Well, maybe it is… but it has a new facelift! Here’s the new look…

See the old after the break…

Nice little graphics boost for a 10 year old game.

I still have a bit of affection for it, being the first MMO that I played. I was always a big big Ultima fan, and jumped at the chance to be in the UO beta. I still have the UO Charter Edition box with all the goodies. I wasn’t into the rampant player killing that went on during the earliest days of UO, but really got into the game later as they refined the game.

Trying to stay connected long enough to place a house during the mad land rush night is something I’ll probably never forget. Scoped out potential spots for days, and then Mogebier sat hidden at one spot while I sat at the alternate. We both placed houses, and used the one Moge placed for most of the game. Perfect spot, it technically should not have been placed there because the back left corner touched a mountain behind it, and you were supposed to have a clear tile line around the whole house. People couldn’t walk around behind! They never made us take it down.

If you were on Lake Superior shard (server), and probably a few other shards back in those days, you remember the pain of the early MMO well. Outages were common. As were rollbacks. You could play all day, and the shard could go down for a few hours or even days, only to come back up reset a day and a half, and you’d lose everything you had done. I think there were weeks when you did the same thing 3 or 4 times because they kept having to reset. People in MMO’s these days complain bitterly when they have a small queue to log in, or when a scheduled maintenance takes longer than expected, or when, god forbid, the company has to do an emergency restart, and you have to log out for 10 minutes. All I can say to those people is “you never played on Lake Superior.”

Sadly, other things came along. Moge got sucked in by Star Wars Galaxies (the SW nutter he is) back in the days before SOE ruined it, and I tried few things like Final Fantasy XI on my PS2. (Yes, I bought the totally neglected PS2 hard drive just to play it.) Eventually I found this little game called World of Warcraft. You might have heard of it. I sucked Moge into it and still play it today, though not nearly as much as I used to. But UO will always be a fond memory. I might take them up on their 14-day trial, just to check out the new overhaul, though I wish they’d offer it to former subscribers so I could log in with my old characters. Good times.

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