UO was great, T2A was the heart of UO...And while it was only around for 2 short years....
I spent some time wondering how I can word this review in a way for it to make sense for those who never experienced it and at the same time explain why the game was so much better in the beginning years to those who only experienced it towards the end. Technically UO is still alive and running, but to those thousands of people who experienced and helped shape the game from the start, it died over 5 years ago. UO really was the first and last MMORPG of it's kind. The gameplay, community, and rule set was, and always will be unique to UO and never, in any future MMORPG will be recreated, or even attempted to be recreated for that matter.
When UO was released to the public in late 1997, to be blunt, it was a piece of crap. It had more lag issues, bugs, and gameplay problems than I have time to list...Today, this would be a death sentence, 8 years ago, you must realize none of this mattered. 8 years ago it was 'cool' to see another guy on the screen who was actually another person. It was unique, it was new. Gradually the game improved. Bugs were sorted out, PvP was improved, PvM was improved, balance was added. This change was almost entirely accounted to the release of T2A: The Second Age. While on paper the T2A expansion was simply just the addition of new lands and a few rule and skill changes, in reality it was so, so, so so so much more. I could spend days trying to explain the changes to the Noto (Notoriety) system, Skill locks, PKing issues, housing changes, and so much more, but I won't. It would take too long, and would not accomplish enough. Theres a reason why this relatively short lived (approx. 2 years) time period that ended over 5 years ago is remembered and longed for by the thousands who experienced and loved it today in 2005. The UO: T2A (Ultima Online: The Second Age) time period, in a nutshell consisted of this.
Each player had a set of skills, stats, and what I will refer to as "social status" to make it easier to explain. You had your character, each character could have a total of 700.00 points in 'skills', with a maximum of 100 points (Grandmaster) status in any given skill. This made the typical character aspire to 'Grandmaster' 7 distinct skills. Each combination of skills made each character unique, and any given combination was allowed. While PvP characters typically stuck to strict planned out 'templates', many players would experiment with different combinations and theories. That character next had their 'stats'. Stats, like skills, had a cap. For the stats the cap was 225 points. There were 3 stats and every character, regardless of type had some of each. There was Strength (str), Intelligence (int), and Dexterity (dex). A mage character would typically have had 100 str, (str which is also your HP or Hitpoints) and 100 int (int is also mana, which is used and regenerates before and after you cast a spell, and 25 dex (Dexterity, how fast you can swing a weapon). While a warrior character would have 25 int typically and 100 dex. Now heres where OSI hit the nail on the head as far as PvP goes with UO:T2A. The combat system, while it seemed to be pretty simple, was in fact more involved, required more skill, had more combinations of tactics involved than any MMORPG has had to date, and in my honest opinion will hold that title for a long, long time. While simple, and without too many combat 'spells', UO managed to somehow incorporate more thought into its combat system than seemingly possible. Skilled players, sometimes had duels (a 1 on 1 match of spell casting and combat trying to kill the other player by getting his hit points to 0) that lasted sometimes well over an hour. Each spell you cast, or hit of your weapon on the other player would take away his health points. with 100 health points and spells and weapons that do damage of sometimes up to 40 hits a piece, this seems pretty simple right? Wrong. Players could organize combos to sometimes do almost 100 damage a piece (The most famous being Explosion [which had a short delay before damage hit], Ebolt [energy bolt], and the Hally [Halberd, the most popular weapon for a mage], combination, which if executed perfectly would cause the 2 spells and the weapon damage to hit at the same time. That other player, if skilled enough, would have timed his Greater Heal spell correctly and healed much of the damage. The casting player, now exhausted half of his 'Mana' and will use his Meditation skill to regenerate it at a good pace, or attempt to follow up his attack. It sounds complicated, and truthfully, it is and it isn't. It's hard to really explain in a way to make someone who never played, understand, but it's a pretty straightforward concept. Spells took time to cast, depending on their 'Circle' (Their are 8 circles of spells, progressively each circle takes more mana to cast, requires more skill in Magery to successfully cast, and for combat skills, typically cause more damage) and if a player is successfully struck during the very brief time he was casting a spell, his spell would be interrupted and he would fail to cast it. This further advanced the PvP and made getting a decent combo off even harder and required more thought and timing. The combat system was great, applied to all forms of PvP, whether it be Group Fighting, PKing, Dueling, etc, etc. To be a top contender, each player had to strongly consider what I will refer to as "Cross Training". A 'TANK' Mage, was a character that had Mage skills, and a combat and the combat tactic skill, while many Warriors or "Med Warriors" had Magery in order to cast spells usually for a defensive purpose. While a tank mage did not have the dexterity to become a good weapon striker or the Ability to heal with bandages, and the warrior was not able to be a great spell caster with low intelligence, it was still considered a necessity. Simply put, the replay value of this games combat system was the best their ever was and probably the best their ever will be regardless of how todays game have infinite more spells and possibilities.
Next was your characters status, while you had 5 character slots per account per shard (server), most people had a Main character, and 1 or 2 other characters for gameplay. Since creating a perfect character took time, people rarely had 5 different 7x GM characters (7x GM = 7 skills with 100 or grandmaster status, or a complete character). Your characer's name would appear, at any given time Blue, Red, or Grey. Blue is the normal color of an essentially law abiding citizen, grey was the mark of a criminal (A criminal would remain grey for 2 means after committing a crime, usually a Thief or attacker of a blue) and Red was the semi-fully permanent mark of a Murderer. Attacking a blue citizen would turn you grey and if you kill this person would give you a murder count, 5 Murder counts and you turn Red. A grey person can freely be attacked by anybody for the duration of their 'Greyness'. If you attack a grey person, they will remain grey to you as long as you are in combat and may turn blue to everybody else after 2 minutes of committing their crime. As long as they have not attacked you and tried to kill you. The two minute timer starts the second after they FINISH committing their crime. therefore if they attack you, they will remain grey and the two minutes will start right when they are no longer 'committing a crime'. The game has many safe zones, or Towns, that are guarded by towns guards. Commit a crime in town and their is good possibility that if a guard witnesses or is called on your crime that you will be killed immeditately. Red characters, or Murderers, abbreviated by PK (Player Killer), are Killed on Sight upon entry into any guarded town. For this simple reason, PK's were outlaws from society. Outside of town, you had an entire world of Dungeons, forests, player housing, Caves, Mining Areas, Oceans (Sailable by a boat). The common misconception about the game is that, during this time period 'Anybody' could be attacked by "Anybody" else 'Anywhere'...This simply is NOT true in the least bit. First, as mentioned before, PK's were not able to enter towns, even if they were allowed to, they would likely be attacked by Dozens of people instantly and killed. Outside of towns PK's were allowed to roam free, now another common misconception about the game is that PKing was so out of control that if you stepped foot out of town you would be killed immediately and all your items would be lost, this is also untrue. Blue characters, and mainly blue PvP characters immensely outnumbered the amount of Red/PK characters in the game. Many unguarded areas of the game were so densely populated (espcially during the games peak), that for a PK to go to a popular unguarded area they would essentially be committing suicide, or would have to have a pack of atleast 10 other bandits to travel with. Especially after the introduction of 'Stat Loss'. I will briefly explain stat loss. It was thought by many that the PKing was getting out of control, mainly because certain PK's were routinely harassing and killing weaker, trade characters. People were getting angry and were continually complaining to the makers of the game. At this point people were more experienced and many more players were turning to 'The Dark Side' so to speak. The creators intervened and implemented what some argue was a good idea and some argue was a horrendous idea and introduced 'Stat Loss'. What this meant was that for each 'Short Term Murder' count, over 5 you would be in danger of Stat Loss. Every time you killed somebody you received a short term murder count and a long term murder count. Short term was 8 hours, long term was 40 hours (These are in game REAL LIFE hours). the long term count, over 5 makes you red, and will remain that way until the hours are up. Someone who may accidentally kill too many people may only be red temporarily, depending on how they behave, while any real PK is essentially Permanently Red. (40 hours PER KILL, multiplied by sometimes hundreds of kills is enough to consider permanently red). The 8 hour, Short Term murder count, which lasts 8 hours per kill, as I stated previously, puts you in danger of Stat Loss. Again, Full time PK's are essentially permanently in stat loss due to the number of kills they usually have. Assuming a PK is in stat loss and dies, upon resurrecting he will lose a percentage of his stats and skills permanently and have to spend time reworking them (Up to 25% at one time I believe). This caused a few things, besides an outburst of rage from players suck as myself who played PK characters, we saw 1.) a HUGE HUGE drop in the amount of PK characters. 2.) PK characters having less skills and few grandmaster skills. The reasoning behind the first is obvious, nobody wants to lose their hard earned skills. The second was caused by the fact that even if you are careful, and a great player, you could lose connection and die, or just make one mistake and die and lose your PK's skills. Now as your skill rises, the harder it is to gain, from 0-10 in a skill takes a couple of minutes, while 90-100 can take anywhere from 10 hours - 2 months depending on the skill. Dying one time and losing months worth of work didn't sound appealing to many players. So the PK's who chose to deal with the stat loss changes and continue to murder were no longer running around with perfect characters due to fear of losing them, they were running around with characters with maybe 1 or 2 of the easier skills to Grandmaster and 80's-90's in others. Now in addition to being freely attacked by anybody, they were also disadvantaged. Don't get me wrong, you could choose to PK with a perfect 7x character, but the risk just seemed to great now. I personally, hold the record to this day for the amount of kills in stat loss on my server and one of the top 5 EVER in the game, so my credentials are credible, and while many of my former PK brethren will disagree with me, I think stat loss was actually a good idea and it did help the game as a whole. Yea it was bad for me and other PK's but you have to look at the whole picture. As a PK their were a few less recognized benefits from the stat loss patch that was added. First were the bounty boards we had. Each person you kill can put a bounty on your head, kill enough people and that bounty adds up, anybody at any time can go to to bank and look at the bounty board. PK's (for an egotistical purpose) always wanted to be #1 on the bounty board on their server. It was like a badge of honor, everybody wanted to kill you, everyone feared you, and everyone respected you. And second, now being a PK actually meant something. It basically said, "Hey, I'm risking my skills if I die and resurrect, you can't stop me, and I have the balls and the skill to continue". Before, anybody could be a PK, and it didn't take much, because their wasn't much to lose. Now, you were a badass, plain and simple. I loved the feeling I would get when I would come to an area, people would see my name and then watching them all scatter like a tornado was coming through. I loved how It felt to be the 'Most Wanted' person on the server. An interesting side note, at one point in my 'career', my bounty had actually reached an unbelievable amount of over $1 Million with 3000+ kills and I virtually had every single person in the game trying to find me to collect the bounty. (a bounty is collected after you kill a PK, cut his head off and give it to a guard).
The community during this time period, is once again, unmatched by any game anywhere. At this point, you had to rely on other people to succeed. Going the route of the loner was always an option, albeit a much much more difficult one. Their was an economy. Some people chose to hunt dangerous monsters for money, some chose to create trade based blacksmith, or tailor characters to supply others with Armor, Weapons, etc, to sell to those warriors fighting the monsters, to create a profit. Some relied on Treasure Hunters to sail the oceans and find treasure. The game was a perfect community, you relied on everyone else, whether indirectly or directly. The Blacksmith relied on the PK to klll people and loot their corpse of their weapons so the victim would pay the blacksmith to make them more, the Rares hunters relied on the warriors who would scourge the dungeons and find rares to sell to them, and so on and so forth. Again, it was a perfect community, full of the Good, the Bad, The Thieves, Alliances, Betrayals, Real Estate and so much more.
Players could actually own and 'place' houses on open land outside of towns, so essentially you 'owned' part of that game if you had a house. a House was many things to many people. It was a store to sell goods for the merchant, another space to hold loot for the wealthy person, a hideout for the PK, and so on and so on. Houses came in many sizes, the larger they were the more expensive and sought after they were. They could be put on 'Ice Island' (A large frozen island...of ice), outside of a town, practically anywhere.
But, all good things eventually come to an end. By late 1999, those players who never wished to take the time to strategize, those who did not want to risk anything and did not wish to adapt to a difficult, at times heart pounding game, won over the developers. The next 6 months was a psuedo Holocaust for anybody who chose to play a less than upstanding character. Game Masters were permanently banning accounts of PK's at will (While PKing was not illegal, they would come up with phony, or to put it bluntly B.S reasons to ban you), myself included. They were now catering to a younger, newer, less involved crowd that won them over with one thing. It starts with an M and ends with a ONEY. An interesting analogy: If you were a restaurant owner, and you had a tremendous, quality filled steak on the menu, and the best chicken around...Assume you had 100 loyal customers, who loved you, respected you and couldn't get your dishes anywhere else. Would you offer more food, with a much lesser quality, knowing you would lose your title as the best restaurant around, if you could appeal to say 150 customers, who werent necessarily loyal and believed in your formula, but just gave you money and lose your loyal long time patrons? If you understand that analogy, then you understand what happened to Ultima Online. Mid 2000 saw the patch of UO:R to the game (UO: Renissance). This patch opened the flood gates for people who did not want to risk losing anything, did not want to interact with anybody, people who wanted easy skill game, people who wanted easy PvP that required no talent, people who did not want to work for what they could gain. This patch had changed the game so drastically that most of UO's longest, most loyal, famous and most skilled players took it as a personal insult and left the game forever, not looking back (I actually stayed around for another year and a half and slowly became less and less of a 'legend' as I once was, until I finally quit altogether due to my disgust with what the game became). Not just the PK's, not just the thieves, but also the hard working tradesmen who at one point were actually needed. The problem is that the changes were made to EVERY server, all 20-30 of them at the time. Origin didn't open up 5 or 6 new servers with the new ruleset, they patched it onto EVERYTHING. UO:R saw another land added to the game that was called 'Trammel'. Trammel was an exact replica of the original land, except trammel was compeltely safe, no one could be attacked, no one could loot you or steal from you. You could basically have all the reward with none of the risk. This made gaining money in trammel unbelievably easy. Reds were not allowed in trammel. Tradesmen were no longer needed since skill gain so so simple now that everybody had a tradesmen character to supplement themselves. The economy was in ruins. Money was so easy to come by due to the fact that their was virtually no risk in obtaining it anymore. Nobody had any reason to hunt monsters in the old lands and risk being killed so they didn't, you werent forced to interact with anybody anymore because the game was made to be so easy that anybody could succeed. It went on and on and on. The PvP system was virtually destroyed. It was made to cater to those who were unable to take the time to learn and benefit from the old system. Literally overnight, the game...well the heart of Ultima Online atleast, died. Hopefully in this long essay I made a bit of sense to those who have played UO but never knew what it 'was' like and have been swayed by untrue rumors about how bad the game supposedly was. And hopefully I brought back memories for those who were there with me during the good times. UO was great, T2A was the heart of UO...And while it was only around for 2 short years. The creators and the entire development team at OSI truly created something magical.
-Ifrit (1997-2002)