Ultima Online is 15

http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/09/25...

I remember those first completely chaotic first days... you would login in (eventually) your screen would reduce to a few slideshow frames.. then a couple fireballs would appear..and you were dead... rinse repeat.

Wow. 15 years? This game was such a defining part of my youth. I can still remember the first night vividly. My pal and I started our characters in Vesper (Atlantic server), we decided that the little town to the west with the orc camp (Cove) would be a great place to call home. A lot of people running around, a lot of chaos. The crossroads between Cove and Vesper was the major hot spot for PVP, died a few times there that night. At one point there was a server wide message saying the Orcs were planning on attacking Cove and players should go help defend! Nothing ever happened.

I'll always remember winning my first PVP encounter, my friend and I were running on the road from Cove towards Britian, we were jumped by a hostile player (I even still remember the name of the guy "General Jarkeld"). My friend managed to run away but I decided that I should stay and fight. After a short but intense battle, I came out ahead. It was such a rush.

Eventually I ended up joining an anti-PK/pvp guild, "The Pluggers". Probably played every night for a year or so. Eventually a high school social life occurred and there was not that much time left for UO. Still, I can't help but look back on that game as the best part of that era of my life.. funny that.

Happy Birthday UO!

Guards!

*sighs* Damn I'm old.

Elliottx wrote:

vendor buy bank guards

FTFY

I'm worried that no MMORPG will ever be able to have the chaos and wonder that Ultima Online had. I played that game for a year and I still didn't quite understand how everything worked. The only thing I've come across that is similar is the game played in the book "Ready Player One".

Elliottx wrote:

I'm worried that no MMORPG will ever be able to have the chaos and wonder that Ultima Online had. I played that game for a year and I still didn't quite understand how everything worked. The only thing I've come across that is similar is the game played in the book "Ready Player One".

Darkfall is the only thing out there that comes close, but it's a much much more focused game. Being so wide open and chaotic is what gives UO it's charm.

Barab wrote:

Eventually I ended up joining an anti-PK/pvp guild, "The Pluggers".

I remember you guys!

I spent most of my time over in Yew with the roleplaying community. Best PvP experiences I've ever had in a game came from that. Our network of guild wars gave us all the good bits of open PvP without the downsides. We had the excitement of never knowing quite when you'd run into an enemy, but the fights were usually fair. If we ran into an "enemy" and one side was outnumbered we'd talk trash in-character for a few minutes while the smaller side ICQ'd for help. When things were roughly even we'd throw down.

I think that explains why I haven't had any patience for roleplaying in MMOs since then. To me it was all about giving context to and finding like-minded opponents for PvP. Ain't really been a game that supports that kind of arrangement since then.

Vargen wrote:
Barab wrote:

Eventually I ended up joining an anti-PK/pvp guild, "The Pluggers".

I remember you guys!

Awesome! Yeah we made a little valley south of Yew our home base for a long time "Plug Valley". I do remember a few RP guilds in the area, there was one in particular that had their homes in our territory and we'd offer our protection.. I can't remember the name of the guild though. It was a great area. Eventually we did end up moving though and set up a little town in the mountains near Trinsic.

In the early days we were in a network of guilds called the "Anti-PK Alliance" (of which I was our guild represenitive), the PK guilds responded with an alliance of their own "Dread Alliance" I believe it was called. Lots of massive battles in that war. Eventually the whole Anti-PK/PK ideology fizzled out and we just got into good old fashioned guild conflicts. Some of our most common guild enemies were.. The Mercs, Covetous Crew, LLTS (the syndicate).. I can't remember any others off the top of my head.

Ahhh the game that made me VERY VERY anti PvP and has shaped my attitude ever since.

I only played the game for that free month when it first came out but it was memorable. Up until I walked out of the city gates and was ambushed by 4 fireballs and a volley of arrows.

Nothing like firing up your first mmo only to have arrows flung at you within 3 minutes.

Well that and the fact that you could not get into Brittania. How I miss thee rubberbanding!

Vendors that won't buy things, putting a coin in your keyboard to repeat last action while swinging at a training dummy for hours to go up one point in a weapon skill, playing leap frog with a pile of ore, being killed by a tiny bird or a rabbit... those were the days!

I never did play UO. Kinda looking forwards to Ultima: Forever, though. V-VII were my Ultima heyday.

emyln wrote:

Ahhh the game that made me VERY VERY anti PvP and has shaped my attitude ever since.

Same here. Nothing better than going to your personal housing and finding a ninja in it...

I only played for a little while... it was interesting, but the game didn't really grab me. I remember some dude waylaying me with arrows in a bank. He even warned me that I needed to leave or he would kill me. But I was in a bank, I thought he was kidding. He wasn't. The homing arrows were lethal.

I sorta dinked around a bit with crafting, but didn't last long.

I think that explains why I haven't had any patience for roleplaying in MMOs since then. To me it was all about giving context to and finding like-minded opponents for PvP. Ain't really been a game that supports that kind of arrangement since then.

I honestly think this was one of the key mistakes of WoW, not allowing the two sides to communicate, and in fact savagely punishing people for doing so. Learning the other side's language should have been hard, but doable.

As is, folks who REALLY wanted to game the system still could, but people who tried to play fair simply weren't able to interact properly with their opposition.

I got into the beta for UO and ended up naming my character "Big Sad Bob, Finch Slayer" as a result of getting killed by Finches over and over. I managed to be on the spot when they public managed to kill Lord British. Fun times!

I was in a guild called "The Undead" and we lived in Necropolis in Felucia on Catskills. I spent alot of time dressed in Bone armor playing the part; when I wasn't trying to reconnect to the internet because someone called my house phone.

http://uo.stratics.com/shard/Catskil...

parallaxview wrote:
emyln wrote:

Ahhh the game that made me VERY VERY anti PvP and has shaped my attitude ever since.

Same here. Nothing better than going to your personal housing and finding a ninja in it...

Yes but this lead to one of our favorite past times. We called it house fishing. You get your team to hide in the house, one in the door to get that tick of stamina off so no pushing out. This was UO so opening a door would I swear in some spontaneous generation sort of way would create a house ninja out of thin air. So said house ninja comes charging in.. then "BAM" loot it all toss the extra or heavy junk in a chest. Make sure you cut up the body and clear the parts out, because a house with a naked body laying in it is "Suspicious”(yet somehow the blood stains didn’t even cause a minor delay XD).

I always look back and sort of wonder. Did Origin set out to make a very open ended world that would sparked things like role playing and a sense of community. Did they have any idea that it would devolve in its prime to what I thought was more of a “What can I think of to do, to get other people's sh*t game”

Greenbeandemon wrote:

I always look back and sort of wonder. Did Origin set out to make a very open ended world that would sparked things like role playing and a sense of community. Did they have any idea that it would devolve in its prime to what I thought was more of a “What can I think of to do, to get other people's sh*t game”

According to Raph Koster, they designed the game thinking that most of their players would be existing Ultima fans who would be invested in the world and the Virtues and such. By the time they realized that the general gaming public was coming to play it was too late to change their design.

Tanglebones wrote:

I never did play UO. Kinda looking forwards to Ultima: Forever, though. V-VII were my Ultima heyday.

Ultima: Fover isn't Ultima.

I still think UO is the most advanced MMO (well back when I played, I don't know what the game is like now) and I'm saddened that MMORPGs never really took UO and advanced that. Instead we are stuck with diku muds that haven't changed much since EQ.

EDIT: I never minded PVP in UO because stuff was so easy to come by. There wasn't the whole "rare loot" and "phat loot" that came from EQ. I had so much back up loot in my bank that I could be ready to go anytime. I also liked that it really allowed guilds to have an impact in the game. Running into new players also was an adventure. Such a great game.

Ulairi wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:

I never did play UO. Kinda looking forwards to Ultima: Forever, though. V-VII were my Ultima heyday.

Ultima: Fover isn't Ultima.

I still think UO is the most advanced MMO (well back when I played, I don't know what the game is like now) and I'm saddened that MMORPGs never really took UO and advanced that. Instead we are stuck with diku muds that haven't changed much since EQ.

EDIT: I never minded PVP in UO because stuff was so easy to come by. There wasn't the whole "rare loot" and "phat loot" that came from EQ. I had so much back up loot in my bank that I could be ready to go anytime. I also liked that it really allowed guilds to have an impact in the game. Running into new players also was an adventure. Such a great game.

Darkfall is the next evolution of UO. Archage will probably be the biggest actually but their loot rules are more friendly unfortunately, and odds of it being released in NA are slim. At least not for another couple of years.

EQ Next is supposed to be a big fantasy sandbox. I'm cautiously optimistic about that one.

Not that I ever let my excitement level go any higher than that for a MMO. I learned my lesson when UO2 got killed.

Vargen wrote:

EQ Next is supposed to be a big fantasy sandbox. I'm cautiously optimistic about that one.

Not that I ever let my excitement level go any higher than that for a MMO. I learned my lesson when UO2 got killed.

Ya that one was brutal. I used to watch that video they released over and over.

Thanks for the link, I used it to spend 2 hours playing UO tonight, working up a noob character. I just don't think I'd have the patience to put serious time into a 1999-era mmo anymore, but it was cool revisiting old stomping grounds. I salute you for sticking with it though.

At this point, it's kinda too bad that they scrapped the closed ecology that was in the UO beta. I'd love to see it in action in a shard with only a handful of players.

I spoke too soon about not having the patience to stick with it. I've rolled up a couple of characters, a bard and a craftsman. It's pretty cool that you can have 3 (or more?) game instances running at once on UOSecondAge, so I'm macroing my guys up to a decent skill level simultaneously. My finest encounter so far was provoking a grizzly bear onto a troll, then helping bash it to death with hammer. It had a magic helmet for loot, but I have no idea its enchantment yet. Barding is great fun.

Running Man wrote:

I spoke too soon about not having the patience to stick with it. I've rolled up a couple of characters, a bard and a craftsman. It's pretty cool that you can have 3 (or more?) game instances running at once on UOSecondAge, so I'm macroing my guys up to a decent skill level simultaneously. My finest encounter so far was provoking a grizzly bear onto a troll, then helping bash it to death with hammer. It had a magic helmet for loot, but I have no idea its enchantment yet. Barding is great fun.

Glad I could assist you in finding a place to have some fun! I've been around the freeshard scene off and on for over a decade and Derrick & company really do run a top notch show and have been doing so for years. Razor (think UO:Assist on steroids) really takes a lot of the pain out of training & the UO:SecondAge wiki & guides have a lot of great skill-gaining info as well. I'm not heavily macroing at the moment, since I have some developed/partially developed characters from a few years back (they never delete old chars/accts), choosing to play more "naturally" on a dexxer/blacksmith. Razor certainly comes in handy for both mining & blacksmithing, though, since I have some carpal tunnel-esque issues.

*3 accounts is what you're allowed, getting caught with more can result in accounts being banned.

No_Chance wrote:
Running Man wrote:

I spoke too soon about not having the patience to stick with it. I've rolled up a couple of characters, a bard and a craftsman. It's pretty cool that you can have 3 (or more?) game instances running at once on UOSecondAge, so I'm macroing my guys up to a decent skill level simultaneously. My finest encounter so far was provoking a grizzly bear onto a troll, then helping bash it to death with hammer. It had a magic helmet for loot, but I have no idea its enchantment yet. Barding is great fun.

Glad I could assist you in finding a place to have some fun! I've been around the freeshard scene off and on for over a decade and Derrick & company really do run a top notch show and have been doing so for years. Razor (think UO:Assist on steroids) really takes a lot of the pain out of training & the UO:SecondAge wiki & guides have a lot of great skill-gaining info as well. I'm not heavily macroing at the moment, since I have some developed/partially developed characters from a few years back (they never delete old chars/accts), choosing to play more "naturally" on a dexxer/blacksmith. Razor certainly comes in handy for both mining & blacksmithing, though, since I have some carpal tunnel-esque issues.

*3 accounts is what you're allowed, getting caught with more can result in accounts being banned.

This makes me miss my old tower with my treasure in the basement, i can't even remember what I had in there.

There's a new server called Ultima Online Forever that went live 1/18/13. It focuses on the UO:Renaissance era without Trammel. The housing is customizable and skill gains vary based on the relative safety of where they're practiced. In towns or other guard zones, you'll get a gain penalty. In dungeons you get up to a 30% bonus. I switched over from UO:Second Age because the archery on that server's era is pretty gimped.

edit: doublepost

Running Man wrote:

There's a new server called Ultima Online Forever that went live 1/18/13. It focuses on the UO:Renaissance era without Trammel. The housing is customizable and skill gains vary based on the relative safety of where they're practiced. In towns or other guard zones, you'll get a gain penalty. In dungeons you get up to a 30% bonus. I switched over from UO:Second Age because the archery on that server's era is pretty gimped.

This is pretty tempting, I may have to check this out.