Remember Ultima Online

I loved that game, I loved looting all the shit from peoples dead corpses.

I love that moment when I was new, I was killing skeletons in the Graveyard in my Bone Armor.
And some guy rode up and just stopped for a minute and watched me.
The whole time my heart was racing, I knew that if I made any sudden moves it was over. I think there was a Moral tug-of-war going on inside that guy. He was thinking that he COULD easily kill me with a Fire Wall (he cast one a couple of squares away, maybe to test my reaction?) but the reward would be 0. Since I was rocking full Bone Armor.
When he eventually rode away, my sphincter relaxed and I let out a sigh, I may have also had a straight shot of Whiskey to calm my nerves.

I also loved it when Trammel was introduced, you could put Portal Stones up and random people would use them, then you just PK and Loot them in Felucca.

And the whole Portal Jumping thing in general, you see people go into a portal then the caster removes it and Laughs because it is on some random 1 square island, or in a Ice Drake room.

Stealing Boats, stealing some dude's boat was the closest to Pirating I have ever seen in a game. Because all of these things were permanent, at first you could steal the Deed to a house off some dude if he was careless.

When Trammel became the #1 realm times got tough, money started to dwindle.

So some mates and I would round up all the monsters in a Dungeon and bring them to the entrance (which was blocked with Boxes full of Candelabras) then go outside in Res Robes and starting asking for help "Please help, my body is just inside the Dungeon but there's a monster right on it and I'm naked."
Sure enough the Shining Knight would go in expecting to kill that 1 Easy monster, however as soon as he loaded in, he'd see 5 or 6 Drakes and Dragons, or 30 Earth Golems beating on him.

The final step was to go in, lure the monsters away with our Barding and begin the looting.
On some occasions we had to mark a rune and do 2 or 3 runs because people carried so much stuff.

I also enjoyed the Player Housing so damn much, every now and again you would find the house of some poor bastard that didn't know he had to lock things down. So essentially he had a whole house filled with loot, just waiting to be taken. I would usually leave a book on their door step thanking them.

That was a great great game, I think at the core of its success was that it had no classes or skill points, you level a skill by using it and once you got to the 90% or so, it got very hard and very rewarding to get that 0.1% increase.

Also items were just fluff really. Yeah you needed a Bow and Arrows to perform Archery, but there was no +300dps Bow of Fire Damage and Instant Kill that you cherished above all else. You might have a Master Crafted Bow for that little boost, but it was just an item.

I think a lot of that is lost in today's RPG's where your Character has become just a vessel for the Items on which you rely. With that we had to introduce Items that could not be looted. Or would not become damaged and destroyed over time. This is pretty sad, it removes a lot of the excitement that is finding something good and making good use of it, while also knowing that if you are silly... it will be gone forever.

Last bit of nostalgia, taming and training my Blue Ostard and getting him 100% magic resist. That was freaking glorious. He could tank the shit out of some Demons!

There is no purpose to this post, unless maybe for some old bastards to remember playing UO in like 2001 or whatever.
I will be checking out Wildstar and EQ:Next when they come out. For different reasons, but nobody will ever recapture the magic of UO.

There are still free shards out there. I have a half dozen friends that I have been trying to lure away from UO to try PoE, but they seem pretty hooked on UO. If you want, PM me and I can find out what shard they play on.

OMG why did I never play this game?

Oh right, cos I'm a graphics whore :(

Is it pre-trammel thread time again?