The gear just came in quality ranges that depended on the skill of the craftsman. There was no 'greens, blues, purples' nonsense where each kind outclassed the other. But at the same time, gear didn't matter that much.

You could pass a friend your sword to use if you had an extra one and his broke. In UO you could pass down gear you had owned and worn many times to your alts or friends. The whole concept of 'soulbound' gear is ridiculous.

A brand new character could equip the same gear as a player that had played for years, and could even trade gear and such. There was also a lot of travel involved back then, where it took time to get from one place to another, not all this 'queue popped -> instant teleport there' crap or meeting stones that just pull you in.Īlso character advancement was entirely character skill/stat based and not gearbased. if you wanted a mount, you either had to tame a horse or buy one and if you got killed or dismounted, your horse could be killed and you'd have to get a new one. You didn't just have 100+ mounts hiding in your back pocket. Huge variety item mall stores would pop up and become popular. You'd have to advertise in town and put runes up everywhere for people to teleport there to see what kind of items you had available. But if you owned a shop out in the woods somewhere, you might only have a few local buyers and you wouldn't get as much for your wares. For instance if you were lucky enough to own a shop right off a mainhighway right outside of town, you could charge a fortune and sell massive amounts of gear to people and people would pay it just for conveinence. In Ultima Online, you had to find a player's place of business (yeah, they had real houses that existed in the game world, not that instanced garbage new MMOs use) and then prices would vary GREATLY depending on quality of craftsmanship, materials the armor/weapons were made out of, and also availability. The prices are set competing with each other because every player at every auctionhouse in the world sees the same list with same prices. I think WOW has kind of 'ruined' a lot of gamers and spoiled them with features and easiness of play that you don't find in old games like UO.įor example, when you want to buy something, what do you do? You simply goto the auction house search for the item, get a list of all of them available for sale and buy the cheapest one. However, I was wondering if a game like that could ever really survive in today's lowest common denominator marketplace.

So I often reminisce about my old days playing Ultima Online because I believe it had the most fun collection of gameplay elements out of any game before it or since.

Ultima online pvp