I played UO on Pacific Shard from early 1999 until sometime in 2002 I think, maybe late 2001. It was and still is the best game I've ever played. So much freedom for an MMO. Most games now days pigeon-hole you into grinding out quests and leveling then raiding for gear, so you can raid for better gear, and so on. UO was different, you could build up your character any way you wanted, choose out of dozens of skills. Become a warrior, mage, blacksmith, fisherman, thief, etc. with any skill combination you chose.
Plus you had freedom to DO what you wanted. War other guilds, murder innocents, steal from people, or be an anti-player killer and fight to defend the innocents. Build (place) a house, open a vendor shop and sell items you make or get from killing monsters.
There are still free, player ran, servers for UO out there. The one I'm playing now is called In Por Ylem 2, the original IPY was even featured in a magazine back in 2003 when it was at it's peak.
Don't take this as spam, since I'm in no way affiliated with the server, but just wanted to let people know about it. If anyone here played UO during the "T2A" era, before everything got super safe and risk was taken out of the game, you'd love this server. If you've never played, but are sick of games like WoW where death is meaningless, and you can't actually build true wealth in game, then you might want to check IPY2 out. There are MANY new/improved features over the original UO, many say this is how UO should have evolved in 2000, instead of going the direction it went. Sure the graphics are a bit "dated" but the gameplay is second to none!
Go to
www.inporylem.com to download the client and patch to allow you to play the server. It's a hell of a lot of fun, probably the most I've had gaming in years.
