As others have stated, UO will always be the game that I base other MMORPG's from and unfortunatley, not one game has managed to surpass a game that is now nearly 15 years old.
UO gave you a freedom that other games simply can't or won't give you. I can understand in some ways why developers choose not to go down this route, to give the players alot of freedom in game I'm sure creates alot of problems for them, but then you look at the other end of the spectrum, games like WoW etc (list is never-ending) ... and personally I take no joy in playing games where I am told what to do and how to do it.
People who say UO was just a gank-fest, well that's not really the games fault, you yourself can change that... by being more organised or just not PvP'ing in hotspots where you know you will be outnumbered.... that's a player problem, not a game problem and it's stuff like that which led to UO's decline. Instead of making sure you were prepared/organised and thinking with your head, people just whined and moaned leading to severe changes and killing UO. Probably the same people who never really cared about the game itself in the first place and left it to die once those changes came through. UO was never a game that was going to hold your hand while you played it, there was real consequences to nearly all your actions, whether they be good or bad. Being a PK wasn't just a walk in the park, like some people lead you to believe. It was alot of hard-work and while you may of got killed and a few hours of hard-work taken out. a PK ran the risk of losing his actual character, so there was balance. (As my friend found out when I missed a heal on him, he was more then slightly angry lol)
Games need risk vs reward, you can't just have everything....I feel in new games I'm rewarded for doing absolutely nothing. *You opened a door* Congratulations! 1000 achievement EXP! In UO you were rewarded for hard-work, whether that be killing monsters, crafting, PvPing. The more work you put in the more you got back, sure the game wasn't perfect but what game is?
I too await the day that I can login to a game and it give me that sense that UO did. I've been playing online games since 1996 and it feels like a long and painful torture when playing these new MMORPG's. For those that asked why don't I just play UO? Well, I and many others never asked for the game to be changed so dramatically in 2003 with the advent of Age of Shadows. UO was just about getting back onto it's feet after the creation of Trammel and although some will disagree, Publish 16 actually got felucca populated again and PvP was again at the fore-front of the game, although it was slightly more unbalanced, but it was still enjoyable. However, it was short-lived and 9 months later, Age of Shadows ripped the fundamental aspects of the game clean out and we got left with a game that wasn't even recognisable to the game we loved. EA themselves even issued an apology about a year ago on Age of Shadows, saying in hindsight they would of never changed the game had they known the impact it would of have. Too little too late obviously, but if a company as big as EA can admit their mistakes, then maybe it's about time they rectified those mistakes and gave us a MMO that a UO player would want to play.
As a UO player I feel I am branded with a "hardcore" gamer tag, like a conspiracy theorist is labelled crazy. I just want a game where I am free to do whatever I wish, as was the original vision of the genre. Is that too much to ask?
Keep this thread alive, love hearing UO stories