Now EA doesnt care a sh*t about its costumers. The only thing they do is..........well nothing!!!!!!!!. Right now i want UO to change of publisher.
I remember the old days when ORIGIN WAS the leader of EA.
Those fine days in Fel........ good vs bad.....ahhh.....good times........now in Fel you get killed by both good or bad.......whats going on!!!!!!!!!!!!!????????????. Trammel is full of newbies.........and borig........so im always risking my character in Fel. Hell, i think im the only good boy in Fel, tried to help a newbie twice.............he kept attacking on me! He somehow killed me with a very rare exploit..........using more than 1 weapon in hand?????????Fel is full of psychos right now
It's funny how being new and dieing in this MMORPG seems to have aroused everyone. Yes, please! Lets go back to the old UO where I got the chance to die whenever I left town and lose what little I had! As a warrior, I use bandages. GONE! Where'd they go? To some dumbass PK who thought it'd be funny to kill and loot a newbie. Ohh fun!
If you like PKing so much. Go to Fel! Rather then getting rid of the stupid old system they made one for those who like PKing (Fel) and one for those that don't (Tram). Is it really that much fun to be constantly killed by random players and have your stuff stolen. Here's an idea. Take all the money out of your wallet/purse, run outside and get into a fight with some local teenagers. They'll beat the hell out of you and take your money. Sounds like fun doesn't it?
I said it before and Ill say it again. It sounds like you had zero skillz in this game. So stay in tram cuz the boyz in felluca dont wanna hear it mouth. I could go to the bucs den as a red with madd loot on me and have nothing to worry about atleast for a short time on some of my characters. You can hide as soon as u recalled there....then id stealth away and have teleport already up....then id get attacked but since i already had tele ready id hit my spot and hide again...all this while having an invis ring handy just in case things got really sticky. Then id stealth away and already have a gate open where id go in and dispel the gate and it would be me and just one clown who couldnt gank me. And then Id crush him and kill his horse and take all his loot. Id liked going to that sweet spot in....damn its been so long i forgot the dungeon name but had rotting corpses and a locked door.....What Im sayin is dont trash old UO for being a unique MMORPG...not everybody liked it but for the majority that did it was their most favorite game ever like me.
Zero skillz? Games like these take little skill. If you can press buttons on a keyboard and move a mouse and click, you could do just about anything in any MMORPG. I am saying the old UO sucked, it made it tons of fun for vets but those vets made it horrible for new players. Who wants to lose everything you spent time on? It's only fun for the PKer, not the new player being taken advantage of his first time on the game. Felluca is for all you vets that feel like you need to attack new players to feel good about yourselves. PvP is fun if it's friendly PvP. You know like 1 on 1 duels or battles in an arena, not run outside and get slaughtered by a GM warrior your first time in the game.
Old UO may have been unique (I guess you could call Shadowbane unqiue then too) but that doesnt mean it was good. You want to randomly attack people, go to Felluca, theres no reason you should be allowed to ruin honest peoples good time.
Well, all I'm going to say is that us "Bad boyz" felluccans all started out newbies. im an avid pker, I like to kill reds and blues and Trammel is my homeplace for my newbie characters. I have been to Fellucca hell, huge ganks and such, and I dont want to train my character in Fellucca for that reason.
Yeah, if UO went back to the "Good ol' days" there would be more blues in Fell, the red count would be incredible.
The old skool UO wasnt bad, in fact, its great for us veterans. But when I was a newbie, it was tough trying to get anywhere in an all Fellccan enivronment. Go play siege perilous if thats your style.
Ultima Online- Apoc Final Fantasy XI Online- Nabara World of Warcraft- (Coming soon :P)
i play on australian servers because racism is acceptable there
I've started playing on the player shards, namely IPY. It's a Pre UO:R server, with a few Post UO:R things thrown in. Pretty fun, even as a newbie. Yeah, getting killed sucks, yeah losing your hard earn gold to some theif sucks, but it's not like replacing your gear is that difficult, especially if you started with a crafting mule for cash.
"Pvp is fun if its freindly pvp." -Dreakon "Theres no reason you should be able to ruin honest peoples good times." -Dreakon
LOL thats my comment on that. I think that UO is just a game right.....kinda like the Stanley Cup championship is just a game right? Can you imagine a player on tampa or calgary saying.."make this game fun so its fair and freindly." LOL Dude stfu...everybody was a noobie in that game at one point. I was a noobie and got crushed tons of times by others but Im smart enough to steer clear of the majority of that. And to say that UO took no skillz to be good is just crazy.
I'll assume you are refering to the post above mine.
However wrong he may be, he raises an interesting point. Given what eventually happened with UO, and the PvE-ifying of SB, although it's still pretty light on content, will we see a non-pvp server for a game like Darkfall. Sort of like the Zeks in EQ, but in reverse. Granted, I don't understand why people that are anti-pvp insist on coming to pvp games, and demanding that they conform to their demands, when there are plenty of games out there where you never have to worry about pvp.
While I tend to agree with TmcC on the point he's making, I would say that UO doesn't require skill so much as knowledge of the game. Given an equal knowledge of the game, it's pretty much a matter of qear, and dumb luck to an extent. I suppose you could argue that knowledge of the game mechanics equates to skill, but I disagree. A game like Planetside does to an extent, same with Darktide in AC, but the only MMO I see as taking actual skill would be Darkfall, and it isn't entirely player skill, but a 50/50 split between player, and character skill.
I agree. I think knowledge meshes with skill. Any kind of mage in UO{atleast when i played it} took skill, knowledge and intelligence to be good at pvp. If you were not semi intelligent you could not become a good mage. We had some guys in our guilds that attempted to be execptional mages for months and months and never got anywhere pvping. So some characters took more skill, knowledge, and smarts to be good at pvp.
I started playing UO in I think 1996, back in the early closed betas when there was really only one shard (at a time, anyway). I miss the game as it was then - I've beta'd and played every major MMORPG released since and nothing has come even remotely close to what UO was in the beginning.
The fact that PVP was possible anywhere, to anyone, so long as it's outside of town was great. Sure, people were often PK'd outside of town and they'd lose all of their hard-earned equipment, [i]but[/i] it's the risk that made it exciting - risk vs reward.
For a while I played as a PK outside of Britain on Atlantic and Chesapeake (when ches first came online); however, the most fun I had wasn't when I was a PK, but when I was in a guild of anti-PKs. We owned a keep and towers up near Minoc (which was amazing back then) and we'd regularly go on PK hunts. We'd go to places like Deceit and set up ambushes just waiting for the PKs to come rolling in. It's the epic struggle of good vs. evil, combined with absolute freedom and risk that made the game great.
For the argument about Trammel being good, well, you could very easily train your character as far as was needed either within the city limits or in your own, or a friend's, house. You were never forced to leave town, but if you did you knew you were taking a risk doing so. The problem with introducing Trammel wasn't that it made the game too easy, but that adding additional landmass, especially one the size of Britannia, cuts the players at any given location in the game in half. While some dungeons were once littered with people trying to accumulate wealth and make a name for themselves, the same dungeon is now almost always empty. I noticed this problem as soon as T2A came out, and it's been getting worse with every new land expansion.
Also, PvP in UO (unlike many other MMORPGs) took [i]a lot[/i] of skill to be good. Sure, as a warrior you just have to double click someone and charge at them, but as a mage there were so many combinations to be done, on top of knowing just what should be done at certain times. It was about tactics, coordination and intuition.
Early Chesapeake was some the best gaming I've ever experienced. I went by the name of Zeus; I spent my newbie months in a Moonglow guild called The Nameless (NmL), and went from there to the Banana Boyz, Keepers of Chaos and eventually I was the guildmaster of a guild called SoV.
Ahhh, those were the days. Nothing has compared to it since, and I've played EVERYTHING.
Well at the end of this year a game called World of Warcraft comes out and that will show you how good UO could have been if the developers actually cared about anything other than $12.99 a month. So, if you want a newer version of UO (and yes Blizzard has copied UOs crafting in some extent) then play WoW. Course seeing Blizzard actually gives a .... we might see them make UO finally go away
Originally posted by galefan2004 Well at the end of this year a game called World of Warcraft comes out and that will show you how good UO could have been if the developers actually cared about anything other than $12.99 a month. So, if you want a newer version of UO (and yes Blizzard has copied UOs crafting in some extent) then play WoW. Course seeing Blizzard actually gives a .... we might see them make UO finally go away
Have you beta tested WoW, or is this opinion based mainly on what you've read on websites?
Hail and well met, stop arguing you are far away from topic i was alpha+beta-testing and left UO when T2A came out and ruined my good old game had some bug,which made it unplayable to my servers Europe and Drachenfels,only the Testserver,where u not could sold stuff to Vendors(forgot Name?something like Perilous?) was available,so i left Game But back to topic there IS a nice little MMORPG and it is a small but nice Copy of Oldworld UO and is called ASHEN EMPIRE this Game reminds me in many Ways of my beginn in early 1996 sincerly Sir-Peter ex-GM Avatars of Sosaria(Blue) and ex-Member of Wolfs-Clan(RED)
Sorry, but my post wasn't meant negatively, or in any way to argue. I genuinely want to know if many WoW details will make it at all like Pre-UOR UO, as I haven't followed all of the features of WoW.
u cant compare WOW with UO and from first Testinsiders its stated,that its a Game like usual,nothing else,exept for ppls which play since Warcraft/Starcraft 1,they will love it(me too)
Originally posted by paratus I started playing UO in I think 1996, back in the early closed betas when there was really only one shard (at a time, anyway). I miss the game as it was then - I've beta'd and played every major MMORPG released since and nothing has come even remotely close to what UO was in the beginning. The fact that PVP was possible anywhere, to anyone, so long as it's outside of town was great. Sure, people were often PK'd outside of town and they'd lose all of their hard-earned equipment, [i]but[/i] it's the risk that made it exciting - risk vs reward. For a while I played as a PK outside of Britain on Atlantic and Chesapeake (when ches first came online); however, the most fun I had wasn't when I was a PK, but when I was in a guild of anti-PKs. We owned a keep and towers up near Minoc (which was amazing back then) and we'd regularly go on PK hunts. We'd go to places like Deceit and set up ambushes just waiting for the PKs to come rolling in. It's the epic struggle of good vs. evil, combined with absolute freedom and risk that made the game great. For the argument about Trammel being good, well, you could very easily train your character as far as was needed either within the city limits or in your own, or a friend's, house. You were never forced to leave town, but if you did you knew you were taking a risk doing so. The problem with introducing Trammel wasn't that it made the game too easy, but that adding additional landmass, especially one the size of Britannia, cuts the players at any given location in the game in half. While some dungeons were once littered with people trying to accumulate wealth and make a name for themselves, the same dungeon is now almost always empty. I noticed this problem as soon as T2A came out, and it's been getting worse with every new land expansion. Also, PvP in UO (unlike many other MMORPGs) took [i]a lot[/i] of skill to be good. Sure, as a warrior you just have to double click someone and charge at them, but as a mage there were so many combinations to be done, on top of knowing just what should be done at certain times. It was about tactics, coordination and intuition. Early Chesapeake was some the best gaming I've ever experienced. I went by the name of Zeus; I spent my newbie months in a Moonglow guild called The Nameless (NmL), and went from there to the Banana Boyz, Keepers of Chaos and eventually I was the guildmaster of a guild called SoV. Ahhh, those were the days. Nothing has compared to it since, and I've played EVERYTHING.
i'm from chessy as well! also i have played since 96-04 i still have my account but play IPY alot more then chessy.i agree with everything you say my man! by any chance were u around during the tourny? if so my best friends won that names are Ru Paul and Ralik the best on chessy PVP wise i very much agree with ur comment about the PVP back in the day but today on chessy it's more about the items not the skillz and it sucks!! i will never find a game like UO pre UOR and that just SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! o well lolz ( UO PWNZ EQ)
Very very well put my UO brothers. We here it over and over again but when will we something that compares to old UO. You guys might want to check out www.darkfallonline.com. This game gives me a lil bit of that old UO feeling....well we'll see.
Originally posted by SirPeter Hail and well met, stop arguing you are far away from topic i was alpha+beta-testing and left UO when T2A came out and ruined my good old game had some bug,which made it unplayable to my servers Europe and Drachenfels,only the Testserver,where u not could sold stuff to Vendors(forgot Name?something like Perilous?) was available,so i left Game But back to topic there IS a nice little MMORPG and it is a small but nice Copy of Oldworld UO and is called ASHEN EMPIRE this Game reminds me in many Ways of my beginn in early 1996 sincerly Sir-Peter ex-GM Avatars of Sosaria(Blue) and ex-Member of Wolfs-Clan(RED)
I played "Ashens's Empire" back when it was called "Dransik." I beta tested it for a year. Then I quit playing it after no updates. They have great potential. Thier biggest problem is that they convert the Japanese game(can't remeber the name) into the North American style game. Some of the features don't convert very well. But, now that the new people bought it out, it may become a old school UO thing...let's hope
For those interested, there is a game that has quietly been in development for some time called Trials of Ascension. It seems very Niche oriented, very innovative, and it is extraordinarily board friendly. The game seems tailored around that classic RP experience we had when younger.
Many a horizons (you know, the visionary one) and classic UO refugee have registered in hopes that this game will rekindle the classic UO feel.
www.shadowpool.com
Permadeath and environmental challenges are the next great step in the evolution of MMORPGs. Only through true adversity will one feel accomplished. Only in truly knowing you can die will true adversity present itself.
Originally posted by Kaiowas Was Yamatto even in existence that early on?
When I started playing the only two servers were Atlantic and Pacific, and even with those, only one of them was online at a time. Being an east coaster, I wasn't too pleased when I had to play Pacific.
I started right after retail launched and remembered Atlantic being one of them for sure. Was great for a while until ATL got too laggy.
My greatest UO memories included late-night antics of a fisherman thief running into pkers houses and taking whatever he could, the amazing rp war between OES and LOA on atlantic, and my own time spent in my tower just watching people go by.
The original poster had a good question, and I think, like others have said, it all comes down to content. If someone makes a game with even close to as good content with enhanced graphics and a fresh look, it'll be the next huge hit.
Any game where you enjoy doing things like sitting down in a house and playing checkers or going out for on a sea voyage for a day or spending an hour or two just making costume combinations is pretty special. As a disgruntled L2 player, I see it as the exact opposite of UO
What made UO great isn't simply that it had a lot of content (granted, it did.. and the small things like you mentioned are what add up) but that it was an entire playground to have fun in. You weren't forced to take any sort of specific path, but could instead do anything that you could possibly think up.
On top of this, what I mentioned earlier about a true risk/reward system made it shine. The graphics aren't the best, but they're more than good enough for the game.. the game play in the early UO days is what made it great. With the lack of PVP it has now it just isn't what it once was.. the risk and fear is gone. Richard Garriot had intended the game to be as it was then - the towns are safe through protection by guards, but outside of the town is dangerous and lawless. Now, with Trammel (as almost every other MMORPG in existance) the only people who are at risk out of town are those who are going out specifically for PvP. The others are safe to wander where they wish.. but finding a hidden point of interest (ie: the hedge maze) is just not as sweet when you can simply walk or recall there with no obstacles (or simply fear) to overcome.
That's true. And even then, I don't think the death penalties (even with looting) were very harsh. If you were stupid enough to venture outside of town with loads of expensive items, you deserved to be robbed. Replacing a full set of plate or magic studded leather and a nice weapon was a setback, but only by a few days at most. Even going back to a normal cheap weapon wasn't th end of the world.
Comments
EA killed ORIGIN.
Now EA doesnt care a sh*t about its costumers. The only thing they do is..........well nothing!!!!!!!!. Right now i want UO to change of publisher.
I remember the old days when ORIGIN WAS the leader of EA.
Those fine days in Fel........ good vs bad.....ahhh.....good times........now in Fel you get killed by both good or bad.......whats going on!!!!!!!!!!!!!????????????. Trammel is full of newbies.........and borig........so im always risking my character in Fel. Hell, i think im the only good boy in Fel, tried to help a newbie twice.............he kept attacking on me! He somehow killed me with a very rare exploit..........using more than 1 weapon in hand?????????Fel is full of psychos right now
It's funny how being new and dieing in this MMORPG seems to have aroused everyone. Yes, please! Lets go back to the old UO where I got the chance to die whenever I left town and lose what little I had! As a warrior, I use bandages. GONE! Where'd they go? To some dumbass PK who thought it'd be funny to kill and loot a newbie. Ohh fun!
If you like PKing so much. Go to Fel! Rather then getting rid of the stupid old system they made one for those who like PKing (Fel) and one for those that don't (Tram). Is it really that much fun to be constantly killed by random players and have your stuff stolen. Here's an idea. Take all the money out of your wallet/purse, run outside and get into a fight with some local teenagers. They'll beat the hell out of you and take your money. Sounds like fun doesn't it?
I said it before and Ill say it again. It sounds like you had zero skillz in this game. So stay in tram cuz the boyz in felluca dont wanna hear it mouth. I could go to the bucs den as a red with madd loot on me and have nothing to worry about atleast for a short time on some of my characters. You can hide as soon as u recalled there....then id stealth away and have teleport already up....then id get attacked but since i already had tele ready id hit my spot and hide again...all this while having an invis ring handy just in case things got really sticky. Then id stealth away and already have a gate open where id go in and dispel the gate and it would be me and just one clown who couldnt gank me. And then Id crush him and kill his horse and take all his loot. Id liked going to that sweet spot in....damn its been so long i forgot the dungeon name but had rotting corpses and a locked door.....What Im sayin is dont trash old UO for being a unique MMORPG...not everybody liked it but for the majority that did it was their most favorite game ever like me.
Zero skillz? Games like these take little skill. If you can press buttons on a keyboard and move a mouse and click, you could do just about anything in any MMORPG. I am saying the old UO sucked, it made it tons of fun for vets but those vets made it horrible for new players. Who wants to lose everything you spent time on? It's only fun for the PKer, not the new player being taken advantage of his first time on the game. Felluca is for all you vets that feel like you need to attack new players to feel good about yourselves. PvP is fun if it's friendly PvP. You know like 1 on 1 duels or battles in an arena, not run outside and get slaughtered by a GM warrior your first time in the game.
Old UO may have been unique (I guess you could call Shadowbane unqiue then too) but that doesnt mean it was good. You want to randomly attack people, go to Felluca, theres no reason you should be allowed to ruin honest peoples good time.
Well, all I'm going to say is that us "Bad boyz" felluccans all started out newbies. im an avid pker, I like to kill reds and blues and Trammel is my homeplace for my newbie characters. I have been to Fellucca hell, huge ganks and such, and I dont want to train my character in Fellucca for that reason.
Yeah, if UO went back to the "Good ol' days" there would be more blues in Fell, the red count would be incredible.
The old skool UO wasnt bad, in fact, its great for us veterans. But when I was a newbie, it was tough trying to get anywhere in an all Fellccan enivronment. Go play siege perilous if thats your style.
Ultima Online- Apoc
Final Fantasy XI Online- Nabara
World of Warcraft- (Coming soon :P)
I've started playing on the player shards, namely IPY. It's a Pre UO:R server, with a few Post UO:R things thrown in. Pretty fun, even as a newbie. Yeah, getting killed sucks, yeah losing your hard earn gold to some theif sucks, but it's not like replacing your gear is that difficult, especially if you started with a crafting mule for cash.
If you don't like playing in a world where you can die at anytime, or be robbed, might I suggest trying
http://www.solitairecentral.com/sol_web.html
You'll never need to worry about being pk'd again.
--------
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
"Pvp is fun if its freindly pvp." -Dreakon
"Theres no reason you should be able to ruin honest peoples good times." -Dreakon
LOL thats my comment on that. I think that UO is just a game right.....kinda like the Stanley Cup championship is just a game right? Can you imagine a player on tampa or calgary saying.."make this game fun so its fair and freindly." LOL
Dude stfu...everybody was a noobie in that game at one point. I was a noobie and got crushed tons of times by others but Im smart enough to steer clear of the majority of that. And to say that UO took no skillz to be good is just crazy.
I'll assume you are refering to the post above mine.
However wrong he may be, he raises an interesting point. Given what eventually happened with UO, and the PvE-ifying of SB, although it's still pretty light on content, will we see a non-pvp server for a game like Darkfall. Sort of like the Zeks in EQ, but in reverse. Granted, I don't understand why people that are anti-pvp insist on coming to pvp games, and demanding that they conform to their demands, when there are plenty of games out there where you never have to worry about pvp.
While I tend to agree with TmcC on the point he's making, I would say that UO doesn't require skill so much as knowledge of the game. Given an equal knowledge of the game, it's pretty much a matter of qear, and dumb luck to an extent. I suppose you could argue that knowledge of the game mechanics equates to skill, but I disagree. A game like Planetside does to an extent, same with Darktide in AC, but the only MMO I see as taking actual skill would be Darkfall, and it isn't entirely player skill, but a 50/50 split between player, and character skill.
--------
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
I started playing UO in I think 1996, back in the early closed betas when there was really only one shard (at a time, anyway). I miss the game as it was then - I've beta'd and played every major MMORPG released since and nothing has come even remotely close to what UO was in the beginning.
The fact that PVP was possible anywhere, to anyone, so long as it's outside of town was great. Sure, people were often PK'd outside of town and they'd lose all of their hard-earned equipment, [i]but[/i] it's the risk that made it exciting - risk vs reward.
For a while I played as a PK outside of Britain on Atlantic and Chesapeake (when ches first came online); however, the most fun I had wasn't when I was a PK, but when I was in a guild of anti-PKs. We owned a keep and towers up near Minoc (which was amazing back then) and we'd regularly go on PK hunts. We'd go to places like Deceit and set up ambushes just waiting for the PKs to come rolling in. It's the epic struggle of good vs. evil, combined with absolute freedom and risk that made the game great.
For the argument about Trammel being good, well, you could very easily train your character as far as was needed either within the city limits or in your own, or a friend's, house. You were never forced to leave town, but if you did you knew you were taking a risk doing so. The problem with introducing Trammel wasn't that it made the game too easy, but that adding additional landmass, especially one the size of Britannia, cuts the players at any given location in the game in half. While some dungeons were once littered with people trying to accumulate wealth and make a name for themselves, the same dungeon is now almost always empty. I noticed this problem as soon as T2A came out, and it's been getting worse with every new land expansion.
Also, PvP in UO (unlike many other MMORPGs) took [i]a lot[/i] of skill to be good. Sure, as a warrior you just have to double click someone and charge at them, but as a mage there were so many combinations to be done, on top of knowing just what should be done at certain times. It was about tactics, coordination and intuition.
Early Chesapeake was some the best gaming I've ever experienced. I went by the name of Zeus; I spent my newbie months in a Moonglow guild called The Nameless (NmL), and went from there to the Banana Boyz, Keepers of Chaos and eventually I was the guildmaster of a guild called SoV.
Ahhh, those were the days. Nothing has compared to it since, and I've played EVERYTHING.
Hail and well met,
stop arguing you are far away from topic
i was alpha+beta-testing and left UO when T2A came out and ruined my good old game
had some bug,which made it unplayable to my servers Europe and Drachenfels,only the Testserver,where u not could sold stuff to Vendors(forgot Name?something like Perilous?) was available,so i left Game
But back to topic
there IS a nice little MMORPG and it is a small but nice Copy of Oldworld UO and is called
ASHEN EMPIRE
this Game reminds me in many Ways of my beginn in early 1996
sincerly
Sir-Peter ex-GM Avatars of Sosaria(Blue) and ex-Member of Wolfs-Clan(RED)
u cant compare WOW with UO and from first Testinsiders its stated,that its a Game like usual,nothing else,exept for ppls which play since Warcraft/Starcraft 1,they will love it(me too)
Blah blah blah......
Blah blah blah......
I played "Ashens's Empire" back when it was called "Dransik." I beta tested it for a year. Then I quit playing it after no updates. They have great potential. Thier biggest problem is that they convert the Japanese game(can't remeber the name) into the North American style game. Some of the features don't convert very well. But, now that the new people bought it out, it may become a old school UO thing...let's hope
For those interested, there is a game that has quietly been in development for some time called Trials of Ascension. It seems very Niche oriented, very innovative, and it is extraordinarily board friendly. The game seems tailored around that classic RP experience we had when younger.
Many a horizons (you know, the visionary one) and classic UO refugee have registered in hopes that this game will rekindle the classic UO feel.
www.shadowpool.com
Permadeath and environmental challenges are the next great step in the evolution of MMORPGs. Only through true adversity will one feel accomplished. Only in truly knowing you can die will true adversity present itself.
Was Yamatto even in existence that early on?
I started right after retail launched and remembered Atlantic being one of them for sure. Was great for a while until ATL got too laggy.
My greatest UO memories included late-night antics of a fisherman thief running into pkers houses and taking whatever he could, the amazing rp war between OES and LOA on atlantic, and my own time spent in my tower just watching people go by.
The original poster had a good question, and I think, like others have said, it all comes down to content. If someone makes a game with even close to as good content with enhanced graphics and a fresh look, it'll be the next huge hit.
Any game where you enjoy doing things like sitting down in a house and playing checkers or going out for on a sea voyage for a day or spending an hour or two just making costume combinations is pretty special. As a disgruntled L2 player, I see it as the exact opposite of UO
What made UO great isn't simply that it had a lot of content (granted, it did.. and the small things like you mentioned are what add up) but that it was an entire playground to have fun in. You weren't forced to take any sort of specific path, but could instead do anything that you could possibly think up.
On top of this, what I mentioned earlier about a true risk/reward system made it shine. The graphics aren't the best, but they're more than good enough for the game.. the game play in the early UO days is what made it great. With the lack of PVP it has now it just isn't what it once was.. the risk and fear is gone. Richard Garriot had intended the game to be as it was then - the towns are safe through protection by guards, but outside of the town is dangerous and lawless. Now, with Trammel (as almost every other MMORPG in existance) the only people who are at risk out of town are those who are going out specifically for PvP. The others are safe to wander where they wish.. but finding a hidden point of interest (ie: the hedge maze) is just not as sweet when you can simply walk or recall there with no obstacles (or simply fear) to overcome.
That's true. And even then, I don't think the death penalties (even with looting) were very harsh. If you were stupid enough to venture outside of town with loads of expensive items, you deserved to be robbed. Replacing a full set of plate or magic studded leather and a nice weapon was a setback, but only by a few days at most. Even going back to a normal cheap weapon wasn't th end of the world.