Do you remember Ultima Online?

The author hit the nail on the head perfectly describing "UO golden age" players yearning to fill the void.

I will offer 2 major hazards:

1) what made UO special back then was not the ultra-harsh pvp death mechanics, as mortal online has shown. It was the players that were interacting with the harsh mechanics. We were all MMO-naive, and our mentality affected how we interacted with the core rules. You can never again get an un-jaded MMO population. Players have since been transformed into minmax ultragreedy automatons. No game can simulate the old players.

2) Richard Garriott is out to suck the blood out of your UO nostalgia. He got $8000 from mine with Shroud of the Avatar, insanely more from some of my compatriots. Now he's fully abandoned that project even though he had full ownership (ignoring the 'seed round' of literal SEC fraud). He's working on the next generation of nostalgia exploitation, building an MMO out of NFTs.

Trust me it's time to let UO die. It feels so much better when you've let go.

I thought holy shit this game blows.

A week later, the zone.com servers were down so I couldn't play AoE. So I logged into UO, and I just don't remember logging out again, I played for hours and hours. The sense of discovery, gaining items, skills, worrying about losing them and trying to be careful, but also trying to steal other peoples. It was a real fantasy.

I remember when the 'blues' had a war with the 'reds' because they were sick of PKing, so they opened portals to the red towns with ~100 people flowing in, lag following closely behind, and reds getting murdered everywhere. For a couple of hours they were just going everywhere in a giant group murdering all the red players as payback.

I've never found a game since that draws me in like UO did. Ever since WoW, everyone has been following more or less the same cookie cutter template for MMORPGS.

There's so much 'content' but the games are a grind to the end to get to end game content, that's it...

The lack of end-game content in UO made it good, PVP was more difficult, and there was risk/reward.

The best thing about UO was that if you didn't play for 3 weeks, you didn't fall behind your friends.

In WoW if you didn't play for 3 weeks you come back and its hard to play with friends, you end up being carried or neglected. Ashes of Creation is trying to solve alot of these problems tho. Fingers crossed that game turns out good.

He founded a new company - Playable Worlds - and on their website[0] are a few Blog posts (look for "Riffs by Raph"), that outline some ideas/concepts behind the new game (without giving any concrete details though).

It's not gonna be exactly like UO but more modern - but it seems it will share many of the design-sensibilities that made UO special.

Raph and a few PW-employees also hang out - and occasionally post - on an unoffical Discord dedicated to their new, still unnamed game[1].

[0] https://www.playableworlds.com/

[1] https://discord.gg/cp2yuQZG4M

I feel like if that feature had been removed, it would make locations and travel far more significant.

I remember sailing the seas with my boat and the sense of exploration I had by visiting islands few people had been to.

I also feel like there should have been consequences for logging out in the wilderness, perhaps a strong chance of waking up to some monster encounter and with less than half your HP when you log in. This would incentivize people to seek towns or homes or at least use the camping skill.

I think UO really shines when you lean into hardcore elements.

But mostly just the mystery of that unknown world. Using just the printed map that came in the box I decided to walk between the town I started and another town. Such an adventure, getting chased by wild animals, meeting real people some friendly some not. And finding that the map wasn’t exactly accurate.

And later on getting together groups of people to adventure into a dungeon. Including the all important wizard who would be able to open a gate so we didn’t have to walk all the way there (after they tried and failed a few times, grumbling about how many regents it was using). The the absolute chaos as we got word from other fleeing players that there was a murderer (a player who’s name had turned red because of the number of other players they had killed) further down in the dungeon. Should we cut our losses and gate back out or were we a strong enough group to take them on?

After two degrees, moving to a whole another continent, and getting my “dream” job, I only can hope to find that kind of excitement again.

I still get chills whenever I hear game’s music. Incredible game indeed.

It plays exactly like UO at its core, with some new frosting layered on.

Most importantly, you get that UO experience with a nice fresh GUI.

https://shardsofbritannia.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0

I'll never join the metaverse, or anything created by the Villainous Zuckerberg, Grandmaster Thief.

Idea: Persistance is value because scarcity is valuable. The final definition of the final game is one that has only one world.

Here is an archive snapshot:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221014064337/https://en.karelk...

But I lost many, many, many hours to Star Wars: Galaxies. May it rest in peace. (yes, I know there are emulators and private servers, but it's not the same)

Building your first house was a big achievement in the early days, as money took real time and effort to accumulate; much later, the challenge was finding an empty plot rather than affording a house.

Walking through players used something like stamina iirc, so you couldn't just wade through a dense crowd without some forced pauses. And once player population swelled, the bank could be just stuffed full of people just outside, in the doorway, and just inside the bank.

So what you did was carry a couple of empty barrels and water. Drop the barrels side by side in the 2-wide doorway, and quickly fill them with water. They were immovable full barriers once full. But with so many players already piled up in that area, you really couldn't see the obstacles. I believe players already on a barrel tile could move off, but there was no passing through a full barrel.

Within seconds, crowds would be denser on both sides of the (invisibly) blocked doorway, with people shouting MOVE at each other. This shouting was somewhat normal due to that stamina penalty you'd naturally hit in that situation even without a barrel. The barrel just meant you were NOT going through, but you didn't know why. It was a bit griefy, but it was really funny. And when you're an early 20s punk, it's a lot of fun.

There was a time before you could press a key to show names of anyone around. I don't recall how you saw their name, but it wasn't as easy before. When bored, I would stand in dense forest a short distance from a moongate on an island where the land between the gate and the small town was just all jungle. Anyone arriving would immediately head into the forest toward the town. But with my forest green dyed robe, dark hair, and dark skin, they wouldn't see me. One or two spells, and they were dead. Very gangky, but 20s punk fun. Eventually tab or shift was made to highlight all names visible on your screen, so that mini-game was over.

In a similar vein, there was a quiet path between a couple of towns with a little S turn, and a couple of rocks and trees at that turn. Drop one or two gold coins on the path, stand "in" the tree, and use the hide skill. You were visible if someone got close, but very faintly. Same dark green or brown robe. Picking up an individual coin usually took a few clicks to find the hit zone, so it meant anyone wanting the coins would be stationary for a moment. Murder.

And that brings us to corpse mutilation and the eventual reputation system that was added. PvP was the norm, and apparently not everyone enjoyed it. Also, ganking was the norm (not just me!). So murdering had some reputation consequences, but mutilating a corpse and leaving bloody bits scattered around was an even bigger rep hit. IIRC, too low rep and you would be attacked on sight by guards; so that meant no town visits until you had repaired your rep. Good to have a house and friends, (and alts? don't recall); then you were kept supplied and your booty fenced.

Finally, one of the first Christmas holidays of UO (maybe the first?)... there were holiday servers, all snowy and festively decorated. You had to create a new character, and you could start with your choice of a few stats at 70%. And you had random red/green chainmail. And there were no town guards. So it was a fragfest, and it was hugely fun.

Eventually typical human misbehaviors became a bigger and bigger problem, with item duping ruining economies (there was a time when you could gather resources, craft items, and actually sell them to other players who had a genuine desire for your product!), other exploits, gang-style ganking, and the usual problem of reaching essentially max skill development of characters and becoming bored (probably the cause of many of the previous bad behaviors).

Still, in the history of MMORPGs, UO was really a special thing for its time.

- edit bonus - For some time, pickpocketing actually took items out of other players' bags. So a thief with good hide and pickpocket skills could do well stealing from players. And perhaps because of the bank crowding problems (where the bank tellers were originally inside at counters), banks were improved so you could do banking just by standing close outside the bank building. That meant lines of people just standing around waiting to be harvested. Inventories were not fixed slots, so backpack and corresponding items (including bags in bags) were a real chore to fish around in, especially under time pressure. That was part of the thrill. And of course if you got caught (failed the pp roll?), you would have an immediate big guard problem. So you made sure you traveled minimally, and death just meant losing whatever you had just stolen.

There was a huge cave at the end of Ultima iV. I arrived there well prepared and made it all the way to the center of the cave. Killed all monsters along the way and after a long (few hours?) battle I had to realize that I did not have a specific item that I needed. This meant leaving the cave (with all monsters respawning), getting that item, and doing the whole battle again (AFAIR you had to do it all in one go, as you could not save inside a cave). On that day I decided to quit the Ultima Series and never looked back. But I still own the original Ultima IV game package.

I don't even remember which one I played more, Ultima II or Ultima III. I don't think I ever played Ultima.

Don't think any of it matters much.

Really nice game.