Since playing this from 2000-2002 I have all but quit gaming. Ultima Online ruined other games for me in the best way possible. I have tried to play various MMOs since but none of them come close to having the same freedom that UO offered.
There were gangs, rivalries, people would cast invisibility spells on themselves outside of your door to try to break into your house when you open the door, you could be put in prison if you were an asshole or exploited a bug, you could hunt down miners and if you managed to take them out before they entered a city's boundaries (where guards would appear and protect them from "murderers") you would be able to steal all of their clothes, armour, weapons, ore, etc. GameMasters or Counselors (GMs with limited abilities) would host PvP tournaments - round robin duels, capture the flag, etc.
I used my limited knowledge of programming as an early-teen to host a custom "shard" with SphereServer and had an average of about 200 players on at a time, from all over the world. It was a lot of power for a kid to have. Of course the software was unstable and increasingly so with more users and eventually I had to shut it down because it crashed too often. The name was Alphanine UO - named for the web hosting company that decided to give a kid a free server to host a video game server. http://web.archive.org/web/20020923181726/http://uo.alphanin...
>Since playing this from 2000-2002 I have all but quit gaming. Ultima Online ruined other games for me in the best way possible. I have tried to play various MMOs since but none of them come close to having the same freedom that UO offered.
The genre of games that is the successor to games like UO would be the open-world survival stuff. DayZ and Rust being the most popular but 100s of them are out now.
For a large scale MMO Crowfall looks interesting. They get around the problem of a small group accumulating all the resources on the server by wiping the server and resetting the world frequently. And of course there's Eve Online.
>There were gangs, rivalries, people would cast invisibility spells on themselves outside of your door to try to break into your house when you open the door, you could be put in prison if you were an asshole or exploited a bug, you could hunt down miners and if you managed to take them out before they entered a city's boundaries (where guards would appear and protect them from "murderers") you would be able to steal all of their clothes, armour, weapons, ore, etc. GameMasters or Counselors (GMs with limited abilities) would host PvP tournaments - round robin duels, capture the flag, etc.
I've had all of these experiences on a Rust server, including the PvP tournament and going to prison for exploiting a bug. Plenty of action packed heists involving lots of coordination and subterfuge. Here's an example of people talking about the crazy adventures in the game:
In particular there's a great story about a powerful group fighting a decentralized weak group that can only use terrorist style tactics to strike back, and how the powerful group started to try and win hearts and minds on the server to root out their enemies.
There were gangs, rivalries, people would cast invisibility spells on themselves outside of your door to try to break into your house when you open the door, you could be put in prison if you were an asshole or exploited a bug, you could hunt down miners and if you managed to take them out before they entered a city's boundaries (where guards would appear and protect them from "murderers") you would be able to steal all of their clothes, armour, weapons, ore, etc. GameMasters or Counselors (GMs with limited abilities) would host PvP tournaments - round robin duels, capture the flag, etc.
I used my limited knowledge of programming as an early-teen to host a custom "shard" with SphereServer and had an average of about 200 players on at a time, from all over the world. It was a lot of power for a kid to have. Of course the software was unstable and increasingly so with more users and eventually I had to shut it down because it crashed too often. The name was Alphanine UO - named for the web hosting company that decided to give a kid a free server to host a video game server. http://web.archive.org/web/20020923181726/http://uo.alphanin...