Ultima Online the twentieth anniverssary

[ivrognard]

Yes...you read it well. The grandfather of all modern MMORPG's is celebrating 20 years since its birth. 

It's amazing the fact that even after so many years, Ultima Online is still alive. I've played it a bit in '99, but i quickly discovered that MMO's weren't exactly for me. The time wasn't a commodity back then, just as isn't now. But what i've seen left deep marks. In many respect UO put the bases for modern MMORPG's and also remained unique, with a lot of its ideas not being implemented in the more modern MMORPG's. Only in the past 10 years things started to appear, slowly in those recent games. And not all of them, mind you. 

So, any UO player here?! What are your thoughts about the resilience of UO over so many years?! How can you explain the fact that the game is still active at twenty years since launch, while many other managed to stay around for about, maybe, 10 years?!

[RedFoxxie]

I used to play Ultima Online back in early millenia. It was my first MMORPG I ever played and the game which made me transition later into Ragnarok Online.

I have been always an Ultima-series fan and the game felt to me amazing during the time. I was roleplaying as a woodsman sort of a guy who was hunting animals, collecting their pelts, chopping wood, making arrows and bows and the like, crafting armors out of the leather etc and then sold them to other players. It felt so, so amazing when I was young how you can have "another life" like this in a video game, haha ~

I was playing the game with a few of my irl friends. One guy was a mage and a fisherman. He acted as if he has no magical talents at all and he's just an old guy who likes to fish. In reality he was quite the strong mage with nox talents and plenty capable of killing someone if they tried anything funny. He always got us all in trouble cause he ended up doing something stupid that pissed everyone off. Strong fellah for sure but quite the pain to deal with.

And then of course one of our friends was the classic Paladin character.. And you can just imagine how "well" he got along with our noxious little mage with no morale standards at all. He had an armor made of silver and the heart of gold. Later on he had also an armor of gold which we had to always try and loot back when he managed to get his sorry behind killed in a forest or something cause his heart of gold wasn't enough to deal with the fact he wasn't quite ready yet to fight against Dread Spiders on his own. Yet he always tried, because, y'now, Paladins and their chivalry never allows them to run away which often got himself slain. But no matter how many times his body hit the ground, his armors left to be looted, he never dropped his heart of gold.

Probably one of my funniest memories of the game and a good reminder of my good ol' gullible self was how I one time in the town asked publicly "Could anyone give me a knife ?" cause my own broke as I was crafting. A guy came out of hiding behind me, stabbed me to the back and said "Here's some knife for you" . Subsequently the city guards whacked the guy into mince meat and everyone looted his body and I was just there all confused like "What just happened" XD

I love the fact the game is still up to this day and I'd encourage people to at least give it a try. If not Ultima Online, at least give the main series of the games a go !

Also, here's the iconic Ultima-series theme, Stones, Ultima Online's rendition :

[ivrognard]

Seeing that article...it brought back a lot of memories. Good and not so good (mostly related to what Ultima IX could have been). God, i miss the old big three (Ultima, Wizardry and Might and Magic RPG series). Loved them all and they were the ones that brought me and kept me into the RPG genre. And it's sad seeing them forgotten. 

[Straatford87]

@ivrognard @RedFoxxie

Ultimate, together with Everquest, are games that I really wanted to play back in the day but never got around to. I was a big fan of RPG's - I think I was just a bit too young at the time to really get into MMO's.

It's amazing to see though, that these games are still around after so many years.

[EA_Archi]

20 years. Incredible! I remember all the hype around Ultima Online. It was an uncharted territory for each and everyone RPG player out there. Some basic rules were created, which shaped the MMO for years to come. I guess you can say, UO was one of the most iconic games in the modern history.