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Originally Posted by spronk  Play on one of the free UO servers and you'll realize that it wasn't the game you are clinging to, it was that "first MMO" experience, the friendships, your young age, the music you listened to while playing, etc. And a young 16 year old kid is building similar experiences today playing WoW or AoC or Hello Kitty Island Adventures. |
To be fair, a free UO server cannot recapture the UO experience, and it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm 11 years older. Even a shard like In Por Ylem (is that still around?) which vehemently held to an old ruleset, will not recreate the UO '97 experience.
Why? Because UO was never, ever about the monsters that you could kill, or the ability to precast flamestrikes, or black sandals. It was about the people in the gameworld. Not just your guild and the people you were fighting with or against, but the entire cohesive world. Your "average" private shard player is, on one level or another, a power gamer. They're the people who had an account full of crafters and a couple of different 7x GMs. With only that portion of the population, how will you ever run into people who play the game differently than you?
Maybe I didn't want to *be* the guy who played a few hours a week, carting ore from the mine of Minoc into town to smelt, hoping that one day he could afford a nice little house in the mountains where he could finally GM blacksmithing. But I sure wanted that person to be in my gameworld. And no, not just because he was an easy target. I wanted him there because it made me feel like I wasn't playing a game with a set beginning and end. I was taking part in creating a world that had people of all types, had ups and downs, and let me decide what was fun on any given night.
Anyone who played UO, SWG, or EVE knows that this kind of thing really isn't unrealistic. I sure doubt that anyone wants to be "just" a tradeskill player or a roleplayer in WoW, but there used to be a place for those players in a fantasy setting. For all that EVE recaptures the spirit of UO, it's still spaceships and lasers, and the technical problems can make it a real chore to play.