ARK: Survival Evolved is a much better example of a game in the UO/Eve Online spirit. While also being a cutthroat PvP sandbox like Rust, it has complex politics and power games between massive inter-server tribes, making it more MMO-ish.

Star Wars Galaxies was another absolute gem at its prime. I never played it, but reading stories about the game makes me feel it's the one game apart from UO which truly came close to fulfilling the promise of a "virtual, persistent, shared world".

Nothing has come close and nothing ever will. Mainly due to the fact that it wasn't just the game mechanics; but that all player types had no other option except to play UO. This, combined with the game mechanics, is what made UO a one-of-a-kind experiences. I feel blessed and honored to have had the opportunity to be a part of it. After so many years failing to find a UO replacement; I've accepted this conclusion as reality and as result, have stopped searching.

DAoC had some of the better PvP mechanics of that generation of MMOs. I played DAoC for years, and eventually moved to WoW for a little while. WoW always felt too easy and never really gave me the same rush that DAoC did.

I still remember the day I gave a friend of mine my DAoC accounts. He later sold them when he quit, and gave me some cash back :)

EVE Online as well but that’s quite a different flavour. I played loads of UO back in the day and spent four years working on EVE. Very few games come close to touching either in terms of being so complex, almost to the point of being real spaces to navigate and live in.

Tibia was absolutely HUGE in my country (Poland) around 2002 and it was my first and last major experience with MMO. I remember it was the only time back then I voluntarily woke up early in the morning long before the school because the servers were usually empty at that time and the spawn locations were full of monsters which meant quick exping :-) Trying to sign in after the school usually took a looong time but once you did it, it truly felt like going to a different universe.

Some time ago I got a craving to play the Tibia version from my childhood and it turns out there's an active server called [1] Classictibia where you play using the 7.1 client version on a faithful recreation of the world from that time - a real blast from the past!

[1] http://classictibia.com/

It was a incredible world to discover and explore (especially custom servers with custom maps and content). There was no 'point' to the game, i.e. no final destination or quest to complete... in fact there were barely any quests at all. It was all just up to you. However you wanted to play you could. I.e. you could just have a blast logging in and hanging out in a player's house which they converted into a bar and play chess chatting about w/e. I even played some great roleplaying shards which were legit, e.g. a LOTR one and it was soo epicly awesome. Good pvp dynamics. I did love the ruthlessness of losing everything when you died. I loved how custom shards could tweak so many of the variables pretty easily. I just have so many absolutely golden memories, hilarious and absurd memories. Idk... it's just really hard to convey how the game was the best. I think a lot of is just because it let you do whatever you wanted, but also provided you with fun PvE, PvP, roleplaying, etc.

What are games today missing? They're not persistent open-world sandbox games. Sure we have open-world games, but they're not sandbox and often not persistent, and we have sandbox but they're not open-world and often not persistent too.

I can't do it. I can't adequately describe what games today are missing which UO had. It's a quality of the combination of all the features UO had that just resulted in the best memories and fun I've had when gaming. I just don't see enough support for player-generated content as UO had, which I suspect is a big part of it too.

Not the OP and I didn't play UO, but I did play a peer game out at the same time, Asheron's Call. AC, UO, and of course EQ were the big 3 early MMOs.

Anyway, there was definitely more community back then, if only due to how there were basically no modern quality-of-life considerations. No auto-group finder, minimal instancing (no instancing?), loss of items on death... you had to lean on others to help you out and they would, because eventually they'd need your help.

A classic example is doing a corpse run to recover your items. In a modern MMO, you die and can rez at some convenient spot with all your items. No real loss or penalty for tough fights, no risk.

In AC, you lost xp on death, lost items on your corpse, and had to make your way back to your body to erase the xp penalty and get your stuff back. I think the timer was something like 3 hours before your corpse would decay and either anybody could loot your body or time items disappeared. I think UO and EQ were the same. Some of the most memorable corpse runs where when you lost your armor and had to get some friends to come with you since you were now half naked and perhaps weaponless.

I played a bit of UO, but I played a lot of Star Wars Galaxies, which was in many ways the spiritual successor, as Raph Koster was the lead designer of both.

Raph came from a background of roleplaying in MUDs, and both UO and SWG had very active roleplaying communities. He designed games that brought together a diverse set of player types and nudged them toward interacting with and depending on each other. In SWG you could (if so inclined) play for months without ever picking up a weapon or venturing outside a city. Professions like Dancer, Image Designer, Tailor, Merchant, Architect, and Politician were on equal footing with the combat professions and you had a certain number of skill points to distribute between all ~30 of them.

Entire player-created cities with shuttleports and malls and parks were constructed, mayors were elected and set policies. City founders worked to entice the best crafters to set up shop in their town (due to an incredibly deep crafting system that resulted in a wide range of qualities and styles of crafted items - people ran full-time businesses just staying on top of the frequently changing mineral deposits and mining high quality materials to sell to crafters). You could place almost any item in your house or guild hall, people decorated elaborately to make their towns and spaces unique.

The planets were huge and very little was marked - you would just go adventuring. One time very early on in the game, someone was running around Mos Espa on Tatooine, getting together a group to head out to Fort Tusken. Like most people at that point, I hadn't been there and didn't know where it was, so I joined up. Once we had assembled a full group of 20, we met on a bridge and headed out, running across the countryside in a line behind this guy for 15 minutes straight. Later they would add mounts and vehicles to the game - early on there was a lot of running. Finally we arrived, and he instructed us to wait outside the fort. He ran in and pulled a couple Tuskens over, and they handily slaughtered our entire host in seconds.

At this time the game still had corpses, so we all woke up as ghosts back in town and had to run all the way out again.

I remember that and other moments from SWG like actual events that happened in my life, moreso than any other game I've played. It's basically inconceivable to me that something like that would happen in a game like WoW where every quest and character and item is fully mapped out and codified, and you largely progress along the rails. In SWG you picked a starting profession and were dropped off in a city, and that was basically it. You had to go run around and observe and talk to people to figure out what you could do. There was so much wonder. UO and SWG were committed to creating rich virtual worlds where players had the tools to write their own stories together. I believe they were ahead of their time and we will eventually see more games like this.

EvE online has largely taken up this mantle and has done amazing things, but the space-based gameplay is a turn-off to many.

They've tried so many times to "fix" it. At this point, I think UO Outlands is probably the best UO experience you can get.

Ragnarok Online is still alive and evolving, there's also a non-complete, but still super fun and playable mobile version, which is not the cash-grabby kind of mobile MMORPG (even though... of course you can pay to advance faster)

>Most of my skills didn't ever get far beyond newbie level.

This is the best test for whether a game really allows freedom in player interaction. If players can have fun and build characters without ever relying on game-mechanical progression, they have true freedom. I made more money in UO running dice games next to the bank than running dungeons.