Being born and raised on the streets of the UO ghetto...

That's how I describe UO to the younger generation of MMOers. They will never have any idea what it is like to get faceraped and all the belongings in your invetory taken from you, nor will they know what's like to do it to someone else.

A friend of mine and I discussed this about WoW players years ago when we used to play WoW, he said "Bro, these kids have no fucking idea what we went through in UO. We were born and raised in the ghettos of UO." He was of course talking about Felucca.

Just thought it was a funny way to put it, but at the same time it's very true.

I played WoW from 2005 to late 2012, never once did I ever panic from anything in that game because I knew my stuff would be safe, no one could really do anything to me other than hurt my pride. My equipment was protected for 3 days if I died, so i didnt have to worry about not making it back to my body in time. Looting it all back? nope, it would just appear back on me... lol.

Not like in UO... you body and it's contents would decay within 10 minutes. Your ass better hope to get out of a dungeon and res'd to get back in before that happened. Anyway I could rant and rant about this... Just thought I'd share the ghetto thing.

exactly!!!!!

Um.... You mean like running around Buc's Den hopping serverlines with 10 bandaids and a GM weapon trying to get a kill?

Oh did I mention naked or with a death robe?

Yup. Yup to all of this. I try to explain the unforgiving world of UO to all the modern MMO players and it never seems to sink in.

"No, no, you dont understand , they will loot EVERYTHING on your body when they kill you."

"No, no, you dont understand, there are no experience points or 'level ups', there are no quests, you gotta make your own."

"No, no, you dont understand, there is no end game uber max craftable item you have to spend months gathering the mats for. The end game of UO isnt a single dungeon raid, or a perfect set of armor/weps, or getting all the 'acheivements'. The end game is........"

"No, no, you DONT understand how awesome it is to have your own house in this game, and work for a bigger one."

" [laughing] No, no, no kid, you dont understand what real, raw PvP unless you have played UO."

"No, no, no mom and dad, you dont understand. This is my life."

This is it man. Parents just don't understand...

Well Tom Chilton did get alot of ideas for WOW from UO after he was on the development team for AOS. It was Adrick and him that developed Publish 15 and 16 which of course was the beginning of the end for the Pre-UO:R crowd.

After item insurance came out I lost respect for UO... it was just a downard spiral after that.

The reason the mean streets we all grew up on back in the day aren't around anymore is it's not financially viable to a company. It costs money to deal with angry customers. As with anything if it must appeal to the masses it must suck.

Back in 1997 when UO was released, I was trying to get my friends to play and when I explained that you can't "beat UO" or "get to the end of the game" - they said it meant I wasn't a good enough player to reach the end of the game. The concept of a 100% open world couldn't even sink into their heads since the modernized MMO-niche was still a new concept (most of us were use to playing MUDs at the time).

I was playing UO and a friend of mine was playing DAoC and we used to compare who's was better. He had houses... I had HOUSES! He had xp loss on death.. I had EVERYTHING I OWN LOST. He had some very very very awesome pvp mechanics.. i had people killing you at the banker or in the dungeon or shopping at yew or ... . Neither had instances (at the begining) or quests (for the most part) and both were AWESOME in there own right. I miss playing DAoC ... but there's a reason I can still play UO!!!

Theres something to be said for a game where you can be ANYTHING.. If you want you can play detective (detect hidden, foresnsic eval) or celebrity chef (cooking and taste id).. and to sell stuff to the masses you have to supply stuff people actually want enough to GO TO YOUR LOCATION - instead of the cheapest price on a global/multiserver auction house.

Also ... almost 20 years later and the graphics are still what they are.. Maybe they don't fit today's 27 inch monitors (dont stretch well) but inside that tiny 600x800 square .. the world still looks as good today as anything else out there.

You realize you can have a much larger window than 600x800, right?

I know you can through razor - never tried it. I actually don't mind the tiny window. Maybe I'll mess w/ it when I get home in a few hours but you know what happens when you try and fix stuff thats not broken...

I used to panic and drop my smoke when this one particular raid leader would start raging over people making mistakes out of nowhere on Vent...

Trust me, it's broken and it needs to be fixed.

It's like when you get a second monitor. "I'd never use a second monitor, what's the point?" is what you tell yourself before you have one. Then you get it and you have no idea how you ever survived without it.

My first UO character got lost in Yew and I had to delete it and start a new one because I had no idea where he was or where the shops were.

My second UO character got killed by a dog. Turns out 10 STR, 35 DEX, 10 INT is not a recipe for success when you run out of arrows and are trying to fight a dog with a dagger and have 0 Fencing.

And it's not like I was some dumb kid or something, I was 18 years old and could legally drive a car and go to war and such. And I was getting lost in the woods and killed by dogs in a video game. There's nothing like this game that I've ever seen before or since.

When I first got started UO I gathered together a gang of noobs like myself, telling them we were going to take over this town (Britain) and slaughter everyone in our way. Well that lasted all but 5 seconds when I got guard whacked in town trying to attack someone with my 50 swordsmanship and the rest of my "gang" laughed at me and walked off.

I got UO Christmas of 97. Wasn't able to install and play it until sometime in May the next year. (PC wasn't up to snuff, and convincing parents to let me use their credit card wasn't easy even though I payed with paper route money)

The first night a friend of mine and I connected and got in game is a night I'll never forget. The feeling was amazing... impossible to describe but everything had this amazing feel to it, there was this GIANT world out there full of people it just blew our minds.

We ran around for a few hours finding our way to the large chunks of player housing North of Minoc. Collecting every piece of trash and loot we could find while visiting houses along the way we finally found our way into a mining cave. On our way out we encountered what were probably a group of reds but I have no idea because we didn't know what a red or blue or grey or allnames was.

All we saw was a little dot of fire on my orc helmed forehead for about 30 seconds until my modem caught up and we quickly saw the flamestrike animation and died.

Untrue. I had to get rid of my second monitor because it dropped my productivity drastically! I was using it shamefully for UO and watching videos while I worked

Ahahaha!

OMG. Im sure we all have a similar story trying to explain the pure awesome that UO was to a friend of the "modern" MMO.

I started playing at the beginning of the end. 2001. I started playing JUST after they introduced trammel and the moonstones, and BEFORE pub16.
I was used to playing games like Diablo2 and console based RPG's like Final fantasy and Dragon Warrior.
My buddys at work were playing Diablo 2 at the time and one of them suggested that we try a game called Ultima Online.

I was instantly hooked.

I started as a mage but took up swordsmanship. I was running around in my home made clothing (cause I picked up tailoring as well) and healing myself exclusively with potions cause they were cheaper than magery and faster than bandages, and I also decided to take up Alchemy. I was seriously excited I remember shouting in game "THERES MORE THAN ONE TOWN!?!?!?"

...and yes, my first death EVER was to a Great Hart and I was running SCREAMING through brittan yelling HELP ME!!!!!

Words can not describe the pure joy I felt that first week to FINALLY find such an open ended game.

Then I found this curious thing called a "Moonstone(Fellucia)" on a mongbat or something I killed. It was late at night and my friends had went to bed so I went experimenting. It opened a portal and I went through without fear. Being "born" in trammel makes you naive after all. It seemed like nothing happened. Puzzled I went to bed.

The next night I logged in and went to the bank to get ready for my next adventure and there were HORDES of people with blue and red cloaks at WAR with each other right there in town. There were bones and blood spatters scattered all around. The trees were all dead and the land was lifeless. I instantly felt a feeling of foreboding that something bad was going on. Not 80's bad either. I was utterly shocked. Ive heared of these so called "shard wide events" and thought this was one of them.

I was a stone marked "Signup stone for True Brittanians" figuring this was all just some event (born in tram remember) I signed up.

To my utter horror I was ruthlessly murdered everywhere I went, I remember one particular fellow who I developed a particular hatred for. His name was "Ahh the Power of Cheese" and he was a dick. EVERY TIME he saw me he would say the same thing over and over. Id be all like "please stop killing me" and "Im just trying to play the game!!!" He would always say "Corp Por" then this squiggly line would fly at me and I would die. I was dumbfounded.

Steeled with determination I went to work and put out the call to arms with my friends. I told them that a server event was going on and we needed to do some serious training just to be able to survive. We needed to band together and destroy this foe known only as "Ahh the Power of Cheese." So we decided to meet at our normal spot at 7pm. The blacksmith shop just outside of brittan.

I waited and waited and after a half an hour or so they didnt show up. I figured they got busy and just werent gonna log on that night. I continued my efforts to defend brittain the best I could. I even got help from another defender of brit who gave me some Daemon Bone armor to help with my defense.

It was useless against the dreaded squiggly line.

Battered and defeated and unable to understand why I would randomly explode and die and that no one else was randomly exploding, I decided to retire. At work the next day I was kinda miffed at my friends for pussing out like they did. They were just as pissed as I was saying that it was in fact, I who did not show!!!!

After some investigation we found out what Trammel and Fellucia were and I felt like a fool.

Long story short. After a while of doing the fel and trammel thing and getting my axer up a bit I was feeling a bit strange. To be frank, I thought the whole Fel and Tram thing was fucking stupid. We found out about Siege Perilous and how it was Fel only and there was only one character slot and from then on we primarily played on Siege. We wore it like a badge of honor when we went back to the Chesapeake server calling everyone tramms and noobs and trying to get people to play on siege.

The population was like 30 at the time.