I just came back to UO after playing other games for a couple of years, and this post made me pretty nostalgic... So I figured I'd share the favorite moments that this post just made me remember, some of them were historic in the history of UO, some were just young kids having fun, some were sad, some were exciting but all were memorable and which I hadn't thought of in a very very long time. Thank you for bringing those memories back.
This will be a very long post, from the age of 14-17 (1997-2000) me and 3 of my RL friends played UO almost non-stop. Hope you enjoy the stories.
I'll try to remember all this stuff in chronological order.
Thanksgiving weekend 1997, 14 years old, I'm using a Pentium 166mHz machine running on AOL dialup with a 14.4baud modem, drinking Surge and listening to Rage Against the Machine and Nine Inch Nails.
I couldn't believe I had the game, and called my RL friend, he came over, and we chose Lake Superior and created a new character in Vesper with 50 stealing and 50 hiding.
We walked west out of south Vesper and were on the road between Vesper and Covetous entrance and hid.
We were there for about 5 minutes just waiting, there were TONS of people playing that day. We didn't know about snooping yet, so we just waited until someone stopped right next to us and we used stealing on their character. We got a key!
We ran and ran and ran, lost the guy. We went back to the spot we got the key and walked to the nearest blue tent, and sure enough, opened up the chest and looted him clean.
We were hooked.
I had spent a few days trying to figure out how people were getting up onto the West Britain Bank roof. I finally figured out that it was through the use of abusing how targeting worked and LOS. I met a guy named "Gidd Monkeysmuggler" and joined his guild. I don't remember the exact name but their colors were light purple and light yellow.
Shortly after spending time on the WBB which was where all the cool kids were since you had to know how to get up there, I met a guy named "Unit", he was a GM of a guild called "Fellowship of the Ring" or FotR for short.
He took me to his tower, and began to teach me the the art of how to get my character built... AKA exploit the game mechanics.
We started with how to get to 92 magery without using any reagents. The trick involved getting a scroll of water elemental, surrounding yourself with wooden crates, and then casting the scroll. It would use the mana, and give you the magery skill check, but would not use the scroll since the crates prevented the water elemental from actually appearing. This was soon fixed by summoning the water elemental at your feet instead of on one of the tiles next to you.
Next he showed me how to GM archery without arrows, simply blocking a monster inside crates, and walking up to them and let them hit you with you bow equipped, with no arrows. For whatever reason, it made a skill check in melee range, and pretty quickly had GM archery. It did not do tactics for some reason though, so there were a lot of people running around with GM archery but like 50 tactics. Back then, having 92+ skills in ANYthing was actually difficult, and skills/stats could not be locked, so you had to juggle your skills and stats constantly. It was very fun.
Next he showed me how to gate monsters to different locations. You basically created barriers in dungeons that would funnel all the monsters onto one tile, you'd cast the gate and they'd walk through the gate trying to get to you. We'd send all of the daemons in Hythloth to places like Britain Swamps, or the desert, or Ice Island. This was later fixed by making monsters ignore gates altogether. What a surprise when that day came.... Had almost all of Hythloth Level 3 on us, casted gate, and to our surprise, they all walked 'over' the gate hahah.
Then he showed me we could bring monsters into the tower to train magic resist, so we have a pet lich on the ground floor stuck behind crates and we all GMed resist.
Next he showed me how to get the "Great Lord" title with pretty much no effort. We had a horse named "Jimbo" in the stairwell of the tower on the bottom floor, and we had a lich stuck in the room in the NE corner, you just macroed "Jimbo kill" and target the lich for like 3 nights straight and I was a Great Lord.
The tower was amazing... We had a war with a number of guilds back when there were no housing ownership or murder counts.... Back when the game was actually a lot of fun. Whoever had a key could get in. So we had to guard the tower 24/7, staying up all night and sleeping in shifts. One night we watched a guy named "Joe Camel of Writ" walk up to the east side of the tower, and began stacking tables and putting gold on top of each stack, he eventually stacked up all the way to the top and just walked right onto the roof of the tower. He died quickly, but that was the beginning of a war on the server.
At the time, archery was actually amazing in PVP... It wasnt just mages running around on mounts trying to fizzle each other, it was legit PVP, no mounts, the map itself was very important, you wanted to created choke points, because with instahit and precasting, everyone had magery, hiding and archery. Explosion, Energy Bolt and Heavy Crossbows were all you needed. There was no BS like meditation, eval in, anatomy etc etc to 'force' you to waste your precious skill points to be effective. It was awesome. We had MANY battles, but one stands out, FotR was fighting Harvesters of Sorrow - HoS on the bridge north of Vesper bank. We were on the north end of the bridge, they were at the south end by the bank. We had about 15 FotR, they probably had 15-20 HoS, but every one of our character's were maxed out from using all the exploits, and HoS was certainly not as high in skills and stats. Again, skills and stats actually meant something, it wasn't like now where skills and stats are just a small obstacle to overcome to get to the fun stuff, virtually no one was 100.0 in anything because of no skill locks.
So we attack them at the bank, but instantly run back up to the north side of the bridge. The bridge was only 2 tiles wide, and if you walked through someone back then, you lost ALL your stamina, so it was very important to pay attention to where you stood and where you moved. We sat there with heavy crossbows, and with instahit, we killed every single player that tried to cross that bridge, most of which were 1-2 shotted. The battle lasted maybe 5 minutes. It was an amazing triumph that was talked about for months.
Someone realized that some items that should have been static, werent locked down, and could be picked up. Fruit baskets, flasks, candles, even water tiles.... This was how "daily rares" were invented... It was an accident by the creators, they just overlooked those lockdowns.
One thanksgiving, they created a server called "Farmageddon" it was awesome, you had character gates that would transform you character and your stats to random monsters/animals. Someone figured out that if you went through a series of different gates to transform you stats/skills into different animals, you'd bug your character out and end up with 32,000 strength and 32,000 intelligence. So what this did was made it to where your character was too heavy to move, but a fast casting spell like Magic Arrow did like 10,000 damage. So you'd get bugged out and just stand there Magic Arrowing everyone with 1hits. Keep in mind, this was back when there were a LOT of people playing the game, it was an amazing weekend.
A few months later, I was in my house one day grinding blacksmithing while hidden. There was an exploit that worked by overloading my backpack with items to the point that I was overloaded. You would create an item that weighed more than the weight of the ingots, it would not make the item or use the ingots, but would give you the skill check.
I was blacksmithing away, and I saw a gate pop up two tiles south of my neighbor's door. I watched 3 guys jump out of the gate, quickly placed crates around the gate except for the north tile. They casted gate again, and the gate appeared on the north tile, they did it again, now they were "in" the foundation of the house, they kept doing this method and were in the house, but they couldnt actually walk around because they were on the ground level, but below the actual floor. Since there were no housing rules or lockdowns, they ended up looting the entire house.
About this time, Richard Garriott left OSI.
This was the beginning of the end of the 'real' UO.
This is pretty much my last fond memory of the game.
They said, ok, everyone log onto the Test Center, we're going to have some killer clowns that escaped from a carnival and are on the loose, we must kill them!
We ended up finding them outside of Wrong. There were probably 100 of them, and probably 1000+ of us... They were tough mages. If you managed to get lucky enough to either kill one, or more realistically, you just happen to be near one of the corpses when it died, there was a deed on them. Noone knew what the deed did.
So people were killing each other throughout the event and the deeds were exchanging hands like crazy. After the event was over, we found out that anyone that had a deed had an invitation to actually beta test their new previously-unannounced expansion.... T2A.
So they announced an expansion, The Second Age.
I beta tested it. The map sucked, it was small, it was bumpy and just a pain in the butt. No one liked it. All the Dread Lords (red PKs) quit the game because of the notoriety system. I am willing to bet that at least on Lake Superior, there were more Dreads than there were Blues... So that sums up my experience on the official Ultima Online servers.
We're almost 20 years later and these memories are still in my brain. I am a firm believer that no matter what age you are, no matter what game you play, your first games/MMO experience will always be your benchmark for all future games in the genre. All these years later, I still love UO. I can't stand to play anything AOS or later, but I still love the original iteration.
I firmly believe we'll be playing UO 40 years from now, still trying to get that fun that we experienced the first time we played it.
Salut to 18 more years!!!!
