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Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

I never played the Ultima games but I did have a crippling Ultima Online addiction in high school for two years.

This video definitely brought back some memories.

Same! I played a ton of UO and met many friends on it. Never played any of the single-player series for more than a few minutes. Played some Ultima Underworld which appeals to me but it didn't stick.

I have played a lot of Ultima-inspired games though. The Exile and Avernum series by Spiderweb Software [1] are childhood favourites. I also really loved Arx Fatalis [2], a love letter to Ultima Underworld.

[1] http://www.spidweb.com

[2] https://www.gog.com/en/game/arx_fatalis

To this day my ringtone is 'stones' played just how it did from the midi setup in my family PC. It still gives me a sense of magic and possibility, all these years later. To everyone else it's just a weird old man with beeps and boops for a ringtone.

“Eat that kal vas flam and have a side of in nox you PK sob!”

Being a PK (as well as a thief/PK hybrid) in UO is some of the most fun I've ever had in a video game. There's nothing quite like the adrenaline rush of being a fugitive and surviving, picking people off and scavenging what you can before the fuzz arrive.

PKing had a deleterious effect on the community -- I'll admit -- but I had fun as both a PK and as a victim trying to escape or exact revenge. UO (pre-Renaissance) remains the multiplayer game with the richest social dynamics I've ever played. When they finally got rid of non-consensual PKing they totally destroyed this richness. Instead of behaving like real people in a community who work together to solve their own problems they had the benefit of inviolable game mechanics to protect them.

So people's reliance on one another disintegrated and they stopped engaging with each other. Without the threat of violence to settle things, people became anti-social and had no problem being very rude to one another. It was tragic!

There isn’t an mmorpg game to date that has recreated the PK experience of UO.

I say this as someone who was very heavy into PvP in UO. There's a reason for this. Most PKs wanted to be wolves. Very few players want to play a game where they're sheep.

I spent most of my time tracking down the wolves and fighting them. So so so many of them would run away the second anything approaching a fair fight presented itself to them. On my shard, over time there was a group of us representing the spectrum of "good guys" and "bad guys" but who weren't just trying to be assholes who bonded & became friends. When playing in character we'd fight each other. And then when some band of asshat PKs would go around being jerks, we'd out of character join forces and go stomp their ass.

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