I played for 4 years, 98-02.  Am I a tourist? haha

I have advocated the Skill based system over the class based system since the dawn of EverCrap. You can not beat the customizability, freedom and replay ability of the skill based system. Garrett's reasoning for the class based system is completely flawed. He said that everyone will play with a certain skill set because it's the best. If that were true than why wouldn't everyone in WoW play a Rogue in the class based system so they can be the best at PvP? People still play Warlocks and Paladins even though they aren’t as good as other classes. The class based system does nothing to solve the issue of balance. Classes are always imbalanced just like certain skills will always be unbalanced in the skill based system. Ultimately it's up the developers to work as hard as they can to balance the game, but using a class based system does not magically balance the game. That is an idiotic misconception and all you have to do is play WoW for a month to understand that if you don't already. I just hope that developers return to the skill based system soon and forget the stupid restricting easy-out class based system.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Fantasy as we know it and greek mythology are not similar. The people of greece believed in the greek gods and it was their religion. Fantasy was never anyones religion. There for greek mythology can't be looked at as a founder of fantasy any more than christianity or Buddhism can. I can remember playing with Conan action figures and he rode I dinosaur or something in the mid 80's when I was just a lad

I thought the game was vaporware when I first came upon it a couple years ago. After just seeing these screenshots with all the characters and polished graphics it looks like it is really pulling togther now. I hope it's as fun as it looks. Sadly that is always the hardest part and I still am wary of that.

I though Ultima X: Odyssey was going to abe a remake of Ultima Online in true 3D with graphics to rival SWG and EQ2. Alas it wasn't, it was just another half-baked succesor to UO that got cancelled. I think they should remake UO in true 3D and make it like it was in the old days, fully PvP, but with some of the new cool features like customizable housing equatable to The Sims 2.

I totally agree. I want to see heads getting lopped off and arms and legs chopped clean through. Why all these candy-arse approaches? UO had to be the most gory so far, letting you chop people up into pieces and take their head for a bounty reward or as a trophy to keep in your home. Seriously, couldn't every game have a slider for total gore of heads and body parts flying everywhere to the point of no blood at all? Let people see what they want to see in battle. We're tired of just seeing some sparks and small drips of blood wizzing through the air. I guess the Conan game will be adding the head lopping stuff wihch is a a step forward.

Ultima Online remains the greatest MMOG of all time. Subscription numbers do not prove a games quality. You can not equate a game's subscription base to the quality of the game. Ultima Online is to the MMOG genre what The Godfather is to movies. Just because 1.5 Million people play WoW doesn't make it the greatest MMOG ever. I played WoW for 6 months and enjoyed it very much, but I played Ultima Online for almost four years. Just imagine if Ultima Online had come out today with all the latest graphics and some of it's features details tailored to today's players. It would blow the MMOG genre wide open. Unfortunately UO is a victim to the time of it's creation and will probably be overshadowed in history by EverQuest just because it had a bigger subscription base which was made possible by UO.

Two words, Ultima Online.

The whole time I'm reading your article I'm thinking, Ultima had that, Ultima had that. Ultima had all the things you described, albeit some in limited fashion because of technological limitations of the day it was created (1997) and because it was the first true MMOG that paved the way for all other MMOG's to follow. It might have been light on the questing side and the character customization is pretty archaic by today's standards but it had all of the features you high lighted as needed in a game for it to be the ultimate MMORPG. Player Customization, Mounts, Player Housing, Player Cities, Guilds, Factions, good PvP, excellent story line and setting and the #1 reason the Ultima Online kicks all ass, it had a pure skill based system exactly like you described in your article, no limiting classes. It allowed endless diversity of the playerbase and replayability with dozens upon dozens of skills to pick and choose from. Letting you create any kind of character you wanted. A lockpicking, blacksmithing, archer, fisherman, mage-hooker? You got it! How could the MMOG genre started by such an amazing and ground breaking game that got it so right get so far off track? Two words, EverQuest or forEverQrap as I like to call it. The games that followed in UO and EQ's wake unfortunately decided to go the EQ direction, which as we see today has set us back for almost a decade in this budding genre. UO started the genre off at Level 10 with features. EQ took us back to 4 and we've been progressing back to 10 ever since. Have we got back to 10 yet? Not quite, and I think your article confirms this.

It really doesn't matter to me either way if UX:O got made, as soon as I found out it wasn't going to be UO2 ressurected I gave EA the finger    for being mentally retarded .  So now they've made two half baked Online Ultima projects, wasted all that money and slapped Ultima Fans in the face twice by getting us all excited and then trashing the game and leaving us hanging.  I think they need to get rid of their bi-polar suites that are killing this great franchise.  Doesn't it figure also that they give us something else to hope for that probably years down the road as they say "an Unannounced Ultima Online project".  Does this mean they will make UO2?  Is it just going to be another lame expansion to a once amazing game thats now helplessly dying of old age?  Will they try and make UO into full 3D like current MMOG's without calling it a sequel?  Who knows, but at this point I could care less because I have lost all faith in the Ultima Branch of EA with their 3 Bomb Shells in a row.  Ultima IX: Ascension, Ultima Online 2 and now Ultima X:Odyssey...

The key to a great MMOG is Freedom