first to apply the word ‘shard’ to the concept of splitting gamers out to separate copies of the world. When they first launched, they had the world balanced such that logical players would just run around killing valuable predators that were attacking them, and they thought maybe more than 100k players would buy their game. And then more than a million players showed up and killed all living things everywhere as fast as anything could respawn even after they ramped up respawns to be impossibly fast…
They looked back to the Lore of Ultima 1 where you defeat the evil wizard Mondain by smashing his crystal of immortality into shards. They decided that a side effect of that action was to create shards of reality where multiple copies of the world existed on separate shards. He [believes/says] all the rest of the IT companies started using the term because of UO which made it up off an Ultima 1 storyline.
So retail players are all walking around on pieces of the crystal of immortality that was destroyed to defeat Mondain back in the 80s in Ultima 1.
(It’s about as neat as learning that Lockheed is the company that merged and bought out the Wright Brothers’ company back early in the 20th century and they have Wright Brothers in their DNA.)
Fact checkers welcome, and I’m sure there’s plenty of commentary about all the things any game designers did wrong with their games. I just thought it was neat. 
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UO was kinda cool, but these days Garriot is a hack.
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More importantly, did Garriot finally lift Rainz’s ban in UO?
I miss old UO. The biggest things that it had was flexibility in how you make and play your character, open ended game play that let you play pretty much as you liked with real consequences (e.g. become a murderer, be branded as a murderer and treated as such).
Not to mention that the best thing it got right on PvP was the giving the ability to loot players while giving players the ability to be competitive without spending massive amount of time and effort on special gear. I used to love PvP in this game and actually had one player that sticks out in my mind as a constant and consistent adversary that I had where we would fight time and again.
The best thing is that the Devs would actually invest time in setting up resources for player groups that set up and played big parts in the game that helped differentiate the different shards. Catskills, for example, had the ORC clans which was a guild made up of players that roleplayed Orcs and the Devs gave them the resources on Catskills to fully do so.
I really want to play UO again as it was during the early release and T2A days…
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I never played UO. I played and beat Ultima 6 repeatedly and got into Ultimas 7 and 8 but never finished for life reasons. (Or maybe final fantasy reasons.) Played and beat one or two Gameboy versions of the game. I was about that thorough with final fantasy and some snes and psx-2 games too. And old Warcraft, dune, command and conquer games too.
I was looking around now to see who’s still alive. UO gameplay video from 2019 didn’t look that appealing, but I miss the soundtracks. Actually started looping ultima soundtracks and some sea shanties behind my Warcraft game now.
I still keep a copy of Stones II around to play from time to time for nostalgia
I really only liked the Pre-Alpha of UO, where it was levels and skill points.
In the final beta/retail game, it was ruined by “skills by use.” So I was playing with some people, who explained that what I did was stand around in the house and get cast on by a “trapped” elemental. This then raised my resistances. Then I got hit by some other trapped thing, which raised my defense.
That was when I quit playing UO, since standing around in a house did not seem like much of a game to me; You had to do this, though, to go out in the world and have a chance against gankers.
Then I was looking forward to UO2, which was a “big 3d mmorpg” (like EQ, or Wow.) I had a PC Gamer magazine, with it on the cover. Then EA, in one of the most unwise decisions ever, pulled the plug on it since they decided they already had this “Ultima Online” thing that people played. So, of course, people played the “big 3d” MMORPGS that other companies made, with UO2 having its design documents burned on a bonfire.
I remember looting players in pvp on old 2-d cartooney runescape where max level was 60 and rune armor and weapons were the best. If you died in PVP, you were able to keep your 3 most valuable things, but enemy player could take the rest. So a lot of us were just walking around with rune pants, breastplates and axes trying to murder people who came into the pvp woods with more than that. All the helmetless barefoot level 60s just wave and laugh at each other and go looking for the adventurers wearing capes and helmets and magic amulets… Some of those turned out to be bait though, and you’d find yourself bombarded by arrows and fireballs from their deathsquad friends. Good times.
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Yep… and that was the big thing with UO PvP… sure, you could go out and get the Vanquishing weapons and the like… but you didn’t get a massive advantage over GM crafted weapons and Armors. You would get a little advantage but not enough to overcome character skill.
That is the big thing I really miss… is that style of PvP… where equipment level was secondary to player skill and a more skilled player with equipment that was generally available could overcome those with less skill that had the best gear available.
I spent a significant amount of my time in UO engaging in PvP in one form or another… be it fighting murderers, fighting guild vs. guild wars, or participating in the Order vs. Chaos war… and I miss that type of gameplay and that type of open endedness in gameplay.
Street Fighter 2 on snes had a handicap system setting where you could set it so player 1 could die in one hit and player 2 needed 30 hits to kill. And my little brother would only play against me if I had the handicaps set against myself in that manner. I was a pretty mean big brother though, so when I beat him anyway I’d laugh and he’d ragequit. (Here in the future he can destroy me on any random game he’s playing for the first time even if I’ve had years of practice, so he got plenty of vengeance later in life. :))
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The good old times of gaming. I played on Sphere and RunUO servers.
The roleplaying servers were awesome. Nothing really beats this game when it comes to roleplay in videogames.
I played on APK before it closed because of excessive racism and whatnot. It was fun to get geared with bane armors and create alliance with other guilds in order to get protection or accomplish tasks.
I miss this, but not my 56k internet.