I remember playing ultima from my Apple IIE in elementary and upgrading to an ibm not much later to play ultima 6,7 and 8...i was an addict and loved the games...anyone know what happened to ultima..i heard ultima online came out..how is that?

What are games that are similar to ultima that have come out these days?

Excuse me, but where have you been the last 20 years ?

FWIW, Ultima Online was the greatest game of all time. But sadly, that is an experience that you will NEVER get back, because what made it so great was that it was such a new concept for most of its players.

You can't re-newbify the populace.

But yeah, Ultima Online = greatest times I've ever had gaming, AINEC.

Anyone wanna play ultima online ?

i haz ultima for sega master sytem
owns
*** modern games

I really want to play UO right now =/

On a server that allows EasyUO, of course.

That was at least 50% of the fun for me on the more recent private servers I played. Writing myself incredibly badass EasyUO scripts to do various things. I never abused scripting for PvP though, because that **** is gay.

Several (5-6?) years back, I played on a server that was one of the first to truly try and emulate a 1999-2000 UO experience, and they implemented the lumberjacking bonuses to axes. I wrote an awesome lumberjacking script and spent 2 SOLID months of 24x7 macroing to GM my lumberjacking. (thank god for multiple accounts so I could still play while macroing that guy)

The skill was clearly broken and their tree cutting system was ******ed, so I was the only GM lumberjack on the server. For 5 glorious weeks I went around 2-shotting people with various axes of vanquishing and posting massive montages of death-shots on the forums.

This was my first melee character. I had played a tank mage since the day in 1997 when I first loaded up UO to see that corny treasure chest. I have never been called a "noob dexer" so many times in my life during that month of ownage. Then, after my reign of terror over the server had gone unchallenged for a while, they made it so that simply fighting with an axe would increase your lumberjacking skill, and they increased the skillgain speed by like 1500%. So everyone and their brother of course made an axer immediately.

Nobody was as successful as I was at it, because I was the only one willing to open PvP with full invul+vanq items plus a ****load of pots.

Good times indeed.

Don't even get me STARTED on the joy that was mace-thuggery.

Snooping
Stealing
Detect Hidden
Healing
Anatomy
Tactics
Macing

100 str, 100 dex, 25 intel.

Bag containing Qstaff of vanq + full invul chainmail + bandaids and pots in the bank.

My GOD that was fun. Getting a gaming semi just thinking about it.

What kind of game is this?

The very first (popular) MMORPG.

It's skill-based and not class-based though, which is key. There were 60 or 70 skills, each with a cap of 100 points, and each character had 700 skill points to budget out between their skills.

You got better at something the more you used it. You got more powerful the higher your skill became.

The game itself was not really item based, because EVERYONE had access to the same pool of items unlike a traditional MMO where the best items are only available to the 25 kids running through the highest level raid dungeons. Someone with 25 swordsmanship skill had access to the same weapons as someone with 100 swordsmanship. The same was not true for magery though. There were 64 spells split into 8 circles. The higher your skill went, the less often you fizzled your casts. (You *COULD* cast a 7th circle spell with 60 magery, but you only had like a 10% chance to succeed. At 100 magery, that success rate was 95%. You never reached 100% success rates for 7th and 8th circle, even with maxed out magery.

In WoW terms, it would be like being able to take a level 80 guy and solo a dungeon, but also being able to take 3 or 4 level 30 people and do that same dungeon. So nobody was ever really left out. There was NO global chat interface. You could only interact in-game with the people on your screen. You chatted with friends using IRC or ICQ. It made for some very very interesting game dynamics.

It also prevented the ******-fest that is global trade chat channels like WoW has.

Best. Game. Ever.

the grandfather of all mmos

Everquest yo

UO was the best game ever. Nothing like scamming and PKing your way to the top. Griefing was the best in this game too.

Didn't have ultima online, i had something like Ultima 7 for the SNES...i remember spending a ton of time wandering around aimlessly because i had no effing idea what i was supposed to do.

Isn't this just a basic grinding game, like WoW or RuneScape or something, where you have too grind a couple of months to reach a certain level?

Nope!

It's not a counter-strike style FPS where you start on the same level as everyone else right away, but you can be highly effective in groups with friends after only a short time. You do not become exponentially more powerful like in a level-based game. There is no "well he's level 50 so he's going to wtfrape me as level 20 100% of the time".

It was a very social game, too. Sounds silly given the lack of global chat, but UO had a HUGE social aspect to it. There were people who played with the sole purpose of being vendors and merchants. You could RP just about anything you wanted.

There were grindy parts of the game, (magic resist) but you could be almost just effective with 80 magic resist as with 100.

Getting a skill from 90 to 100 was almost always more difficult than 0-90, but those last 10 points weren't more useful than the first 90 like in most games.

I played UO on catskills from early 98 until the end of 2000. Was a great game until they introduced trammel. The whole risk of losing all of your stuff if you ventured out of town was what made it great. Once trammel was introduced it turned into a bunch of clowns sitting at the bank showing off their weapons and armor that they would never use because they were scared to lose it. Definitely the best MMO ever. And Lord is right, if you had decent skills you could usually hang with someone of greater skills if you were smart about it.

+ eleventy million

the first time you looted someone's boat key was the single greatest gaming moment of all time.

I wonder if there's still a market for a "free roam" MMORPG.

It would follow the same model as early UO, uber-powerful NPC guards to keep order within town, unhackable bank boxes, but otherwise anything goes.

I assume there's really not more than a niche for this though. People are too big on structured gaming, like guild-based PvP and raids and whatnot.

There was room for all of that in UO.

The Order/Chaos system was the epitome of group(guild) based PvP.

I played on Chesapeake, which was the go-to server for PvP, and you could log on 24/7 and find some order/chaos fighting, or simply guild vs guild fights.

There is room for "raids" in UO, even the old-school style.

I had some GREAT times on Chessy back in the day during the big order/chaos fights. Bodies littered all over the streets. No time to loot, so you could rez and find a corpse with more loot on it to get right back into the fight. Sheer enjoyment.

You can try this server . . .

http://www.uosecondage.com/

Hard to get back into it though.

Galad and the LuTers, anyone?

What an awesome game that was pre-Trammel.

I played this for a few years - although I only properly got into it after the Malas facet came out with the custom housing feature.

Awesome, awesome game back then.

I had a buddy who played this, and I always loved going over to his house to check it out. back then though, my parents would never have got me a crack game like that, it would have consumed me.

I played here. I haven't been on in a long time, but a friend of mine has been refreshing the small kingdom of housing.

If anyone wants to, or already does play here, I can probably give you a free house (large brick or tower, most likely) and some cash to work with.

Getting back to OP's question since he was mostly speaking about the single-player games...

I'm one of those *******s who has to play everything in order. I've wanted to play the Ultima series since the 90's, but to get to the great games like U4 and U7 I'd have to go through the incredibly arcane U1-3 (even "U0" - Akalabeth). I did finish Akalabeth and then U1, and 10 years later I'm still on U2. I actually am as far as the final battle in 2, but needed to level up (or whatever the equivalent is in that game) just a bit more...that was 3 years ago.

Anyway, U7 and the Underworlds definitely appeal to me, but the more the years pass the harder it will be to get into them.

As for Ultima Online...never played it but I love reading the stories. There was a thread with more of them years ago. I've said it before - there's definitely a book here somewhere.