Broadsword just announced Ultima Online: New Legacy.Nope, it’s not a sequel or an expansion or a Steam launch; it’s a brand-new shard, but it’s not. Just a copypasta “fresh start” server or a “classic” shard (this is not, for example, going to be like the existing Siege Perilous hardcore shard). Ultima Rares is the place to search for every event rare, server birth, and oddities ever created on Ultima Online mmorpg. You can lookup Quantity of the UO Rares, find pictures, sounds, Hue IDs and more! Buy rares that you want for your UO Collection.
A classic, free to play Ultima Online shard
Are you tired of playing the same cookie cutter games that lack accomplishments, true friendships, epic battles, and a sense of free will? Now, the greatest 2D game has returned. Ultima Online, unmatched to this day in depth of mechanics and interactions. A social sandbox unlike any other. Second Age is a free Ultima Online Shard that can be accessed by anyone with UO client software, available for download in the Downloads section.
Second Age is the most accurate emulation of the UO: T2A era online today. There are no giveaways. On UO Second Age you will build your character(s) from the ground up. More information about the Ultima Online game itself, and its rich history in the MMORPG online gaming community is available here, from Wikipedia: Ultima Online.
Founded in 2007, Second Age has established itself as the preeminent T2A era free shard in operation. We have a stable and diverse base of players dedicated to enriching all aspects of this online world, and a professional staff dedicated to non-interference in the game. If you are considering joining us, please be sure to review the Shard Rules and other information, and our Frequently Asked Questions on this site.
[Read More]
Since inception, the goal, vision and rationale of even creating this accurate T2A era shard has been very simple but unique:
- We aim to replicate the T2A era as best we can and within technical limitations as a whole.
- We do not intend to ever change any aspect of normal game play to particularly favor any play style or to protect or further expose any players to the in-game risk that was a large part of this era.
- We will especially not pull aspects of other eras into this one, even with an overwhelming demand of players.
We believe that 'proper' game play can only be achieved by taking the era as a whole and accept it for what it was. Tampering with the era in hope of achieving balance is not something that we will do, nor do we believe is achievable across all play styles. Diversity of players and play styles is a necessity of a healthy shard. Every type of play depends on another, and this is why UO is absolutely the greatest MMORPG ever crafted.
With that said, we do still continue to strive to become more correct and true to the era. Player feedback and research is a big part of this process. We don't claim to have everything perfect yet, but we do continue to actively work towards that goal.
We recommend client version 5.0.8.3, but all client versions above 5.0.0.0. are supported. If you do not have your UO installation CDs, you can download a modern client from the downloads section, here. We have a guide on the forum, here, to assist you with downloading, installing, and connecting to Second Age. [Read Less]
Ultima Online Population
Believe it or not, there was a time when the term multiplayer was strictly related to one-on-one play over two PCs via a serial port, or a few people getting together over a local area network for a quick blast at Doom. While people were busy discovering the delights of shooting each other in the face in a Doom deathmatch over a LAN (mostly games journalists it has to be said), a company called Origin was busy working on something altogether more ambitious. The plan was to build a living, breathing world for players to live in virtually via the Internet.
The audacity Origin displayed in thinking it could actually create something that would be so good it would hold the interest of players over a period of years when most single-player games struggled to do it for more than a few days, was ever so slightly arrogant, not to mention wildly ambitious, but it still went for it all the same.
The man who conceived the idea and charged with making it all happen was Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series, one of the most engrossing and powerful role-playing series ever created.It was never going to be easy, but Garriot's reasoning behind the creation of Ultima Online shows he was confident right from the start: 'Since I began writing games in the 70s RPGs have always emulated the social, paper games like Dungeons & Dragons but solo player games were all that the technologies of the day were capable of supporting in a high-quality way. As the Internet became more popular, we knew our time had come. So in the mid '90s we began creating Ultima Online in earnest'.
Their time had come indeed, and against all the odds, they succeeded and created not only a game, but a whole new genre. This is how it happened...
Rule Britannia
Perhaps the most difficult challenge in creating a game of this kind is developing an actual world for people to live in. This was no problem for Garriott. he already had a world. The world was called Britannia, and anyone who had played the Ultima games was already familiar with its many towns and dungeons. Branding was firmly on his side, and so was one of the most convincing game environments you could possibly imagine. The question from there was, what the hell do you do with it? The Ultima games were rich in terms of story, but a game like this called for complex interaction with items, buildings and virtual people in the game world. It was to be no easy task, and Garriott was well aware of this, and let's be honest, anyone who was around at the end of beta for the 'official' release will readily testify that the game was in such a bad way when it was released, it's a wonder it ever survived its first year of existence. The gameworld was in place, NPC merchants were in their shops, the monsters were roaming Britannia, all the buildings and structures and towns you would expect from a virtual Britannia were present and correct, but the game itself was completely unplayable, with unstable code and nightmare lag combining to make Britannia more akin to hell than the multiplayer heaven players originally envisaged. Garriott is the first to admit to the early problems: 'An MMP is much bigger and has inherently more complicated code than a single-player game. Thus the code base needed to be better engineered than previous efforts. It was a lesson we learned the hard way, by not doing it right and shipping an unstable game. Lag issues plagued us until we rewrote a good deal of the server code, and I don't think we kept people very happy during the transition. They even held a drunken, naked brawl in Lord British's castle as a protest.'
Despite all its teething problems. Ultima Online struggled through its first year and developed into a game that would change the way people thought about interactive entertainment forever. For those of you who have never experienced Ultima Online first-hand and are wondering what all the fuss was about, the following is a guide to just some of the many innovations inspired by what will always be remembered as the true pioneer of the online revolution.
This Is Your World
The basic premise behind UO. as is the case with most RPG's, is to create a character and develop your skills while you explore a fantasy environment. UO went much further in the way it allowed you to advance your character, and in fact it even put single-player games to shame in the flexibility it gave you in this respect. You could use melee weapons and your melee skills developed accordingly, the same applied to schools of magic, but there were so many different areas in each category you could create a character that was entirely unique to you.
Combat: you like it? Good. If you don't, no problem. UO still has the most impressive trade skill development trees in any online RPG. bar none. In many ways, even Everquest is still embarrassingly shallow compared to UO in terms of character development and trade skill management and opportunities. Many people played this game as a blacksmith, or a tailor, or even a fisherman or explorer, without ever once entering into combat.
Housing: as you explored the world and accumulated gold through either killing or selling your wares, eventually you would accrue sufficient capital to buy your own house. This was one of the major selling points of UO. It was even possible to buy your own castle eventually if you played the game long enough and got enough gold together, and of course, you could decorate your house as you saw fit.
Player versus player conflicts: Ultima Online is still the only game that ever injected real fear into the people who played it, and it came in the form of the ever present player-killers who prowled dungeons and the outskirts of town looking for easy prey. It's impossible to describe the adrenaline rush you got when a known player killer entered your vicinity and you had to either run (which usually didn't get you very far) or defend yourself, knowing that if you lost the battle you would also lose your best weapons and armour to the player who killed you. Many of today's online titles have attempted to recreate the thrill of player versus player combat as experienced in UO.They have all failed.
All these things combined to produce a game experience like no other, and while most people have moved on now to 3D online RPGs and left UO behind, it remains the most complex and comprehensive online game on the market.
The Next Chapter
For all its innovations and revolutionary ideas. Ultima Online finally reached a point where it had to change in the name of commercialism. EverQuest arrived on the scene and offered a game environment where players could completely avoid player versus player combat if they chose the right server. A decision was made to implement safe continents in the Ultima Online gameworld, thus giving people a choice as to whether the many dangers and perils that normally lay waiting for them outside towns would pose a problem. For many people, this was the day Ultima Online died.For all the whining cry babies who complained about being killed and having their things taken from them in a dungeon (after walking straight into the damn thing unprepared, like the idiots they were) there was a whole group of people, a thriving community who were relishing the player versus player conflicts, which for them were an integral part of making the world believable. There were role-players on both sides of the argument - blatant player killers who terrorised the innocent, and knights in shining armour who fought them in the name of justice and protecting people as they I travelled from town I to town. It was a ' totally self-sufficient community where you had to keep your wits about you. or you paid the price. As time went by. more and more of l/O's content was geared towards non-PvR The I population count on the I non-PvP EverQuest servers compared to the PvP servers told its own story, but nobody bothered to tell EA that this was largely due to the fact that PvP in EverQuest was very badly implemented and the PvP was in no way integrated with the normal game to make it feel a necessary part of creating a believable environment.But the final nail in the coffin for UO was not the switch to player-friendly environments, it was the arrival of 3D. and along with it. the expectations of players went through the roof. EverQuest took full advantage of this.
The Game That Never Was
The game that many Ultima Online players waited patiently for was the fabled Ultima Online 2. For a long time it looked like it was going to become a reality and. of course, it was going to be 3D. This was the title that was going to replace UO as the premier online title, and bring new features and innovations to the genre, while at the same time retaining the original UO player base who could still play the original game on the old servers if they wanted to. It never happened. We don't know why, but Richard Garriott does: 'After UO launched, we advised EA to build another property instead of moving forward with UO2. We felt UO2 would need to have all the features of UO1 and then some, and as UOI was growing it would be hard for UO2 to beat it. EA insisted we do UO2, but late in the project EA cancelled it as they saw UO2 was taking a long time and would cannibalise the UO1 player base... Just as we said.'
Ultima Online Download
Whether or not UO2 would have revived the UO franchise or killed it off completely we'll never know. However, we do know that irrespective of what comes after it, Ultima Online was the first truly original online RPG, and it still puts many of its followers to shame. The sad thing is, despite the obvious influence UO has had in creating and shaping what is now a flourishing genre, the UO copycats failed to learn from some of its most important features. Take a look at the EverQuest tradeskill system and baffling time-sinks that force players to spend forever completing what should be simple tasks, Anarchy Online's woeful PvP implementation, Dark Age of Camelot's insultingly simple approach to just about everything, Neocron's mish-mash of class skills which puts it in serious danger of disappearing up its own arse in a desperate attempt to balance the game, all of these titles have evolved from Ultima Online in some shape or form, and all of them still manage to get the simple things completely wrong. UO got everything right. That's what made it a classic, and that is how a genre was born.