I played UO from release until maybe about 1999, with a few breaks in there. First on Lake Superior, later on Great Lakes. The only expansion I was there for was The Second Age with the ostards and ophidians and what not...
I didn't particularly care for T2A, but I just have to say...
Original UO, in those first couple of years, was the most fun I've ever had gaming in my life.
No game before or since got my heart pounding the way UO did.
Me and my buddies got up to some crazy stuff.
- We'd tame a bear and a rabbit in the Wind Zoo, tell the bear to follow the rabbit, then untame the rabbit so you'd have a tame bear moving exactly like it was wild. Most people wouldn't notice the rabbit it was following. So they'd attack the bear and we'd call "guards!" and be looting their corpse clean moments later.
- We'd tame a panther in Wind Zoo which had already been fighting one of us, and the panther would kill attacking them even after tame. So he'd run past our victim screaming "help! help!" with a panther hot on his heels, chewing at him, and the good Samaritan who helped would end up dead and looted likewise.
We managed to get a small house behind the alchemist shop in Vesper during a period where they were tweaking the amount of bumpiness the ground could have and still allow a house placement. This was during a period of time where they were no longer permitting houses to be placed inside town, but this little sliver of peninsula behind the alchemist shop was not considered to be part of Vesper. So we got a house into Vesper basically, at a time when everyone had written off ever getting a house into a town area again.
We set up a guild stone on the front steps of it, and we'd tell people whatever we had to tell them by the Vesper bank, offer them anything, make it sound as sweet as we could... if they had no guild tag, we'd preemptively mark them with the stone, and then all that needed to happen for them to be a guild member was for them to touch the stone.
We'd take them back there to that house and as soon as they touched the stone for one of my friends, me and another friend would come out of hiding (which made you entirely invisible) on top of our horses, with crossbows at the ready. You could kill your fellow guild members with no penalty at all, and loot them in the middle of town likewise. So we'd end up chasing the stronger ones all through the town of Vesper, and they'd be screaming "guards! guards!" not understanding (usually) why we were able to attack them with no consequence.
And those were the times where my heart raced the most... chasing someone on horseback through the streets of Vesper, trying to make sure they didn't escape.
Very rare indeed that any of them would actually turn and fight back. A lot of people used magic and at this time, I believe you couldn't use magic in town... but we could use our crossbows with impunity in town against guild members. So maybe a lot of these people were advanced magic users but that method of defending themselves was somewhat unavailable.
At one time I kept a huge list of people we'd killed with the Vesper guild stone trick. It was over 300 names, and I didn't start keeping track until a long time into it.
One time we ran into a guy who was still green colored (marked as in our guild, but without the guild tag) in the town of Occlo. Three of us walked up to him and he was with some of his friends. He said "these are the guys who killed me!" and we told him "yes, and we'll kill you again right here in Occlo, and the guards won't do anything about it" and he and his friends refused to believe this. Completely unaware that he was still marked as being in our guild.
We did exactly what we said we'd do, and his friends were dumbstruck, convinced we could do the same to them. We allowed them to think that
And early on, I did so much horse scamming in the city of Britain... I'd ride around on a horse yelling "Horse for sale, 500 gold!" and as soon as I got the money, I'd ride off at top speed. I had a house south of town in the wilderness, and I remember the absolute white knuckle thrill of riding there, terrified that someone from town would finally discover where my hideout was. I would take these elaborate zig zag paths through the woods on my horse to avoid being found out.
Because I had a massive number of people who hated me and would follow me around trying to warn others about the horse scam, or convince me to come outside of town and face them in combat. Later, me and my friends had a similar posse in Vesper who'd try to warn our victims not to follow us. They ruined a lot of good kills for us, but we'd usually still somehow manage to keep the victims coming.
The day we quit the game we finally faced off with all of our haters in real combat, we rode the road between Vesper and Minoc and killed a lot of people, because we'd actually managed to get strong... we'd always been sort of weak characters, but we took the time to get really powerful (kind of) before the final battle. Wanted to go out with glory. Running through poison fields and fire fields helped in this endeavor.
So that last day we ended up with a massive angry mob outside of our Vesper house, and I think we were trying to like let one in, close the door, kill him, open it again... until finally we were overwhelmed and killed.
Best MMO ever.
I know it sounds like we were massive d-bags, and we were. But we were like 17 at the time. In every MMO I played after that one I was a huge carebear Mr. Nicey-pants.
This UO Forever thing doesn't look like it's for me. Too much from later patches and expansions is included, too many houses and vendors everywhere... if they had it be how the game was in the first couple of years, I'd feel differently.