As I never found anything close to Ultima Online, I basically stopped gaming entirely. UO raised the bar too high.
It was all downhill after WoW. It was a great game, but it was precisely because it was so good that it soon hegemonised everything. Rather than being one possibility out of many, it became "the" MMORPG, in that due to its success every subsequent game copied WoW, often superficially, and maybe even sometimes accidentally. Its specific conventions became the genre itself.
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!
I posted a few articles on my blog after it was shut down in 2011. Here's one of them, going into the crafting system:
https://benovermyer.com/post/2012/star-wars-galaxies-craftin...
Now, ten years later, it feels like I documented a part of history that hasn't replicated itself. I can't help but feel really sad about that.
https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/postmortems/
He has a book called Postmortems where he compiled essays (many found on his web page) about his early days writing MUDs and developing fantasy worlds, including UO and SWG.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.