Why Are People Still Playing Ultima Online?

UO Online was my youth. I didn't had access to the internet back in 1998 when it went live, so I obsessively read (and re-read) all the stories in game magazines and hoped that one day I will be able to play this game.

Few years later, I finally get my 56kbps modem and spent decade playing the game on so many different unofficial servers as well as being GM and developer of few more shards.

I would say that UO was Minecraft of our generation: especially on unofficial RP servers you had awesome game systems scripted by community as well as sandboxed world where you can do basically anything. During my stint in game I was beggar joking around other players, owned farm, baked my own bread and make beer, been drunken sailor as well as competitive PvM warrior.

It is "real" world, that tends to create nice community of players, some like to chat, some like to joke around, some hunt dragons and another are just pure evil killing noob players, stealing everything they own and then troll them till they cry and leave the game forever.

Try that in your "bring-me-ten-wolf-teeth" click grind MMO game.

It was really a recurring theme with Origin at its height... games that simultaneously combined being staggeringly ahead of their times with bizarrely broken mechanics, and at release time, generally code that barely ran on the best computers of the time.

The Ultima 7 games, for instance, are both fantastic role-playing stories with deep adult stories that could stand with anything made today, and are also enormous recursive fetch quests of the worst kind that I could never play again now.

There were many great studios at the time of Origin's heyday, but Origin has to be one of the most interesting. Almost every game they made was like somebody time traveled back from the future and was desperately trying to jam a future game on to the primitive machines of the time. (The Ultima Underworlds also come to mind for that. Graphically more primitive than Doom in most ways, but in terms of the world and what you can do in it, staggeringly ahead of their time.)

UO is very much a view into the world that could have been, if WOW hadn't come along and MMORPGs became driven by addiction mechanics instead of depth. (I do not necessarily mean that as a perjorative... I take my own hits on the bong of grind-based (J/W/T)RPGs sometimes. But it's a fair description.)

Since playing this from 2000-2002 I have all but quit gaming. Ultima Online ruined other games for me in the best way possible. I have tried to play various MMOs since but none of them come close to having the same freedom that UO offered.

There were gangs, rivalries, people would cast invisibility spells on themselves outside of your door to try to break into your house when you open the door, you could be put in prison if you were an asshole or exploited a bug, you could hunt down miners and if you managed to take them out before they entered a city's boundaries (where guards would appear and protect them from "murderers") you would be able to steal all of their clothes, armour, weapons, ore, etc. GameMasters or Counselors (GMs with limited abilities) would host PvP tournaments - round robin duels, capture the flag, etc.

I used my limited knowledge of programming as an early-teen to host a custom "shard" with SphereServer and had an average of about 200 players on at a time, from all over the world. It was a lot of power for a kid to have. Of course the software was unstable and increasingly so with more users and eventually I had to shut it down because it crashed too often. The name was Alphanine UO - named for the web hosting company that decided to give a kid a free server to host a video game server. http://web.archive.org/web/20020923181726/http://uo.alphanin...

UO had a great risk and reward environment. I remember feeling emotions of anxiety when hunting due to the chance that real people might show up, kill me, take everything I have on my body and move on. It meant using strategy to decide what to keep in your backpack out in the wild and what to leave in the bank or in your private house. Houses could be broken into if you lost your key which meant more danger.

The fact that real groups of people were out in the world hunting each other also meant for a lot of fun and dynamic battles to re-claim property, etc.

Funny, I actually just reactivated my account a couple months ago. I've put a few hours into it, but haven't done much. But within five minutes (seriously, I checked the clock) of logging in to the Chesapeake shard (which is not even a terribly high population one) I ran into two friends I had last played with in ~2003/2004!

My fondest gaming memories are all from Ultima Online.

EDIT: I forgot to share my very first experience with the game and I have to share because it's short and hilarious.

I made a new character and started in Moonglow. Barely a few minutes later I walked out of the gate with all of my starting items and gold on me. I think I made it 10 steps out of the guard zone before a group of guys jumped me and took everything I had. I was in shock. I had no frame of reference for what had just happened to me.

I made a new character, started in Britain this time, and got to work building him up so I could go back and get those guys. After that, I was hooked.

I converted from The Realm (Sierra Online, anyone?) to UO:T2A and never looked back. Played on Chesapeake with my brother, a neighbor, and a middle school buddy of mine. Was pretty heavy into PvP in the form of guild wars, Test Center, Britain graveyard fights (in the 30 mins between server saves and shutdown) and anti-PK. Then I learned about Shadowclan via the official UO game guide, rolled a new 'toon on Catskills and I became a hardcore UO RPer.

I roleplayed an orc, then an undead, and an evil mage in the Crimson Alliance. Then I joined up with various other guilds of the day such as The Free Corps, the Yew Militia, the Paladins of Trinsic, the Goblins (so much fun annoying the Shadowclan Orcs), Kingdom of Winterfell, VvV, the Romans, the Wahju (a tribe of traitor orcs), and probably a few other groups I'm forgetting, all over the span of roughly 8-10 years.

In college I migrated to private RP shards: Teiravon, Khaeros, and even got involved in founding one of my own with a group of guys I played with called Requiem.

Ultima Online is the game that taught me about story, roleplay, community, and true sandbox gaming. I've never found anything that's come close since and, given the way the market is going, it's likely I never will.

Similar to why many play Asheron's Call. The levels of customization available, the time invested, the friends made.

Both these MMOs were highly player customizable compared to later MMOs where everyone is cookie cutter. Even the world was in a way less cookie cutter.

Plus in some ways developer interaction had been much more personal then. So I would say that investments made early have their pay offs. Get the community built and it can sustain itself. Reinvent yourself a few times along the way will help and hinder at times, but if you give players a means to establish a good community they will stick with it.

Finally, not shutting down when other games would call it quits is big too. Both Origin and Turbine attempted spin offs but neither made it, I don't even think any Origin follow up even launched. Players had their comfort level and moving on isn't all its cracked up to be

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Ultimate Online's private servers (though I guess their legality is probably a gray area at best). Most of the people still playing UO are on those servers where they're running an older version of the game without many of the later expansions, some even add significant amounts of custom content. Last I checked there were servers that have hundreds, or even thousands of active players.

http://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima-online/ has a bunch of blog posts from Raph "Designer Dragon" Koster, one of the original designers of UO. It's amazing to read about how "world like" the original game was, especially compared to the direction that EQ/WoW took the genre.

I actually still play a couple of PC games that are older than this:

Descent, 20 years old (source port setup instructions at http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php ; 20th anniversary LAN party, July 16-19 in Denver, at http://descentchampions.org/20th/), and

DooMII, 21 years old (source port at https://zandronum.com/ ).

What keeps me coming back to these old games? They strike a balance between simplicity and complexity that leads to more interesting emergent gameplay than I've been able to find in newer games. DooMII single player has just enough balance between puzzle elements and raw combat, and with the majority of enemies firing non-instantaneous projectiles, dodging and weaving between waves of incoming shots becomes something of an art form. Competitive Descent is all about using the space, outthinking your opponent, using small elements of position and orientation in order to force engagements on your term. A high-level match is like a combination between chess and poker, all inside of an FPS (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb63KIotMMM ).

There are some other factors that helped, which both games have in common and some of which UO also has. They had fantastic player communities and player-run organizations. Both were open sourced a few years after release, allowing the communities to maintain and update the games -- keeping the fundamentals the same while building modern capabilities (like game trackers) around them. Both had relatively easy-to-use content creation tools; making new levels for DooMII or Descent didn't require a high-end PC or a 3D modeling suite, but simply downloading the level editor. And the game makes no particular demands of you -- you can play it on a wide variety of difficulty levels, against computer-controlled enemies or with or against other human players, in new levels or old, for a few minutes or for hours. And for those who played with other people, it was possible to develop deep friendships -- I actually met my wife in Descent, and we named our son for another player.

I played UO 98-99 on Europa. Back then I enjoyed being able to play a game where I could do smithing almost exclusively. Just hanging out with other people who enjoyed a very small aspect of the game, and being able to service others. There was a nice feeling of earning the trust of a community (people had to give you their things for you to fix, and you could theoretically just keep them, but play enough and your character built a reputation as a reliable person in the community, rather than having it rules based or anything) that hasnt been in place in other MMOs that I've played.

I went back to play it last year I think, and it was still an enjoyable, but thoroughly broken game world. For me it was mostly nostalgia, and after a few months of playing it vaned, but the content still held up surprisingly well, especially as it was never really meant to be balanced.

UO was an amazing game and a huge part of my adolescence. I couldn't even begin to tell the stories and lessons I learned playing the game. Making macros was my gateway drug into programming. As the article says, it is one of very few MMO's where you can truly live an alternate life.

It completely ruined all MMO's for me. I haven't been able to play an MMO since because they all feel like single player games that you're just playing together, not an alternate universe full of risks and rewards. I tried WoW during it's beta and gave up within 2 weeks.

My favorite gaming magazine had a monthly column about Ultima. It was an interesting read. Then I bought a disk with Ultima around... probably 9 years ago. I don't remember whether I played on the official servers. But my first experience was clicking on a dummy a hundred times to raise my attack skill. Then one of my friends gave me a set of better armor. And then I was randomly killed by some higher-level player. And then I stopped playing. Then I quit.

Frankly, I don't understand why all those "interactive world" features people keep talking about cannot be decoupled from grinding and crappy PvP system.

Though the thing that completely cured me from online gaming was a certain MUD I was playing at the time (for several month, for at least an hour most of the days).

It was one of the first real MMOs. You could also turn your players into jerky for energy.

"If memory serves, when you cut up a corpse of another player the body parts gained would show which player it was, just like the head does, it should read "a torso of Soma", "a right leg of fwerp", etc, as it is right now, it just reads "a torso" or "a right leg".

Also, if you carved up the body parts further, you would get human jerky which also displayed the player's name, I can't exactly remember if this was in T2A but I do remember that human jerky was the majority of my character's sustenance."

UO was a griefers paradise unfortunately but it had many fun elements.

http://forums.uosecondage.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7738&view=...

One of the simple reasons: because they can.

One of the biggest reasons a lot of people missed about the early days of WoW and the record high subscriber counts, too. 15 million people worldwide played World of Warcraft, because 15 million people worldwide were able to install and competently run World of Warcraft. It originally ran on a Pentium III or a Mac G3. That opened up the amount of people who could even come to the table and consider ponying up a subscription fee.

So when looking back on Ultima, it would literally run on anything. It is a relic approaching the opposite end of the spectrum, from a digital preservation standpoint it's becoming more difficult to run it on things. But you still can. So people do. That's really step one, in my opinion.

UO took over much of my life as a youth. I still have yet to discover a game that has the depth that was found in UO. Every once in awhile I find myself playing on the free shards. The complete customization of everything was what really intrigued me. You could buy a house. You were able to permanently impact the game landscape with this house - you controlled a piece of the game! This concept blew my mind. The economy was also incredibly complicated. I remembering being a part of a player-run auction guild. It was essentially a part time job. I had to build relationships with people in order to secure this job - just like real life.

I always feel it's my duty to chime in whenever the subject of original MMORPGS comes up-- anybody remember Meridian 59? Y'know the mmorpg that came out BEFORE Ultima online?

A great many people love UO because it's organic feeling community (and I'm one of em ), but nothing tops the experience of interacting with people in an online game for the first time. Checkout an article I wrote about it awhile back: http://mmocadet.com/being-a-rookie-for-the-100th-time/

No mention of Meridian 59 in this comment thread? Derp! Come see/play merdian at the Open Meridian Project (http://openmeridian.org)

I used to talk a lot to Petra Fyde when I still played. She had a shop together with her husband where I bought my everyday bags of reagents (8 different kinds of fuel for casting spells). Seeing her name in this article was surprising and just gave me a wide smile instantly.

While I haven't played on OSI (the official servers) in forever, my username here is an homage to The Nadirian Horde, a guild that existed back in the day on Europa (the main european 'shard' (server)). The leader of this guild, like Petra, was a teacher of the highest degree.

I love UO, but the times I'm talking about, around Y2K, were different than what UO became later. UO is one of those games that very quickly became watered down once EA bought it. It may have found a nice place now, but coming from what it was back then and being right in the middle of the transition was horrible.

Luckily, however, there are a multitude of freeshards to play on that will adopt the older rulesets so that you can still play the same game. They're usually very liberal in the development they do with the game itself too, so it's not uncommon to have them rework some stuff that isn't necessarily perfect in the old ruleset, but keep the general idea there.

(Epidemic from Pink Hat Thugs @ Europa, if anyone from EU's here. :))

Only 18 years, huh? Hmm, if that is ancient, what would 30-40 years be? Lots of people are still playing Avatar (release 1979), EMPIRE (1974), Oubliette (~1977) on PLATO. I still enjoy a good old game of Mahjongg (1983). You can see of these at cyber1.org.

The RunUO code is a testament to how great the game was:

  http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.62  T=11.67 s (285.5 files/s, 47086.1 lines/s)
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Language                     files          blank        comment           code
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  C#                            3319         103315          12969         422223
  XML                              9              1            296           7097
  MSBuild script                   2              0              0           3517
  ASP.Net                          1              0              0             10
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  SUM:                          3331         103316          13265         432847
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://github.com/runuo/runuo/tree/releases/2.5

UO was honestly the best MMO I ever played and I still get back into it from time to time. I honestly wish I hadn't sold my account shortly after UO:R came out and I started to get bored.

I think Ultima Online was one of the first MMORPGs that I played. I think Ultima and Ragnarok Online. I loved the entire feel of Ultima Online, it had a great community. Same with Ragnarok Online (I still help code for my friend's private server, actually). I fell off playing UO once I started getting more into RO, but to be honest, UO and RO are the only two MMOs that have been able to captivate me for long periods of time, never really got the appeal of WoW. This makes me want to find some shards to play some Ultima Online this weekend.

I pre-ordered Ultima Online back in September 1997 (well my parents did) but did not participate in the beta. My friends were all playing by the time I received the giant box filled with the cloth map, a dragon poster and the installation discs. I remember my first day just strolling around passing people outside Britannia and saying "Hail sir". What an amazing world it was, oh what are these 10 red names running at me? You are dead. Back then a lot of stuff was "broken".. my friends and I used to sit inside a building in town and steal items repeatedly from a spawning chest, selling them for much in-game gold. As the game progressed I remember many "exploit" sites and yes I too tried them out, gating around the outsides of houses with 4 of my friends until we were able to hit the right spots and be teleported inside, free to loot the contents. I also remember many times angrily losing my entire house and/or possessions to a simple thief hiding outside, waiting for the house door to open and the best chance to run in and kill me. There were many fun bugs for years until they managed to patch quite a few... and started to crack down on macroers and gold dupers. I owned a castle, many dragons, had countless PVP battles against 100s of foes at once (remember server downtime anyone?) and nothing will come close to it.

Cool thing about UO is the macros you can make. Using programs like UO Steam and Razor you can have the program do most of the mundane tasks (sorting, targeting) that no one wants to do.

My question is, Why Are People Still Playing World of Warcraft?

risk vs reward, this is what made this game so great.

Only a handful of games have come to life with the same original "spirit", Asheron's call, Darkfall Online and Albion Online to name a few.

UO is a real world with consequence, your actions really matter and the people around you can be a threat at any given time or help you in unimaginable ways, this alone is the best feeling you can get from playing an MMO. Players are the content not the scripted AI.

UO was an absolutely fantastic game which I started as a child in 1998, and played as a teenager in the early 2000s.

UO really captured the intensity of utter anarchy-- there was the free market, the danger of being murdered, the castle-doctrine seriousness of defending your turf (with all your hard earned loot or crafts!), and the huge world, filled with monsters, murderers, scammers, and jokers. I am told that Eve was somewhat like UO, but I could never quite get into Eve because its mechanics weren't entertaining to me.

UO's mechanics were extremely clunky to be sure-- anyone else remember having to shuffle shit around in your backpack all the time in order to prevent thieves from stealing from you while you were in town? The mechanics really were part of the charm, though. The game certainly did have a pleasant musical set and graphics, although neither has stood the test of time.

The next closest experiences similar to UO are Rust, and DayZ (heavily modded). I really enjoy the "nothing is sacred, make your own turf" experience along with the deep PvP and challenging PvE.

Just thought I would join in this remanisathone...

I agree with what everyone else has been saying about the diversity and the excitement of the game (until they introduced Trammel).

For my part I specialised in thieving, hustling and buying and selling 'rares'.

The difference between rare items in UO and in games that followed it (e.g. WoW) is that these items were actually rare in the sense that there were a very limited number of them.

There were many different type of rares - the most prized ones were from very early bugs in the game which allowed you to pick up background scenery if you logged in just as the server was starting up - they had already fixed this bug by the time I started playing, but these objects were still floating around in peoples private collections!

My favourite scam (that I invented as far as I know) was to rename a book with the title 'a box of cigars' and then sell the book as a rare item.

There are still thousands of us playing at uoforever.com. I help code a bit when I have time.

Why do I still play Ultima VI from time to time?

Because nostalgia, and it's still a really absorbing game.

Never played UO, bar a brief furtle when it originally launched, as I could see the crack rocks glistening all too appealingly.

Spam spam spam humbug.

12 years later, people are still playing Halo PC.

I bring this up because in a genre (FPS) that has so many evolutions, so many releases, it's amazing how dedicated a community can be. It's incredible.

ps. if anyone played I probably know you. I know there is a certain Eric who runs a rather successful startup who played quite religiously... :)

15 years later and i still remember "unhide… CORP POR"

I still the different phases of pvp tank mages, skeleton archers, dragons, grey lords, etc

I still remember the bad midi music on some pvp clan website (banana boyz if you wonder)

Kudos to this game, kudos to it's makers!

in UO you can really change the world. not houses not mounts not gold, what makes you log in again and again is that you can influence all the people connected. when you are inside, you can do everything and that makes you owner of the player "role".

that doesnt happen in all that shit that we have today. its just .. if you played UO you will never feel the same immersion in any other games. and that is.

we can just hope that Shroud of The Avatar will do the same, for years.

garriot, you own us

It was by FAR the most fun game I played as a teenager. The world was wide open. I had so much fun playing UO that very few games since have held my attention.

PvP - one of the best (and controversial) feature.

... because it is fun? Because it pre-dates the "WoW" model, which most newer MMORPGs want to follow?

I mean, it didn't have levels. It didn't have XP. It had skills, which increased with use. Your health could increase via attributes, but not that much.

In the end, after a few days, there wasn't that much difference between your character and people playing for a year. In the best case, maybe they would have 50% more health? And could cast more powerful spells, if they had Magery. But so could you - as a newbie mage, your spells had a high failure chance (and would consume reagents regardless), but you could cast almost all of them.

Which means that an older player couldn't just walk in and start murdering an unlimited number of newbies without any effort. If the newbies banded together, they would have a decent shot. The biggest differential was actual player skill (and game knowledge). Also, preparation.

In WoW and the like, if they even allowed PVP, a max level character can easily have a thousand times more HP than a first level character, incredibly better equipment and skills. You could take the whole level 1 population against him and they would lose. Badly.

In UO (pre-Trammel), it was very likely that anyone you encountered wouldn't even have "magic" weaponry. If they had, it was probably a low level one. This is because everything (save a few items considered 'newbie') would drop to the ground when you died. So you wouldn't take that +9 sword with you, unless you felt somewhat safe (playing with a group of friends, for instance).

Losing items also meant an economy, albeit a weak one compared to, say, Eve Online. Items had to be replaced, after all.

There were also other gameplay options that are missing from newer games. Such as pickpocketing. Distract the attention of the mage guy you just met in a dungeon, steal the reagents, then watch their now complete lack of spell casting ability. Just hope he is a pure mage and can't hit you with anything else (possible, due to the skillcap, not guaranteed, due to the complete lack of anything resembling a "character class"[1])

Even things like "Animal Taming" required thought. Taming a dragon? Well, better have a way to keep it from hitting you, otherwise you'll be dead in a short order. In a hostile dungeon. And he could eat your stuff. Tamed it? Cool, remember to feed it, otherwise it will turn on you and you will die. Dragon dead? Well, time to tame another one then [2]

Hell, what other games require you to have a skill in order to speak with dead players? :)

[1] Debatable now, as some of the newer skills require a few others to complement, making it some sort of class.

[2] There was a concept of "bonding" with the animal. Required that you kept it for a week (real-time). Then you could resurrect it when it died - if you had the skill. If not, time to find a veterinarian...

38Usd subscription in an age of freemeums and 2 dollar games is rather impressive.

That's nothing. I still play Warcraft 2 at war2.ru !

No mention of Tibia in this thread?

www.uosecondage.com mirrors uo the way it was during the golden era of T2A (1999-2000)

Why aren't I playing Ultima Online? I've always wanted to play it since I saw it in PC Gamer magazine in the mid 90s but never had a computer.

Has it been updated to a pay to play sort of game? What draws me to UO is the nostalgia value

The top comment in that article nails it:

============= Kajisan says: Ultima Online (Renaissance) was my very first MMO that came as an extra with Ultima Ascencion. I played over 3 years, being a Gamemaster for another year. UO is the only game that defines Roleplay. You don't need to grind or leveling up. It was the stories the players created on their own, sometimes with the help of the gamemasters having a global adventure event on certain Saturdays. Everybody played the role he wanted to play. Want to be a magician? Sure.. it took several weeks on our Server to become one..and once you was one of them..you was literally a damn f* Gandalf. You was able to stand in front of 10 enemy players and they can't kill you..because it was not possible "roleplay" wise. The 10 players respected this, and you had to respect other things.

It's something very rare and for me its a bite to the heart that World of Warcraft more or less killed this interaction between players..made them marionettes who gave their wisdom to the current generation of players, roleplaying less than a cow on the field.

Shroud of the Avatar is an attempt to bring back these old goods, but like movies like Dune..or 2001, i think its too slow and hardcore for the actual generation of gamers.

Example? We had a raid on an enemy bastion, and sat a whole night in front of a fireplace - waiting for the right moment. We talked about distant lands..how one of us hunted a Dragon last week, sang songs. You just can't do this in modern MMO's. It's possible..but it needs the right people for it, understanding the base principles of roleplay. I did not had these knowings when i started with UO..and found people who took me aside. I learned a lot about roleplay, about other people and about myself - acting with other people.

Today, i am game developer aside people who worked on UO, and they're good people. It's all about imagination, UO just gave the Pen and the Paper an alternate more colorful form.