UO had a great risk and reward environment. I remember feeling emotions of anxiety when hunting due to the chance that real people might show up, kill me, take everything I have on my body and move on. It meant using strategy to decide what to keep in your backpack out in the wild and what to leave in the bank or in your private house. Houses could be broken into if you lost your key which meant more danger.
The fact that real groups of people were out in the world hunting each other also meant for a lot of fun and dynamic battles to re-claim property, etc.
>UO had a great risk and reward environment.
This is it.
Playing this game with my best friend when we were 12/13 was a magical experience in my life. There was this awesome sense of freedom/adventure/opportunity/risk that no other game I've played has been able to capture. Though I imagine it is probably due to me outgrowing MMO's I still like to believe a game could come around and sweep me off my feet again. Maybe VR can provide that novel experience again.
The emulation community for UO was what introduced me to programming and now 15 years later I am grateful to say I'm working on my own game in UE4. I owe a lot to Ultima Online.
Same here regarding emulation. When I was about 16, I took over project management for the UOX3 emulator for a year or so when the original author abandoned it. I sure as hell wasn't a good enough coder to have written it myself, but I knew just enough to be dangerous. I made bug fixes and added minor new features (the one I remember best was implementing the "page a GM" queue). And most importantly, got other much smarter--and older--people involved contributing impressive pieces of code. Who for some reason didn't have any problem working on a project being managed by a teenager :)
Ironically, now that I've gone down the sysadmin path as an adult, there's no way I still have the C++ chops to even read the code I wrote back then. Let alone recreate it. Kind of hilarious that some of the best code I ever wrote dates from high school.
One of my most vivid memories of that period was spinning up a new build, posting it to the website, and then leaving for school. When I got home, I had a number of emails saying "hey moron the new build instantly crashes on startup". Sure enough, it did. That was an excellent early lesson in the importance of testing!
(btw, I went by the incredibly terrible handle of "Anthracks" in those days, if that rings a bell for anyone. Still turns up a small number of hits!)
The fact that real groups of people were out in the world hunting each other also meant for a lot of fun and dynamic battles to re-claim property, etc.