Things that made UO the best game ever

Hey all, just learned about this sota and am very excited, planning to contribute in the near future but wanted to quickly post why I feel UO was the best game ever made in hopes of highlighting certain qualities to the development team of sota.
I started playing UO during beta and was blown away. I believe the biggest thing UO brought to the table like no other game has was skill based play over item based play. The constant threat of losing your hard earned items made equipment selection something to be carefully considered. This in a sense leveled the playing field so that casual gamers with the right blend of skill and strategy could compete with hard-core gamers much more effectively. Also, knowing your items would be up for grabs upon death could bring you closer together with fellow players at times, I made some of my best in game friends by helping them retrieve belongings from their corpse in dungeons or being helped by others to retrieve my items. I also made some of my biggest enemies by scammers , thieves, and murderers that scored my items. Both situations drastically improved the game in my opinion though and added a level of realism that has not been duplicated in gaming since.
I loved how scarce property eventually became which made a small home in a prime location worth as much as a tower in the middle of nowhere.
I loved wandering the woods with nothing but my death robe in search of animals to tame and happening across houses that had collapsed, or unusual buildings that had no explanation.
I also loved the varied play styles the skill system made available. Animal taming was my personal favorite but I remember having just as much fun playing tradesman, melee warriors, or thieves.
Another unique quality that stands out in memory was the rare items market. I loved how some of the most valuable items in the game were simple home decor items that were from early holiday gifts, or old dungeons that were later patched, or rare special event spawns.
Anyway, really excited to see how this game progresses and look forward to reading through the forums and seeing other people's input. Peace.

 

UO wasn't the "best game ever", but please continue...


* UO was one of the first graphical MMO's ever and so it gets a lot of credit for bringing to the masses what had already been present in MUD's for over 10 years prior. It is what it is, best game ever is really stretching it though.

 

I think Meridian 59 was the first. And back then it was a "graphical MUD" with the idea of taking what was in MUDs and adding a graphical layer to it. Whether or not you think it was the "best game ever", its certainly in the top as far as MMOs which paved the way AND are still around and operating today Not to mention all the free shards out there. Don't know if its the best game ever but its on the top of the list for sure.

 

I think from my point of view it probably is the best game ever.

I have played it for around 14 years..... I have quit three times for other games, I always go back to UO. When I was most active I ran 5 accounts and had pretty much all characters completed.

UO is the only game that I judge every other mmo by. I lasted around 2 weeks on WoW before I got bored, Aion kept me going for 6 months and Guild Wars 2 has kept me amused on and off for a few months.

They all lack the control, the sandbox, the freedom.......the PvP.

EDIT:
I mean seriously, how many people have played the same game almost every day for 14 years......UO has to be at the top imo.

 

UO was the best game ever or actually it evolved to be the best game ever with UO Renaissance with its almost perfectly balanced and skillbased PvP. UO PvP from the beginning was very unbalanced.

This have nothing to do with little competition cause i played just about everything worth trying after i left UO with Age of Shadows that destroyed the game.

 

My motivation behind this thread was more just to draw attention to aspects of UO that I thought made the game exceedingly fun, not so much to convince people of my opinion that it was the best game ever. Most points I made have been made many times in these forums but I wanted to restate what separated UO from other popular games that fall in the same genre in hopes that some of these point, especially the full loot aspect, will garner support from the development team for implementation into sota.

 

Free to attack players.
Free to drop things anywhere.
Free to place your house where you want.
Free to hunt with your friends even though you might all be at different levels.

I could go on.
But it was mostly about all the freedoms you had.
Today they continue to lock players from doing these things.
Hoping we can get back into a free open world.
But you can already see things not going they way I would hope.
At least let us drop things on the ground anywhere, that would be a start.

 

Another thing that made UO great was that players could be the Hero or the Villain and fight against each other.
The hero could practice things that were good.
The villain could practice things that were evil.

This created content that needed no storyline.
The story was written by the players and their actions.

 

I agree that UO was special because of its skill-based versus level-based approach. When playing EQ or AC after UO, I remember feeling constrained by the character advancement compared to what UO offered. The interactivity of the world - the fact that thing could be moved and stacked - also was cool. It lent a level of open world feeling and creativity that other games just didn't have. Next, I would have to say that the concept of role playing felt more alive in this game - not just in people practicing it, but in how the game was shaped to promote it. And lastly, the unpinning concepts of the game - the Virtues - was great. There was a lot of potential around that.

 

You could make yourself into what ever you wanted to be or what ever naturally evolved, everyone was different.
No quest lines, you could just start doing whatever you wanted, or wander around until adventure found you.
You never found anyone that was too high or low level that you couldn't play with them, and that in part made it easier to make and keep friends.
The chat/chat bubbles and top-down view made socialization easier too.

A lot of things made it great, the only real thing that makes it not so great now-days is there aren't as many people anymore, too many competing games with alot to offer have taken their toll on UO.

 

Things that made UO the best game ever. For me it was Trammel.

 

Griefing made it fun for me.

 

Runebooks

 

One toon that was an evil SOB, and others that were not. They were never connected and only one friend knew about the evil toon.

Being in town with my bard when it was attacked, setting up a table and chair in the middle of the road with wine and food and then provoking everything while my friends ran around finishing monsters off.

Being a member of SOA (Society of Archers), and having a large group get wiped doing something stupid but we had to try.

Damn that was fun.

 

No dropping items wherever you want??!!!???!!!!

Omg.... You mean.. we can only place them inside our houses? =( That is horrible! The freedom to drop items ANYWHERE is even more important than full loot PvP for me! =(

*throws a balling tantrum*

Ill make a trade. The game will be all pure trammel, but with the ability to drop items anywere. plzzzz???

 

I believe there is discussion about placing items on the ground, even if its for a short time. Nothing is concrete but it looks like its leaning that ways.

 

Even if the items decay real fast.. thats better than not being able to stack stuff up at all! =( *sniff* How can we have a sandbox style game when you cant interact with objects and move them around in the open world like you can in UO or Ultima 9? Being able to break barrels and see items come out and being able to scatter them and stack them any way you please is the core feature of "sandbox". Ultima 9, though single player was probably more "sandbox" than any game ive ever seen! It just wasnt online. You could scatter the items in the game anywere you wanted! Out in the woods, on a mountain, in lord british's castle, come back later and they would still be there! You could basically make any building in the game "yours" by dropping all your loot in it. You could find an abandoned building out somewhere and make it your hideout and stash all your goods there. Sure you cant do all that with building in an MMO since players will actually own the buildings... but being able to scatter items anywhere is what makes a game "sandbox".

 

Best game ever is Ultima 7 and I was soo happy back in beta to see that UO was based on the same vuew, graphics and freedom. What I loved the most about UO was thr freedom to do anything you like and for me it was treasure hunting!

 

The sand.

 

Finally: ..that so many (obviously) VERY different player types seem to have found the same game so appealing..

After all!