First of all, hi!
Dunno if it's a good thing, to start my posting history on such a topic, but well ...
Anyway, in my opinion, I played some really great games in my life, but I really couldn't list them all up right now, even if I wanted to. Thing is, it doesn't matter. There were only a few games, which really had that specific 'something', for which I fell completely. One of them is the MMORPG Ultima Online (and I mean the 2D version).
I don't know, how old I was, I guess about 14. I had Meridian 95 behind me and didn't like it, I was all about Paper&Pen Role Playing Games. My life consisted of eating, sleeping, not-going-to-school and instead of that, playing P&P RPG's. Then someone told about UO. I remember the first time I started the game. It wasn't one of the official OSI servers, a polish unofficial one. I can't even explain it. I felt like I was thrown into a completely new world, everything was so exciting, everything was new. For the next 3 years, my social life vanished. And I don't regret it. The game had everything. I'm not a person that likes playing for some npc-quests or just xp and leveling up a character. I'm a hardcore RP-gamer, and UO gave me everything I needed and wanted. I made some of my greatest friendships in those times with guys from UO.
 But anyway, that's not what I wanted to tell You all. I don't really know, if it was illegal to play on those 'unofficial' servers, or not. I even created, at later times, some of those servers. The possibility, to create everything You want, was so goddamn tempting. On one server, I took a group of friends, and we chopped down a whole wood (playing as orcs), built ourselves Barracks, an inner and outer palisade, a temple made of stone, that we gathered near a mountain, we had our own blacksmith, our own fruit trees, plants, a river from which we have taken water, we hunted animals, we built our own first ship. Everything made step by step, brick by brick, from seed to tree, from tree to house. Thing is, those are experiences You won't get out of WOW or any other MMORPG. It was a user-made world, it only used the graphics of UO, everything else was made by a bunch of freaks that wanted to create something special. And they did it. I thank them, not only them, but the creators of every server I played on, as well as the developers of the game itself. Even though I'm unable to play the game again, because I know it too much already, it really took a special place in my heart. As stupid as it sounds, it's true. Building a town from the scratch is something totally unique, maybe even spiritual. You can't compare it to chopping up hundreds of monsters, collecting loot from them and then buying a deed to place a house. Even if it's stupid to waste 3 years on a PC game, I'd do it again at anytime, if there was a game worth it, like Ultima Online.
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