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I guess its a bit old school. But how many of you guys play it?, and where. There are quite a few places to play it (both free and the official OSI servers).
I see the new games, but they have never really held my attention, the eye candy might be nice, but I always end up drifting back to ultima. To be honest nothing ive ever played has ever matched it on gameplay. If you beg to differ by all means post your preferences :)
Ahaha! I was about to make a post about UO just this minute!
I quit three years ago, selling my accounts to a friend/guildmate (for a tidy sum!). But I saw The 8th Age box in Game for £6.99 with a 45 day free trial last month, and I'm absolutely hooked, AGAIN.
When I quit UO, I tried DaoC and hated it. I also tried WoW a few weeks ago, and hated that too. I think after playing UO for so long (5 years, before I sold the accounts), I just can't get used to all this namby pamby 3d with triple-interlaced brassiere effects and whatnot. Give me a simple isometric viewpoint and TONNES of gameplay any day of the week.
I play on Europa :)
Hehe I play on a couple of private free shards. But yeah, UO has so much gameplay.. and on the freeservers (not so much the paid ones) the amount of content is amazing the clients are pretty maleable for adding new graphics etc. Sadly there isnt the playerbase there used to be, lets hope they realise the error of their ways and go back to UO like the good old days!.
It is a fun game, I used to play it and played on a great free shard a few years ago.
The thing I love about it is the exploring and finding ways to get around things and doing things that perhaps you shouldn't be doing.
WoW has some of this, but it's not as free I guess.
The expansions in recent years have been terrible mind
The expansions are merely cash hogs. I made a new interface/desktop for it. It's heads and shoulders above the default ones. But if you get caught using it on OSI even though it doesnt tamper/cheat in any way.. its just replacing graphics.. they will terminate your account. They ought to pull their fingers out and redo the client... maybe even make a decent 3d one. The gameplay was always there and probably always will be, but the biggest turn off for new players is the old look it has to it. Lets hope they will fix that at some point.
Played UO for 18 months, quit back in 1998/1999 after getting all 5 characters to 7xGrandmaster in the skills I wanted, sold my account for 330 quid to a guy from Bolton who came round and paid cash :)
(Yes, after buying a game, paying a tenner a month for 18 months, plus the Internet costs, I made a long term profit whilst having fun!)
I had a blast on that game, it was my introduction to both the Ultima world and MMO(RP)Gs, however there wasn't much of an endgame.
After quitting I moved on to Asheron's Call, which held my attention for 3 years.
The community in UO was great - the fact that the official website pulled the character data out on a daily basis and you could view your details through browser was great (why don't more do this?).
The lack of "quests" really let it down - this was also the first MMOG to show that player housing, where they can place buildings where they like, is a baaaad idea, and that lag really builds up when you run across the doorstep of a house with 100000 chests full of 9999 items each and the server sends you a full inventory.
Was fun to have a character fish up treasure maps, then have another dig them up with a group of you ready to pounce, throw around blade spirits and so on... but it got old fast.
After I quit I thought I read about a 3D version of the client being produced? Did that never happen?
Would kind of ruin that sort of game though I think.
The 3d version.. sucked.. Pure and simple. It was really nasty looking and buggy as hell. I think they ended up dropping it all together. The advantage to the freeshards is that they are all pretty much custom. Lots of GM's mean lots of quests usually. All in all the environment varies quite dramatically :)
The 3D client is still there. I used it once when Third Dawn came out, but dropped it due to the 2D job being far better for PVP.
2D is better in a lot of respects to be honest. But I am currently tinkering with a free 3d one (iris) should be interesting to see how it turns out.
To be honest, I just LOVE the GUI. It's just so simplistic and easy to use - I was quite worse for wear last night/this morning, but I still managed to go a few rounds on Test Center while Europa was down for maintenance.
Though, I do remember a time when I first started playing.. The guild I was in was really quite noobish, and three pure warriors (including myself) and one mage, none of whom had GM skils, went to Destard for some Dragon hunting. What I had failed to mention to my guildmates at the time was that whilst I was waiting for everyone to come online, get their armour/weps repaired and whatnot, I'd already drunk a litre of vodka. :S
It really is a shame the direction in which the game has gone recently. The amount of people who script mine or lumberjack has gotten seriously ridiculous - causing prices to fall for ingots/wood (bad for honest miners/jacks), and prices on weps/armour to rise. I remember 1 million gold being sold on ebay for something like £20.. now gold is so easy to make that people sell it for £2/million.
One of the more enjoyable things at the moment is hunting scripters in felluca. Easy resources and insurance money, plus - you help put a dent in their (illegal) operations.
I played UO for about 6 years, throughout my school days :mrgreen:
Lake Superior (aka where all the best PvP was at).
Quit awhile ago tho, before all this new crap (EA) ruined the game. The 6-7 Months after AoS untill the SE was released were some of the most fun times the game ever saw, after SE it was incredibly lame.
The best times has to be UO:R Faction wars tho, which where huge on Lake Superior, talking 40v40v40v40 Stronghold base fights at peak times. Alas such days are long gone
too many long night, and early mornings gone in that "life".
Modem's logging out after two ours, and having to make camp just in time to leave and redial back in ;)
Zak on phone to Nick any/every day from work "You 'going in' tonight"
Nick "Yes bud, see you 'in there' about 11pm"
Zak"Laterz bud"
Another night gone ;)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chan
Noo! The guildwars and O/C on Europa was awesome, and we had some of the best duelers around. Factions really wasn't my bag.. I preferred 2-4 man teams rather than 10 para mages, 20 fencers and 5 tamers with god knows how many dragons on your bum.
When I came back to UO a few months ago, I felt that it had really lost all connection to Ultima in itself. EA seem to be trying to bring the game into a place where it should be (but of course, nowhere near how anyone would like it), what with the current year-long story arc that's going on at the moment. PVP is nothing like how I remember it, and I'm not sure too keen on the looks of Pub 41. However, some of the Pub 40 changes are promising (except that bloody targetting recticle they've just put in... GRRR.).
Back onto what Zak was saying..
I remember my first ever character - Swede, he was called. Despite having read through the manual several hundred times already, I had no ideal about skill/stat caps or how GMing a skill would make me more efficient in using that skill. All things aside, I spent many many many many hours sitting in the Bakery in Britain cooking loaves of bread, then running off to collect wheat from the fields outside of the city, selling my wares to the baker, and buying a broadsword and leather armour with the gold I'd earned.. It took me two months before I could afford my first boat, and a year before I could buy a small house (with help from my guild of course!).
Then I discovered PVP.
Heh, PVP was never my bag. Mostly it was kids that started shouting noob. The stabbing in the face over the net machine would come in handy there. I prefer RP and consentual PvP, makes for a much nicer world. But of course thats on freeshards :)
I play UO, my accounts are still active, a near 7 years old :o
Its still the best MMORPG for PvP, none around match it and ive tried them all :/
Europa ;)