Publish 124 released last week. Quite incredible that the game is still undergoing development and new content. Admittedly it has changed hands several times, and the Richard Garriot days are a distant memory now, but still!

I used to operate one of the more popular player run shards, after the peak of the mainstream game, and even that feels like a distant memory.

Edit: latest notes https://uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/publish-notes/publish...

Ultima Online is one of very few games (probably Star Wars Galaxies and that's it) that actually merit the label MMORPG. It's kind of insane when you think about it, that the MMO that most closely came to fulfilling the promise of a "shared, persistent, virtual world" was also the ~first one.

Here's an enjoyable read by lead designer Raph Koster on the influence of UO: https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/09/28/ultima-onlines-influen...

had to download the client (mainly the map, entities) upfront though (like a 500MiB package)

to my knowledge, no one has released a classic UO (t2a, etc) web client, though it would be pretty easy to do these days

I played EverQuest on the PS2 using a modem in 2003. Performance was fine.

Still no better MMORPG.