were part of the charm, though. The game certainly did have a pleasant musical
set and graphics, although neither has stood the test of time.

The next closest experiences similar to UO are Rust, and DayZ (heavily
modded). I really enjoy the "nothing is sacred, make your own turf" experience
along with the deep PvP and challenging PvE.

------
leonthesoundrel
Just thought I would join in this remanisathone...

I agree with what everyone else has been saying about the diversity and the
excitement of the game (until they introduced Trammel).

For my part I specialised in thieving, hustling and buying and selling
'rares'.

The difference between rare items in UO and in games that followed it (e.g.
WoW) is that these items were actually rare in the sense that there were a
very limited number of them.

There were many different type of rares - the most prized ones were from very
early bugs in the game which allowed you to pick up background scenery if you
logged in just as the server was starting up - they had already fixed this bug
by the time I started playing, but these objects were still floating around in
peoples private collections!

My favourite scam (that I invented as far as I know) was to rename a book with
the title 'a box of cigars' and then sell the book as a rare item.

------
eppp
There are still thousands of us playing at uoforever.com. I help code a bit
when I have time.

------
madaxe_again
Why do I still play Ultima VI from time to time?

Because nostalgia, and it's _still_ a really absorbing game.

Never played UO, bar a brief furtle when it originally launched, as I could
see the crack rocks glistening all too appealingly.

Spam spam spam humbug.

~~~
danso
I never played VI, but have thought about revisiting VII if/when the Exult
bugs get worked out. What do you think of VII in comparison to VI?

~~~
cozuya
Not OP but I only played VI once and thought it to be fairly pale in
comparison to V, which to me is still the seminal game in its genre. IV was
amazing but rough, VI was fairly retread, V got it just right I think.

~~~
rosege
V was my favourite by far too - IV and VI just didnt capture me as much. Had a
friend that actually finished V - took quite a few months of constant play
apparently

------
joshmn
12 years later, people are still playing Halo PC.

I bring this up because in a genre (FPS) that has so many evolutions, so many
releases, it's amazing how dedicated a community can be. It's incredible.

ps. if anyone played I probably know you. I know there is a certain Eric who
runs a rather successful startup who played quite religiously... :)

------
andreasklinger
15 years later and i still remember "unhide… CORP POR"

I still the different phases of pvp tank mages, skeleton archers, dragons,
grey lords, etc

I still remember the bad midi music on some pvp clan website (banana boyz if
you wonder)

Kudos to this game, kudos to it's makers!

------
davideberardi
in UO you can really change the world. not houses not mounts not gold, what
makes you log in again and again is that you can influence all the people
connected. when you are inside, you can do everything and that makes you owner
of the player "role".

that doesnt happen in all that shit that we have today. its just .. if you
played UO you will never feel the same immersion in any other games. and that
is.

we can just hope that Shroud of The Avatar will do the same, for years.

garriot, you own us

------
cliftonk
It was by FAR the most fun game I played as a teenager. The world was wide
open. I had so much fun playing UO that very few games since have held my
attention.

------
nextpulse
PvP - one of the best (and controversial) feature.

------
outworlder
... because it is fun? Because it pre-dates the "WoW" model, which most newer
MMORPGs want to follow?

I mean, it didn't have levels. It didn't have XP. It had skills, which
increased with use. Your health could increase via attributes, but not that
much.

In the end, after a few days, there wasn't that much difference between your
character and people playing for a year. In the best case, maybe they would
have 50% more health? And could cast more powerful spells, if they had Magery.
But so could you - as a newbie mage, your spells had a high failure chance
(and would consume reagents regardless), but you _could_ cast almost all of
them.

Which means that an older player couldn't just walk in and start murdering an
unlimited number of newbies without any effort. If the newbies banded
together, they would have a decent shot. The biggest differential was actual
player skill (and game knowledge). Also, preparation.

In WoW and the like, if they even allowed PVP, a max level character can
easily have a thousand times more HP than a first level character, incredibly
better equipment and skills. You could take the whole level 1 population
against him and they would lose. Badly.

In UO (pre-Trammel), it was very likely that anyone you encountered wouldn't
even have "magic" weaponry. If they had, it was probably a low level one. This
is because everything (save a few items considered 'newbie') would drop to the
ground when you died. So you wouldn't take that +9 sword with you, unless you
felt somewhat safe (playing with a group of friends, for instance).

Losing items also meant an economy, albeit a weak one compared to, say, Eve
Online. Items had to be replaced, after all.

There were also other gameplay options that are missing from newer games. Such
as pickpocketing. Distract the attention of the mage guy you just met in a
dungeon, steal the reagents, then watch their now complete lack of spell
casting ability. Just hope he is a pure mage and can't hit you with anything
else (possible, due to the skillcap, not guaranteed, due to the complete lack
of anything resembling a "character class"[1])

Even things like "Animal Taming" required thought. Taming a dragon? Well,
better have a way to keep it from hitting you, otherwise you'll be dead in a
short order. In a hostile dungeon. And he could eat your stuff. Tamed it?
Cool, remember to feed it, otherwise it will turn on you and you will die.
Dragon dead? Well, time to tame another one then [2]

Hell, what other games require you to have a skill in order to speak with dead
players? :)

[1] Debatable now, as some of the newer skills require a few others to
complement, making it some sort of class.

[2] There was a concept of "bonding" with the animal. Required that you kept
it for a week (real-time). Then you could resurrect it when it died - if you
had the skill. If not, time to find a veterinarian...

------
demarq
38Usd subscription in an age of freemeums and 2 dollar games is rather
impressive.

------
EGreg
That's nothing. I still play Warcraft 2 at war2.ru !

~~~
jegutman
That's pretty amazing. I played so much warcraft 2 over lan back in the day,
but having played broodwar, warcraft 3, and starcraft 2 the game did seems a
bit flat? I am assuming you're reasonably good or you wouldn't have stuck with
it as long. What are some of the things that warcraft 2 does better than the
newer games in the genre by the same company? I know how to explain that
mapping for BW -> SC2 or WC3, but not for WC2 -> Other games.

~~~
EGreg
Warcraft 2 just had an addictiveness for me that Starcraft and even Warcraft 3
never had, for different reasons.

I am a fan of things that are "easy to learn and hard to master". With
Warcraft 2, it was like realtime chess. There were two races, the graphics and
sounds were satisfyingly simple. It was about the actual strategy and not just
crazy "oh look at this" glitzy features. Warcraft 3 did away with the strategy
in favor of 3d glitz. Starcraft seemed too complex and I didn't like the
diagonal movement instead of the vertical-horizontal. I liked knowing where
the units will pop out of the building, and other stuff like that. It was
really about strategy.

Keep in mind I also liked chess.

Another game I liked a lot was MYTH - TFL. I wish I could still play it. Also
because of the realtime strategy!

~~~
Samorite
If your after the old school feel of UO with lots a tweaks try
[http://www.uorenaissance.com/info/](http://www.uorenaissance.com/info/)

" UO:Renaissance is an Ultima Online free-shard, based on Renaissance era
mechanics, without the influences of Trammel.

    
    
        Designed and operated by passionate PvM and PvP experienced staff, that do not play here, this recreation aims to perfect what we all loved about Ultima Online before its decline. A highly immersive game with seemingly limitless possibilities coupled with risk vs reward, this world is what the players make of it. Offering an extensive crafting system with the best free shard economy, PvP mechanics with more templates than you'll have the time for and PvM with more challenge and data than ever before. This is the shard to play on if you want to truly enjoy Ultima Online."

------
gberger
No mention of Tibia in this thread?

~~~
lohengramm
I really spent like 8~ years in Tibia. Did everything, in and out of the game.
The PvP system was great (before crazily automated bots eventually emerged).
My first C program was actually a keylogger to hack Tibia passwords, and my
first PHP site was a bunch of scripts for users to register in my OTS (Open
Tibia Server).

Never played UO but I realize that Tibia was kinda like a ripoff, at least
graphics wise.

Killer Tibia features to me were: lots of PvP strategies, freedom of killing
anywhere, player-based economy and harsh death penalty. All that summed up
made the game very social dependant -- it was practically required to build a
social network ingame to survive. People would start fighting for arbitrary
reasons and guilds would emerge, often creating wars that defined the future
of the server.

The nature of infinity, bots, lack of new servers and bad new features killed
the game to me. Besides the fact that I have grown old.

------
chmielewski
www.uosecondage.com mirrors uo the way it was during the golden era of T2A
(1999-2000)

------
curiously
Why aren't I playing Ultima Online? I've always wanted to play it since I saw
it in PC Gamer magazine in the mid 90s but never had a computer.

Has it been updated to a pay to play sort of game? What draws me to UO is the
nostalgia value

------
jz10
The top comment in that article nails it:

============= Kajisan says: Ultima Online (Renaissance) was my very first MMO
that came as an extra with Ultima Ascencion. I played over 3 years, being a
Gamemaster for another year. UO is the only game that defines Roleplay. You
don't need to grind or leveling up. It was the stories the players created on
their own, sometimes with the help of the gamemasters having a global
adventure event on certain Saturdays. Everybody played the role he wanted to
play. Want to be a magician? Sure.. it took several weeks on our Server to
become one..and once you was one of them..you was literally a damn f* Gandalf.
You was able to stand in front of 10 enemy players and they can't kill
you..because it was not possible "roleplay" wise. The 10 players respected
this, and you had to respect other things.

It's something very rare and for me its a bite to the heart that World of
Warcraft more or less killed this interaction between players..made them
marionettes who gave their wisdom to the current generation of players,
roleplaying less than a cow on the field.

Shroud of the Avatar is an attempt to bring back these old goods, but like
movies like Dune..or 2001, i think its too slow and hardcore for the actual
generation of gamers.

Example? We had a raid on an enemy bastion, and sat a whole night in front of
a fireplace - waiting for the right moment. We talked about distant lands..how
one of us hunted a Dragon last week, sang songs. You just can't do this in
modern MMO's. It's possible..but it needs the right people for it,
understanding the base principles of roleplay. I did not had these knowings
when i started with UO..and found people who took me aside. I learned a lot
about roleplay, about other people and about myself - acting with other
people.

Today, i am game developer aside people who worked on UO, and they're good
people. It's all about imagination, UO just gave the Pen and the Paper an
alternate more colorful form.

