Twenty minutes ago, as I was taking a shower, I got the idea for my latest article. Here is the idea: the second fall of Ultima Online.
UO first fell after the introduction of Trammel. And so, even as it became unplayable for us on the official servers, we still had the chance to play on free ones. Lucky us, heh? Well, it didn't last long. And here is why.
After exiting my bathroom I got a message from a friend of mine on Facebook. In short, he wrote the following.
"Templar, you did not stick with us for long on any of the free shards. Why? After all, you were the guy who showed us Ultima."
Indeed, I was...
My eyes are watering as I write this. It was probably 2004 or 2005. I read an article about Ultima Online in a bulgarian PC games magazine. The graphics...the feel of it.. it captivated me. UO was already Trammelized, yet the spirit I felt, the invisible energy that stormed into me.. it was enormous.
Hm, actually, maybe I decided to introduce my friends to UO a bit later. When I saw a guy (who later turned out to be the cook for our lockal Rock bar) play UO. The layout of the screen he used at that time is the same I've used for years.
The guy was feeding his beetle. Those huge beetles you could tame in a cave near Minoc, remember them? The guy was feeding him meat. Amazing.
I was around 14 at that time and did not own a PC, but me and my friends would go to a PC club to play games all the time. We asked the guy at the club we frequented to install UO for us.
And so, it began. We played on a free no-Trammel server. The server had all the new lands (Malas, Ilshenar) but it did not have Trammel (except for a tiiiny newbie island). It was magneficent. And this is how I fell in love with Luna.
Nowadays I have the Luna tune in my android phone and I play it on loop from time to time. Music for the soul.
Anyway, by now you might be wandering, how did Ultima fall for the second time? Well, here we go.
Over time, dozens of free shards were created. Trammy shards, Felucca shards. Shards with custom stuff and shards true to a certain "era" of the official Ultime timeline.
Dozens of shards.
But as of 2014, none of these shards did it for me.
WHY?
They were all essentially dead. Even the ones, that had players.
See, Ultima Online is a deep, extremely immersive roleplaying game. [well, SS13 beats it in terms of immersion, but it is a session-based game, and not a MMORPG]
In order to function properly Ultima needs two things: players and roleplaying.
Roleplaying on parto of the players. And the GMs. And the Seers. Only trough the actions of all these parties can the magneficent and complicated world of UO come to life. Now, I know I have said on numerous ocasions that the Roleplay in UO creates itself even without GMs interfering to create an interactive story, but bear with me
Remove the RP aspect - we've got a bunch of people running around killing each other.
Nowadays, Ultima Online does not have this.
Two years ago, in 2014 I stumbled upon a thread in reddit's /r/UltimaOnline (or whatever it is called): a guy was happily bragging that he was about to start HIS VERY OWN UO SERVER! New cool features! Responsible staff! Yadda yadda...
Kicking the door in, I was at his throat immediately, in an instant.
"Bitch", I said, "look around you. There are tons upon tons of fucking UO free shards. Don't you see the population of the game is too small already? And you create yet another shard to draw players? What for? If you wanted UO to be playable nowadays, you guys would need to take down 90% of the current free shards. We only need several shards in order to gather all the different players there and have some ACTUAL population. And some actual RP. Come to your senses!"
Of course, I was downvotted immediately. The issue still stands, it's not going anywhere.
The tiny population of UO players is spread thin across multiple servers.
But in order to function, an immersive Role-playing game needs a lot of players. It needs action, frenetic activity in order to be and feel alive. You don't get frenetic activity on a server with a population of 100 people. 50 of which are nowhere to be seen.
......
There is that server. UO Rennaisance. They call it one of the best remaining servers. Pre-AoS, pre-Tram. The message at logon says there are 2-3 hundred people online.
Well, guess what. I've traveled far and wide in hopes of finding people. I couldn't find anyone except a few people afking at Brit bank and a few guys in their castles here and there. No pvp in sight. I couldn't find any people fighting each other no matter where I went.
Basically, the "250+"people on that server is a fake. I've seen servers with ~50 people generate hundreds of times more activity, both in the PvP and PvE sector.
And here we go. This is all I wanted to say.
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