That music! that music have always a magical effect over me, even if 18 years have passed it still gives me the chills.
It happens from time to time, the memories from my teen years surface again, and the best game that I had the chance of playing comes to my mind: Ultima Online!
The first MMO ever created, the father of a successful franchise that had a peak with World of Warcraft(not even comparable with UOL). To this day I have not found a game that is capable of even creating the same kind of experience, the same connection, the same freedom that UOL had. The servers feature made it possible to play in many world with different people and stories.
It was not only a great game, it was the idea behind it, the total freedom given to the player, the players had che task of molding the world, with their ideals, with their roleplay. I had a part in many guilds, met hundreds and hundreds of people over the years, had TONS of fun fighting the PKs(Player Killers), and with time I even became one myself.
As long as the emulator was the POL(UOL worked with more than one emulator, each with his own particularity), the adrenaline was pumping in all the time, reason being that building your equipment and finding stuff that was worth money required a lot of time and effort, and the main feature of the game was that once you died all your belongings would stay on your dead body and you were turned into a ghost. That means that you could actually lose hundreds of hours worth of gameplay by being killed either by NPCs or PKs.
The game had no tutorials, that today would be considered a foolish move, but it was a point of strenght at that time. Basically only other people could teach you how to play the game, and experience was the main thing that was required to be successful. I still remember the first time I started playing, I had a friend who was teaching me the game features, and as long as I was left alone in Serpent's Hold I was killed by a water elemental that invaded the city.
It was a pain in the ass to understand how to come back to life, eventually I managed to get some help and was back on my adventure!
I spent most of my years on Midgard shard, it was an italian server with some unique features, great people and secured fun. There are still many servers online for the people who want to play the game today, some with certain emulators and some with older versions of the game(there were some expansions during the years). It was a bit sad to know that Midgard eventually died a few years ago, no more server and no more players.
The nights spent with friends to avoid PKs, the hours spent killing each other with hated enemies, guild's wars, spending hours to train the workers(amazing mining and blacksmithy system), everything was just EPIC.
Here is a random screenshot from the internet:
I have an old hard disk in my closet, I plan on recovering my datas from it one day so that I can recover old screenshots and other files that I collected during those years.
The new generations really lost something, but they still have the opportunity to try out the game, and even if it is quite old, they can see what the difference is from modern video games, and what it meant to use your brain and understand things in order to win over the other players.
Hardcore gaming began to die during the 2000 something, and even UOL was affected by that wave, the Run UO emulator introduced a system which was called "insured" that basically saved you from losing your items when you died(for a little amount of money you could have your items stored in your backpack).
I really wish that I could find a game good enough to challenge UOL, but the more years goes by, the more I think that the only way to feel that magic again is to get on a random server and start a new adventure.
If any of you had those experiences please comment and write some old story from your gaming experience!
Thanks for reading,
CharlesX.