Ultima Online – No. 43 – 1UP.com Essential 100

Some people claim that UO never gets any publicity in the gaming media. They couldn’t be more wrong. Massively.Joystiq.com writers can’t go a week without working in a mention of UO somewhere. Anytime anybody looks at past MMORPGs, Ultima Online is going to be mentioned in the article or in the comments. MMORPG.com even cranked out a several-hour livestream video a few months ago. UO is mentioned a lot more often than people think, by higher profile gaming sites than people think, and it’s about to get a lot more coverage later this month.

UO is even going to have a special session at next month’s Game Developers Conference.

So what’s the latest reference? UO clocked in at number 43 on 1UP.com’s Essential 100. It’s even the top cover story at 1UP.com today:

If Ultima Online has any legitimate claim to firsties here, it’s on account of that “massive” part of the name. Thousands of simultaneous players sharing a single world just hadn’t been done before. Subscribers peaked at around a quarter of a million, which sounds almost paltry when compared to the millions upon millions still playing World of Warcraft, but for the time it was nothing short of a phenomenon. Especially when one bears in mind not only that the world’s online population was orders of magnitude smaller back in 1996 when the game was unveiled, but that a 33.6k modem was a blazingly fast toy for rich people. It was a much smaller pond, and when 100,000 people started playing within the first six months, it felt like everyone you knew was getting into this thing.

It’s sandbox nature gets a good mention as well:

It’s actually this near-total anarchy that most sets UO apart from what came after. Nobody had done anything quite like this before, and it shows. While today MMOs have become mostly formulaic and carefully manage player progression, interaction, class balancing, and just generally make sure that the entire experience is a known quantity, Ultima Online faced no such constraints. There was no “common sense” when it came to this sort of thing, and while the kitchen-sink approach of providing everything one would expect from a single-player RPG and then letting a few thousand people play with it at once had occasionally disastrous consequences, it also led to the kind of freedom and surprise that one doesn’t often encounter in a modern MMO. Instead of a predictable XP-treadmill, players weren’t even confined by character classes and were left free to pursue trade skills or martial talents without restriction.

The author wraps it with the hope that someday, somebody will take a look at UO and develop a new game based on the same concepts:

but maybe sometime soon someone will look at that saturation and sameness and trace things back to UO, before everything was crystallized, and start a new lineage. Er, except not Lineage, because that’s pretty much the exact opposite of what I’m talking about.

It’s a good article, doesn’t pull any punches, and while some may not be happy that the article mentions some of the major negatives that players had early on, UO would not be UO without those negatives. Like or hate the early years, there has never been anything else like them.