Publish 124 released last week. Quite incredible that the game is still undergoing development and new content. Admittedly it has changed hands several times, and the Richard Garriot days are a distant memory now, but still!
I used to operate one of the more popular player run shards, after the peak of the mainstream game, and even that feels like a distant memory.
Ultima Online is one of very few games (probably Star Wars Galaxies and that's it) that actually merit the label MMORPG. It's kind of insane when you think about it, that the MMO that most closely came to fulfilling the promise of a "shared, persistent, virtual world" was also the ~first one.
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Ultima online released in 1997 and required only a 28k modem.
I also would argue it was a more complex game.
Publish 124 released last week. Quite incredible that the game is still undergoing development and new content. Admittedly it has changed hands several times, and the Richard Garriot days are a distant memory now, but still!
I used to operate one of the more popular player run shards, after the peak of the mainstream game, and even that feels like a distant memory.
Edit: latest notes https://uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/publish-notes/publish...
richard garriot helped make another game that has some UO-like elements, and is currently going through a major update: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_the_Avatar:_Forsaken...
Ultima Online is one of very few games (probably Star Wars Galaxies and that's it) that actually merit the label MMORPG. It's kind of insane when you think about it, that the MMO that most closely came to fulfilling the promise of a "shared, persistent, virtual world" was also the ~first one.
Even if it's not quite technically the first MMO, Origin did also coin the term MMORPG themselves in order to describe Ultima Online to the press.
EVE Online.
Here's an enjoyable read by lead designer Raph Koster on the influence of UO: https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/09/28/ultima-onlines-influen...
had to download the client (mainly the map, entities) upfront though (like a 500MiB package)
to my knowledge, no one has released a classic UO (t2a, etc) web client, though it would be pretty easy to do these days
I played EverQuest on the PS2 using a modem in 2003. Performance was fine.
On PvP servers broadband was a huge advantage because you could switch zones much faster.
Still no better MMORPG.