- A blacksmith can be a feared person in a given area because anyone messing with him can become target for massive assault by entire communities. Because it turns out this blacksmith would craft and mine in his spare time for r&r and just give free stuff to these guilds just because.

- A guild siege can last a month trying to work 24/7 to destroy someone's property. It wasn't easy, but doable.

- A friend was unfortunately banned for scamming people in town by pretending to be under attack, followed by having the other guy slaughtered by his dragon. It was loads of fun. Yes yes we were assholes, but it was fun assholeness.

- It was the EVE online before EVE. Definitely "place to build" was a rare commodity, unlike EVE.

- Unlike EVE you can just have fun no matter what you did. You didn't have to travel for 2 hours to get somewhere interesting. And building a character from scratch took a few days at most.

He did it for about three weeks, which lead destroying TONS of the most valuable items on shard. He wrote journal about his journey and it could be even good book on its own, while it was done ingame and you actually interact with that guy (and probably lost fortune). It was great joke at the end, but many were pissed.

For anyone who don't know, dragons are incredibly powerful. They could easily slaughter you, and your friends. Usually took like 4 mages to take it down... OR you could tame it. And then you use your dragon to kill other dragons. Though you may end up having to feed it the body parts of your fallen player victims.

And on that note, PVP was the most fun part about it. No other game was quite like it. All players run at a constant speed. And hitting a player wasn't exactly easy. To really kill someone you had to get a group of people, lower the enemy's stamina by at least 1 point so he could not "shove" you out of the way, and surround him on all 8 sides (4 + 4 diagonal) and then finally kill him. Battles were either a mage/warriors combo with tactics, or a jousting match.

Oh and the ol' saying of "don't bring to a battle anything you can't afford to lose" was VERY true in UO. You die, you lose everything. So don't bring expensive armor! Often you go into a battle. Fight, lose some armor and weapons, quickly teleport home, get your 2nd (or 8th set), go fight, find a dead guy (or a teammate's kill) steal his weapons, and then continue the fight wearing someone else's armor / guild colors. It was was a ton of fun.

It is the only game that you play with people and where the people you play with are the most important element of the game that creates the game itself. In other mmorpgs you just play around hordes of people that you don't really care about: you just click and click and click.

I also had the same experience with people in quake that I played with - I am sure if I caught up with some of the guys from the swedish QWCTF scene back in the day we would have a bunch of things to talk about, same with the community around the webgame Utopia.

I think it depends on how much time you put into the game and how engaged you are with it. Communities can develop around all types of games, but I agree that UO was a very engaging game and I still remember the people I played UO with 17 years later, even though I am not in touch with them anymore.

I still remember one guy, which I considered to be my friend, to betray the city, making the portal that leads to small house full of PK, quite a few people get killed and robed out of equipment that you need to spend weeks of full time dungeon going to get to. There was greed, noble characters and also evil ones. You lost your precious equipment forever easily, you build ingame friendships and hatred by seeing same people every day.

There was also another guy, who by playing his role pretend to be mentally ill, but was actually using greed of other players to steal out of them. Just by talking, little bit of using known bugs (for hiding his name), using different clothes and stuff like that. He wrote it up when he did his act and it can be great book, but it actually happened in game and you were part of it.

These stories are 12 years old, tell me about your frags ;)

The game split game types into "zones" that were 24/7. The zone I played, and eventually became a "sysop" of, would regularly have only 40-80 people tops at any given time. Maybe 500 unique people. Not sure exact numbers because we didn't track stats like that.

Anyways, can totally resonate with playing with the game group of people every day for months or years. I had an arch-nemesis who, while we were cordial, always ended up playing league matches against each other. The rivalry was fierce but so was the friendship.

The game has been Steam Greenlit after many years of problems (copyright issues with original company, no source code for client, etc) and is about to make its debut:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=144913...

You can play today at http://getcontinuum.com

Great, balanced mechanics, though perhaps that's changed. I'm thinking of the old Chaos and Capture the Flag zones. Can still hear the sound effects as I'm typing this.

I login every so often to check my ?messages and see if any old friends are online. The zone I eventually sysoped in is dead these days but the community is still strong.

The game honestly started my programming and tech career with things like bot and zone/squad website dev. I plan to check in tomorrow for the Steam launch.

> "you can almost hear the other guy snap his keyboard in rage."

This made me chuckle as it 100% spot on.

Do you know your brothers alias or would you be willing to ask him if he was ever involved in SS[*] RedStar or knew me? (game alias same as hn account)

EQ - pulling all PoF bosses without touching any trash mobs, swimming through lava with a one hit kill boss behind me to save time, spending 3-4 hours with 70 other people to clear council of rathe, progressing from killing dragons in the ice zone to clearing plane of time, aoe kiting an entire zone... (Eq bard is still the best designed class I saw in any game)

UO - getting an order for 200 suits of coloured ore, working to complete it like mad for 2 weeks and being robbed by a bug in the new stealth feature just before completing the sale... Hitting GM smithing, buying a tower with 3 friends, exploiting blade spirits for resists forever... First time buying a house (just north of Minoc)

QWCTF - first time winning a clan game by timing quads perfectly on e1m2 for a full map (I could still run that map in my sleep), taking on and beating a clan miles better than us by playing from the same room, playing a match entirely with the boom stick in a clan game and still typing kills, the feeling of flying into a base with perfect grapple moves despite two guards with ro and str/res runes, the feeling of bouncing along on the long stretches of e4m3 with floor grapple speed jumps...

All of that more than 10 years ago and still vivid memories for me.

QWCTF - Capten, Foureau, TwinTurbo, Pimp all the other Synergy and Lords guys, Nii! (We were the worst and nicest), Skalman and many more...

Utopia - All the Malaysians from HaLL, the swedes from AV, The mishmash that was PAX, all us monkeys, the hasbeens in Mordor who you still couldn't mess with, the annoying Absalom guys, the other random alliances that formed and broke up.

EQ - all the dawnraiders I played with, the dream team with Zohran, Ashigaru, Filroden, Stragen, Veggi, Ganewate and his brother, Graouwl, Qujam, Stamford and their team and way too many more to mention..

UO - all the smiths in Brittania, including the UBB guild led by Ulysses... Min, and the other independents, Ethereal and his two crazy Canadian sidekicks in our guild, the two Danish pks (dog something?) and so on...

All those games are filled with memories of both events and people.

When I walk around a player-built town in UO it feels lived in, something I have never been able to say about any other MMO I've ever played. In this regard, UO is more like Minecraft than (World of) Warcraft.

At one point in beta, enough of the wildlife had been killed, and enough of the middle-difficulty monsters had been killed, and there was a bug where town guards didn't work quite right .... and a dragon strolled down the streets of Trinsic, leaving a trail of bodies behind it.

I then took a dead guard's plate, cape and halberd equipped it. Looking exactly like an NPC guard I wandered around the city tricking other players. You could enter combat stance and everyone would flee.

Funny to think I can still vividly remember this 18-19 years later but can hardly remember the plot of many of the recent AAA titles.

Might also be age related ;).

Joke aside, I recently spent some time partially replaying the two games I most vividly remember (Baldurs Gate II, FF7 PC version), and it's by far not as memorable now as it was back then. And I haven't played at all the last 12-15 years, so it's not that I got used to different types of games.

That's because the "plot" in most AAA titles is relayed to you in a series of cutscenes, not something you actively participate in.

I agree that Minecraft is what UO was to our generation, although I'm a bit worried they're learning java, but I guess php is no better. Oh well, just more tools for the toolbelt. :D

I've heard they've gotten better since Java 8 and Joda isn't as necessary now, but haven't used it since Java 8's release to know firsthand.

I had a similar 'read about it and waited years to play' experience :) Started playing on Europa in the T2A time I think.

I feel old. Must be the same thing that people from the commodore/amiga era feels like...

Also, UO was released in 1997, according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online

Best private servers are/were really different to original game. Much purer in vision to original UO and populated by hardcore players.

I remember one private UO shard I played on for a number of years: "Ackadia". Ackadia had two systems that made it unique and wonderful.

If you were not resurrected from your corpse quickly enough it would decay and you would be forced to use one of the UO shrines. Each shrine would only work once. Once you had used all of them, that was it. You'd have to start a new character.

Secondly, monster spawns would spread out from dungeons if not periodically kept in check, eventually spawning in town and defeating the guards. This, combined with restricted travel, tended to condense the players into a smaller number of towns and gave real purpose and consequences to player organization and adventuring.

The result of this was that Ackadia had a tight-knit community, griefing was very rare, and you actually felt like you were accomplishing things other than making numbers go higher: helping and engaging with the community.

I have always hated people like that. I realize that griefers are a part of the game and even a part of life but they really do ruin the fun for so many people that I'd prefer to be rid of them.