Ultima Online and the Endless Dabble
By Brian • 19 December 2024
- Year
- 1997
- Platform
- PC
- Notes
- We go way back.
A man appears, summoned by forces beyond thought or understanding. The world is familiar, and yet it isn't. He has been here before, and yet he hasn’t. The same Britannia, but decades later. (Or maybe earlier?) The present blends with antiquity, friends and foes long gone, the echoes of ancient battles and adventures nipping at the edges of consciousness. An innate set of skills. Meager equipment. Ahead, a crossroads. He sets out, a quest beginning again in a world of endless possibility.
Oh, no. I’m back in Ultima Online. How did I get here?
If you check the classic content section of this blog, you might find a post I wrote for the 20th anniversary of Ultima Online WAY back in 2017, the Before Times. The last time I checked in on the game in a serious way was during the pandemic, when I didn’t have anything better to do. I have since dabbled here and there, maybe a week or so at a time, before parting ways again for months or years. It’s probably the insane behavior of a once-addicted player who will never be able to fully let go, and I’m willing to acknowledge that. Ultima Online played an enormous role in my life for a number of years, and I will always feel warmth, fun, and familiarity from firing it up every so often, no matter how dated or janky its presentation. The open-world sandbox style, deep skillset customization, and nigh-limitless custom housing options offer gads of appeal in the face of newer, technologically superior massively multiplayer games.
Before I get into my recent history with UO, and what specifically brought me back this time, let me share a few details on what playing an MMO is like for me in the year 2024, as opposed to 1999, when I had unlimited time, no responsibility, and could exist competently on three hours of sleep and a couple cans of Vess cream soda. While I do technically “play” Ultima Online, I just have an Endless Journey account, which is UO’s free-to-play option, because I’m only logged in 45 minutes at a time here and there, hardly enough to justify the $12.99 monthly fee for a paid account. As spastic and unpredictable as life in this household can be, paying monthly for an MMO would be akin to dropping my money directly into a volcano, without the added spectacle of getting to watch my money burn up in a bunch of lava. There’s a reason this family doesn’t spend much on streaming—we’re lucky to scrape together an hour of TV time a week. Want to watch a movie? Plan to spread it across a dozen 10-to-15-minute viewing sessions, because time is short and movies are long. I missed a handful of Marvel movies, and it took me years to catch up.
Anyway, on the free-to-play account, I’m subject to certain limitations. I can’t own a house or a boat, my bank box is limited to 20 items, and I can’t harvest higher-tier crafting materials. I’m sure other restrictions apply, but I’m too casual to know what they are. I’m probably missing something fantastic. Arrgh! Although, I will say, with no house and a 20-item bank box limit, I can’t hoard items, saving me the trouble of sifting through crate after crate of things I think I’ll need later. (I won’t.) I keep essentials only—bandages, arrows, potions, some spare weapons and armor. That’s it. That’s the list. It’s refreshing for an RPG. Let us not discuss my Skyrim inventory, encumbered by every cheese wheel and pewter goblet in the land.
I have two characters who never really make any progress because I keep fiddling with their skills and can’t figure out what to do with them. There’s Schneider, who began life as a crafter, converted to an adventuring lumberjack, and is now a ranger, trading his axe for a bow and quarterstaff. His brother, Scholtz, hasn’t received much attention lately. He was a samurai, and then I started to convert him to a stealthy lockpicking treasure hunter. Now I might just have him craft gear for Schneider. Maybe he can pick locks, too? I haven’t decided yet. I haven’t trained a skill above 75 in years. The max level of a skill is 100. Power scrolls can raise some skills to 120, but hey, let’s not get into the minutiae here. I’m just dabbling.
So, I have to talk to you about the specific reason why I came back to Ultima Online this time. It centers around the launch of something called New Legacy, an all-new server featuring seasonal content, a story-driven narrative, accelerated skill gain, quests, boss battles, and a lot of other elements foreign to what is otherwise a sandbox-style game, where players typically craft their own narratives and objectives. Seeing UO try something new for the first time in nearly a decade (no exaggeration—their last expansion came out in 2015) caught my attention, so I had to try out the new game mode for myself.
I created a new character, also named Scholtz, because coming up with character names is time-consuming and mentally overwhelming, and dipped my toe into New Legacy for the first time. I emerged from a strange portal just outside the city of Occlo. As I reached a crossroads, a hooded figure gave me the option of the narrative path, or to immediately join the frontlines and start fighting. The narrative path is the new and different approach for UO, so that’s what I chose to investigate. The introduction was exceedingly basic—walk from building to building in Occlo and essentially meet all the NPCs in town. But soon enough, I got to choose a profession (warrior) and received a task to kill a bunch of rats in the library cellar. Finally! A thrilling task worthy of my RPG acumen! I moved on from rats to battle some restless dead in the crypts below the Occlo cemetery, and eventually got the option to continue as a warrior, or specialize as a ranger. I went the ranger route—I never used archery in any game until UO, back in 1999 or 2000, when a friend suggested I pick it up. It was a great addition to my character, and I have since used archery a lot in RPGs. I like to have a melee skill, as well, but in New Legacy, I am limited to just archery for now. We’ll see if I get the option to add a melee skill moving forward.
Upon choosing the path of the ranger, unseen forces teleported me to the city of Skara Brae, home of the ranger’s guild. Here, I got more quests, mostly battling brigands at a nearby camp and wraiths at the Hag Ruins, which awarded me points to distribute among my ranger skills. This is a new approach to skill gain in UO—prior to New Legacy, the only way to raise skills was to use them. Again and again. So much skill use that my gaming friends back in high school called Ultima Online “Work: The Game.” That is not an entirely inaccurate analysis, and parallels real life more than I’d care to admit. Getting good at anything takes a lot of dedication, repetition, patience, and practice. Just like real life! But, the rewards of achieving grandmaster status (or “GMing”) in a skill are worth the journey. New Legacy potentially makes the trek to grandmaster a little more palatable when time is of the essence, so I like that. I’ve raised each of my ranger skills to 70 thus far, and I’m itching to get back in there and see what happens next.
The downside to this narrative-driven skill gain is the lack of customization. In vanilla UO, there are 700 skill points to distribute among as many skills as I’d like. The customization runs deep, but the more I diversify, the less skilled my character can be in each ability, something that’s also relatable in real life. I will forever and always have too many interests and never be great at any of them. I’m like a real life Red Mage from the first Final Fantasy, but I like the Red Mage, so I guess I’m embracing it. New Legacy, however, limits Scholtz to six skills, with points left over for a seventh, but I think I might have to have a paid account to unlock that extra bit of customization. We’ll see when I get there, if I get there.
Honestly, New Legacy might be one of the best things to happen to UO in quite some time, and I say that as an admitted skeptic coming in. Despite the limited customization of a character, the accelerated skill gain brings a level of accessibility to busy grown-up gamers like me who’d like to make some semblance of progress, rather than crafting ten thousand suits of armor to gain 0.1 skill in blacksmithing. The downside is that after a year, a cataclysm wipes out the server (remember, New Legacy is seasonal), and as an Endless Journey player, I must pay to transfer my character to one of the standard servers, so that quick skill gain has its shortcomings.
Another big change in New Legacy that caught my attention concerns magic items. Back in the day (ugh, because I can’t help making myself sound as old as possible here), magic weapons had accuracy and/or damage bonuses, and armor had defense and/or durability bonuses. That was it. The bonuses had specific names and tiers, and were easy to understand. In modern UO, magic items have a million different characteristics—damage types/resistances, skill bonuses, stat bonuses, swing speed bonuses, hit chance increases, and more. It’s a lot like loot in Diablo, but deciphering all of the item traits baffles me in a way Diablo loot never has. The bonuses are too granular, and even weak enemies burst with magical loot upon defeat, which means a lot of time spent scrutinizing magic items. Altogether, all these item statistics make it almost impossible to determine if the war axe I just picked up is better or worse than the one I already possess. It’s maddening, and I ultimately discard most of the loot I find so I don’t have to waste time deciding if it would be better to have a helmet with 15% physical resist and 10% energy resist, or a helmet with 14% physical resist and 11% energy resist. Mercifully, New Legacy returns to the old system, which means that I know what the heck my magic items do at a quick glance. For a dabbler like me, it’s a big deal. I’m never going to kill anything stronger than low-level skeletons or leave the newbie area of the game as it is, so expecting me to also spend time micromanaging my equipment is too much to ask.
So, this is it. This is how I play Ultima Online. I dabble endlessly. I get temporarily obsessed, switch up my characters’ skills, raise them to around 70, and then rapidly lose interest and move on to another game. Months or years later, I’ll pick it up again and repeat the process, having long forgotten what I was doing with my characters. I never reached what would be considered endgame content. Even when I played until my eyes bled in high school, I invested so much of my time in the roleplaying community that I didn’t actually see much of the game world, unless a roleplaying event happened to take us to an exotic location. Much new content debuted in subsequent expansions, as well, so I will probably never find myself running out of things to see or do, even on a free account. For me, this is great. It’s all I need. I fulfill my periodic urges to play without spending any money or investing in Britannian real estate. I fight some monsters, raise some skills, and wander aimlessly looking for purpose. It’s fun...in a perhaps nihilistic sort of way.
I see my Ultima Online experience as something of a microcosm of my overall year in gaming—dabbling in a lot of games, wrapping up a couple of games I already had in-progress, but never committing to anything new and big. It’s been tough to find the time to devote to it, and if I start a new game, I want time to dive in and really enjoy it rather than play it half an hour, forget about it, and start another new game the next week (or just play more Stardew Valley or UO). Instead, I dabble in lots of games that don’t require a large time commitment in a single sitting. I did recently start Super Mario Odyssey, which might finally be my big gaming commitment of the year, assuming life allows me to stick with it.
In the meantime, however, I have some skills to raise to 75. Will that be the end of my latest Ultima Online obsession, like it usually is, or will New Legacy help to hold my interest? Time, in more ways than one, will tell.
Thanks for reading, and see you next mission!
Cover Art Credit: MobyGames
Title Card Art Credit: Tim and Greg Hildebrandt
