It's great to know that the most addictive game I've ever played is getting this overhaul. I played on Chesapeake as a miner and blacksmith - completely defenseless mind you, but the runs to the local mine with my pack mules in PK infested lands were nothing short of nerve-wracking. I used to hire other players for protection on these runs, and we'd always come up against a bunch of PK's on the way back, wondering whether or not they could gank us and kill my pack mules.. lol

There was always something about UO that was incredibly addictive.. though I could never work out quite what it was.

I'd love to see Ultima Online somehow changed into a 1st-person view game. It's cool that they're still building on it, but shinier top-down isometric graphics don't really impress me at all.

---

Originally posted by xfakturx

Anyone else remember powerhour :-p

---

I do, but can't quite place the time period or what my characters were doing.

I remember I was'nt a fan of it, and felt it was somehow a corruption. To me it was un-natural to dedicate an hour server wide for "training up". Training was for me something that came with just playing my characters.

I never macro'd or ran scripts. I remember bards in vesper and all the racket they made. I used my thief to silence them, carpenters also.

All this had only made me miss the game more...

I remember powerhour.  Heck, I perfected it's use (thanks to the help of "friends").  UO was great.  I stuck around way too long.  I wish AoS had never been released.  I would have kept playing it.

Hasta,

Nieves

For more memories: www.uopowergamers.com

Originally posted by Vagelisp

-"excuse me... Are you A person?"

- "Hmmmm what do you mean?"

- "are you a human?"

- "LOL you F....... newbie! Of course i am!"

-"Sorry i thought you are a computer character. What does LOL mean?"

-"Muhahahaha!!! It is short for laugh out Loud. Come out of town let me help you around."

-"Thanks! can i have some weapons please?"

-"Sure! come to my house it's just out of the eastern corner of MoonGlow's Bank."

-Corp Por! Corp Por! Vas ort Flam!!  

-" OOOOOoooOOOOo, OOOOooooOOOOO! OOOOoooOOOOOO OOooooOOOOO!"

"December 1997. Chesapeake server."

 

Bah, moonglow? You got lucky. Compared to the Brit GY, the friggin Compton of old-school UO, Moonglow was musical chairs at a downs convention compared to that madhouse northeast of her majesty's bank.

I remember UO like it was yesterday. Perhaps, it may very well have been yesterday. I remember logging in to the most boring intro-screen, followed by the lamest server screen, after which was the saddest looking character selection screen any game has ever seen. I couldn't have been happier. The nostalgia of my character names ALONE gave me more joy than any ding/epic on WoW .Day after day hat sad little grey box patcher would make my mid-late pubsecant life a little more bareable.  UO was my home away from home, yet wrought havoc on social and personal relationships alike.

Doing so little had never been so time consuming. I'll admit I was a bitch for test center, because of the sheer magnitude of the PvP alone (Even before factions.)  Instant housing, instant riches, all you had to do was grind for Lord and you'd be the best bank/house sitter within 2 feet of yourself.

set tactics 1000 set anatomy 1000 on and on and on. Go make myself a set of armor, tame a @#$%in dragon, play the market with some vanqs (cash was worthless on test.) and so on, over and over and over. This alone kept me numb to reality for a good 5-6 years, at least 2-3 hours a night, a sad much more on weekends.  PK at Brit GY, PKK At brit GY, PKPKKKPKK at Brit GY, by the end of the pre-trammel days, everyone was killing everyone, crafting everything, equiping anything, at the touch of a nifty macro utility (in-game one, of course.) and you could set your skills for the day, or if you were truely a PvPer you changed your skills with every bleeding moment of time not spent trashtalking or ninjalooting (My WoW brethren know nothing of the ninjas that we faced in UO on a daily basis, except we got to slay them, dismember them, and put their limbs and head on the bank roof.)

When on regular servers Lake superior and pacific, Dark Knight Pointmad and PhredTheBroker respectively, I was captivated by the struggle it took to truely stand out in the game. Nowadays in any sensible MMO there are epics, rares, galore, with the exact same damage/stats/effects etc etc. In Old UO, seeing a person PvPing in a set of Ranger armor gave one the impression of seeing Russel Crowepeeling out infront of a cop at a stoplight in a 66 charger(Or something of equal revolutionarical badassity).

On regular servers, a person "adept" at swordsmanship and a master of anatomy and healing with the right skill and nothing less than a GM crafted weapon (an every day ordinary thing) could take on the best of any class in too much of a rush to fight without patience. GM or not, 56k or not, there were true heros and extrodinary players in UO, and at one point or another that game made us all seem like the Avatar reborn.

Then trammel happened.

take back about 95% of what i just wrote, eat it up shit it out and that's the UO you have now.

Mix in a little Blizzard D2 gangrape and UO is officially a crossbred bastardchild.

Add some pathetic excuse for an expansion in the slots after T2A, _______ _______ _______ insert bullshit; not BTR, Rennesiance,or anything else, in those spaces. The true home of the UO scions was tarnished, literally, with brambles and %#$%ing ghost sounds... It seemed to symbolize the epitome of the tired, old, gray haired silver vanq katana in a world of secondary and tertiary skills in the paperdoll, the healing powers of spirit-speak (ftw?) and elves.... elves.... what the hell.

I have gone through practically every bloody MMO since UO, betas, alphas, Darkfall  and none of them come close to bringing any appeal to me. We need to start a petition to bring back OLD uo with the NEW graphics, create a new server in every region, and take all this filler out.The more EA gave us, the more we choked. We all hated OSI so much but the devil we knew was NOTHING. This big bad mess of words I'm passing off as a post, will hopefully entice some other Oldschool gamers to come out of their comfy WoW Cacoons and join back in the community that"pwns their* community l337 pk3r syl3" . EA needs to stop this friggin chemo therapy like appeasment, trying to cure their bad revenue with a painfully complex system which is infesting all fun the game had or should have merely for longevity of a product trying so hard not to die.

And it wont, if I have anything to say about it!

An Lor Exen

** http://mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/gameId/0 A comprehensive list of games that Oldschool UO and its communitiy owned/ will own

*sigh* This brings back memories.

I remember when Ultima Online first came out that day waaay back when. I didn't have a computer, but I was still totally into it. I went to my friend's house all the time just so we could play my character for like, an hour or two almost everyday. I remember when I finally got the money to buy a longsword, a bronze shield and a suit of chainmail armor. I thought I was totally bad-ass.

Then I stepped forth and got my head handed to me on a gold platter by a puny orc.

Best time of my life :)

When I finally got my computer and bought the game, it was great :) My friend and I played together a lot, we would chop trees together, fish together, fight together. Eventually we got into a guild and it became even better. I got really heavy into the roleplay community. Then, I stopped playing in '99, due to moving and stuff.

When I finally got back into UO in 2001, it had changed dramatically. Everyone I knew was gone, and the game, in my opinion, has only gotten worse since those days, not better.

Cmon EA. Stop raping the game. Work on a better GAME, not the graphics. Hell, I don't like all the bigger landmasses... it just makes the community spread out too much.

I hope a game comes out that has what UO did. Horizons got a bit close, with their crafting system and community, but it just doesn't have that... flair. Style. Class.

If I find a game that makes me look at the forums, that's one thing. If the forums has stories of what people are doing with their characters in game, that's old school UO. Since UO, I have yet to see stories of what people did with their char in a well written, in or out of character, style.

In a sense, I find it kind of funny how MMOs have started off so great (UO, EQ), and have fallen to a cookie-cutter style of play in almost every single game out there.

We need another game just like UO, as far as the skills, what you can do, and so on. No templates, no pre-determined classes, no big quests. Something where you have to WORK at it to make yourself known. Where people stare at you in awe and bow down to your glory just because you had a longsword of Vanq, which you got because you went down to a deep part of a dungeon and were lucky enough to kill that balrog that you stumbled across.  And then heading out and almost losing that sword to a PK, except your friends come in and save your sorry butt at the last minute.

Quests, in the end, become time-sinks. Sure, they're cool and all, but quests these days gives EVERYONE the same thing once they're completed. I think a previous poster said something about this.  Quests just need to go back to a... moral, good-feeling about something reward. Or just hard cash. Not a useless item or whatever...

Of course, this is just me rambling on and on about the past I suppose. *sigh*

Have fun guys :)

---

Originally posted by sempiternal
I actually prefer the graphics in the "before" images of the article!  What a waste.

---

Seriously, drop it. All you ever do is flame everything and anything about UO and its just getting real old now, infact anyone who reads your posts should just completely ignore what you say. We all understand your obviously sore about the changes to UO in the past, but stop whining about it. You have said your part to many times already and now whenever i see you post in the UO section i cant take what you say seriously. I wouldnt mind but you have a link to Roma Victor in you sig, how can you flame any game when your playing that POS.

Perosnally im glad there still working on it, the graphics upgrade looks good, i will be trying it. It will be nice having alot of people playing it again.

Garrik

Mythic has a history of taking something great, and making it better; EA has a history of taking something great and making it worthless. Frankly, I think EA is right to turn a lot of their projects over to the guys at Mythic, they will do them justice.

The graphics overhaul in DAoC was the best thing to happen to it since... well since Catacombs. While a lot of people aren't all for it right now, I think it will make the game just that much more appealing. While we say we don't mind graphics, the easier a game is on the eyes, the more depth it brings.

I was never a UO player (I hated isometric RPGs, they hurt my eyes), I will say that I am glad Mythic is taking the same approach to UO as they take with their own personal DAoC.

Congrats Mythic on the great gift you got, treat it well, and treat the players as you treat us DAoC players! =)

Originally posted by pyros98
I left because everyone was botting/scripting for skill gains.  Most of my friends weren't online, but mostly afk.  Then I started to do that and the game became meaningless because I didn't earn any of those skill points.  And ultimately AoS release was just so horribly implemented, and then they wanted more money.  If I go back for a free trial, it'll just be to look around...I doubt I'll stay.

AoS is one of the things that finally turned me away from UO. I like the idea of building my own house but beyond that I hated AoS.

Maybe I'll try it again and see how it is but I have to say that I really liked UO before AoS.

I share alot of thoughts with alot of ex-players here. I seem to always "re-try" this game once a year after being a hardcore player since beta to that dreaded publish. AoS was rotten to the core. The devs have received petitions with 1000's of signatures to put back up an old-school server. They always tell us "things are coming". Remember, all of the UO:KR information was supposed to be released by the end of 2006. The PvP patch they keep promising has been delayed to the point of where it's going to out-delay Guns N' Roses Chinese Democracy album.

Everything became very gear dependent and took less of a players actual skill over the years. It's kind of like a FPS making it so even if you remotely put your cross-hair kind of near your target, you'd still hit it instead of having actual skill.

I played beta in '97 but paying for a game after i bought it was such a novel concept it didn't fly with me.  Little did I know what patching a game can do for it.  I started playing in 2000 when my financial situation improved and have had at least one account going at all times, even if I'm not playing continuously.  $10 a month on the extended pay plan is not a lot of money when other games are getting as much as $15 a month out of you.

One reason I've spent time away was because of the script kiddies but mostly, I tired of people complaining about this or that latest expansion.  People don't like change for the most part and even with AOS implemented like it was, it wasn't THAT bad once you learned the new systems.  Those that gave up on expansions and left were unwilling to give it a chance, something I've seen in every online game I've played since.

The other reason I haven't played as much as I could have is that the 10 year old 2D graphics were microscopic on today's large monitors, at least with the 3D client you could drag it out to a larger resolution but the objects in containers were still too small to see well.  Now that UO:KR is on its way that will not be an issue.

There's something to be said about the familiarity and in some cases, simplicity, of UO.  It's not work to play like some games can be, it's actually fun.

Originally posted by Garrik  

Originally posted by sempiternal
I actually prefer the graphics in the "before" images of the article!  What a waste.

 Seriously, drop it. All you ever do is flame everything and anything about UO and its just getting real old now, infact anyone who reads your posts should just completely ignore what you say. We all understand your obviously sore about the changes to UO in the past, but stop whining about it. You have said your part to many times already and now whenever i see you post in the UO section i cant take what you say seriously. I wouldnt mind but you have a link to Roma Victor in you sig, how can you flame any game when your playing that POS.

Perosnally im glad there still working on it, the graphics upgrade looks good, i will be trying it. It will be nice having alot of people playing it again.

   Garrik

Why even bother to tell me what to do?  I'm entitled to post as much as anyone.  You have no influence over me and even less chance of having any now, so your post does not help your cause.  In fact, it inspires me!

All I said is that I prefer these graphics:

Over the new ones:

The new graphics are less sharp and more cartoonish, but they do have more texture.  For example, the shiny steel armor in the orignal graphics does look better than the cloth-like soft textured armor in the new graphics.

So I don't prefer the old graphics by much, but then what is the point of spending all the money if it does not have a significant impact?

Typical UO/Electronic Arts update...a new shell for an old game, whithout focusing on what is most important, the integrity of the virtual world and the gameplay.

Originally posted by Rejor

Cmon EA. Stop raping the game. Work on a better GAME, not the graphics. Hell, I don't like all the bigger landmasses... it just makes the community spread out too much.

I hope a game comes out that has what UO did. Horizons got a bit close, with their crafting system and community, but it just doesn't have that... flair. Style. Class.

If I find a game that makes me look at the forums, that's one thing. If the forums has stories of what people are doing with their characters in game, that's old school UO. Since UO, I have yet to see stories of what people did with their char in a well written, in or out of character, style.

In a sense, I find it kind of funny how MMOs have started off so great (UO, EQ), and have fallen to a cookie-cutter style of play in almost every single game out there.

We need another game just like UO, as far as the skills, what you can do, and so on. No templates, no pre-determined classes, no big quests. Something where you have to WORK at it to make yourself known. Where people stare at you in awe and bow down to your glory just because you had a longsword of Vanq, which you got because you went down to a deep part of a dungeon and were lucky enough to kill that balrog that you stumbled across.  And then heading out and almost losing that sword to a PK, except your friends come in and save your sorry butt at the last minute.

Quests, in the end, become time-sinks. Sure, they're cool and all, but quests these days gives EVERYONE the same thing once they're completed. I think a previous poster said something about this.  Quests just need to go back to a... moral, good-feeling about something reward. Or just hard cash. Not a useless item or whatever...

Of course, this is just me rambling on and on about the past I suppose. *sigh*

Have fun guys :)

All this exists in Roma Victor!  The problem for most is it's still very new, it was released six months ago and still has lots of development and bug fixing to be done, but Ultima Online was no different.  The key is that at least they are going in the virtual world direction like the original UO, and not the item based kiddie land that UO has become.

Here is a post that a player made about a combat tournament we had a while ago: 

By Jessaius:

It was a battle of high quality, Sylvius positioned me at one side of the arena, and the noble fighter Meinard on the other side.

The fight starts, we circle around some, slowly move in towards eachother but avoiding contact. Then I think it is enough, I charge towards Meinard, in hope of suprising him, his range is his advantage, but it won't help him when I get closer. It worked, his reflexes failed, and his chest felt the power of my sharp gladius. But Meinard did not give up, he didn't feel the pain, nor did he pay attention to the fluids that sputtered out of his open wound. My blood started to boil, I was destined to win this battle; I now knew I had a chance.
Again I attacked his chest, but he managed to avoid my hit. Not letting this hold me down, I slashed again; yet again he avoided it as if it were nothing. He didn't only dodge it, he riposted, with a quick turn of my sword I parried it. I quickly turned my parry into a slash to the right. The Gods must have been with him, he did not dodge it, he did not parry it, but I did not hit him. With my own eyes I saw my sword touching his weapon arm, but without a wound, not even a scratch.
Meinard, who was not watching his arm, but focussed on me saw his chance and trusts his pilum into my chest. I am not a hardened warrior, I am not ashamed to admit that, I fell down on my knees. The pain was horrible, his spear had hit my stumach, when he removed it from my body, you could even see a bit of bad-digested apple on the spearhead. Suddenly I heard Mars, to whom I had prayed before the battle say, "do not give up, I will not tolerate such weakness".
Thè God had spoken, I stood up, dodged his attack, watched how his attack connected to my arm without a scratch and attacked. His big shield came in between. I avoided another of his attacks... I suddenly felt really really tired, I could hardly see, and my knees were starting to shiver. I almost passed out, but then I felt something pointy in my spleen. I fell down on the floor and heard Mars saying, "You are no longer worthy of my attention you weak human".

And here is the actual video from that combat: http://media.putfile.com/Meinard-vs-Jessaius

Enjoy!

Originally posted by Garrik

 

---

Originally posted by sempiternal
I actually prefer the graphics in the "before" images of the article!  What a waste.

---

 

Seriously, drop it. All you ever do is flame everything and anything about UO and its just getting real old now, infact anyone who reads your posts should just completely ignore what you say. We all understand your obviously sore about the changes to UO in the past, but stop whining about it. You have said your part to many times already and now whenever i see you post in the UO section i cant take what you say seriously. I wouldnt mind but you have a link to Roma Victor in you sig, how can you flame any game when your playing that POS.

Perosnally im glad there still working on it, the graphics upgrade looks good, i will be trying it. It will be nice having alot of people playing it again.

Garrik

I'm glad they are working on it too, it's about time it was updated. 

But everyone seems to be forgetting there are currently TWO clients, and the unstated goal of OU:KR is to unify the clients.  I happen to prefer the 3D due to the scalability of the window, which KR is already stated to have.  The 2D takes about 1/6 of the screen and is impossible to play since it's so small, and going full screen looks lousy on an LCD monitor with a native resolution of 1600x1200. 

Besides, once I got a look at my fire steed in the 3D, I could never go back] to 2D.  3D is laggy as all get-out, and looks strange with 3D rendered mobs on a pixie background, so I welcome this overhaul.   However, I don't call putting a new skin on 2D pixies anything resembling progress, but unlike  semp, I'll reserve judgment on KR until I see it live, you really can't tell much from screenies.

Well, why can't they at least make a full-blown 3d world, which was overdue in the year 2000?  Everyone knows EA has plenty of money.  The only thing I can think of is that EA has no vision, they had no vision back then in 2000, when MMOGs were growing and they have had no vision for the past seven years, opting to concentrate on their fiscal boxed-sales business rather than upgrading to the new service-based business of MMOGs.  Of course, because their own MMOGs have been relative failures compared to Origin's UO, that probably does not help either.  They are afraid of losing their small share of current UO customers, when in all likely-hood most of those that remain are dedicated and would upgrade to continue playing anyway.

Now, seven years later, EA is finally trying to do something, likely because of WoW, but it seems like too little too late and insignificant.

What is even more disturbing is that gameplay is paramount, UO had it and UO lost it, and yet what are they concentrating on most now?  Another skin, even after their experience with the failed UO: Third Dawn and constant requests over the years for Classic servers.