UO Second Age

Little background.

I'm a former Origin employee who worked on UO2. When the project was cancled, I had a somewhat bitter taste in my mouth, and haven't revisited Britannia since.

Well, a decade has gone by. I'm older, and to be honest I don't play many computer games any more. Certainly not any MMORPG. Now I have a son (who spent many days in the Origin office in Austin as a toddler) who is turning 10, and has the love of games that I once had.

In a fit of nostalgia I was browsing the web for UO related material, and I stumbled upon this site. I'm not sure how many former OSI employees have stopped by, but it does my heart good to see that something I worked on still has an active community. It may seem hard to believe, but for the folks at Origin, UO was never just a job. It was something we did for love, and seeing people a decade later get enjoyment from it makes it worth it.

Alright, with the nostalgia crap out of the way, I'm thinking of playing with my boy, but I have a couple of questions.

How difficult is it to be play on the shard? Are there any barrier to entry that I should be aware of? Do you think a younger player can have a rewarding experience?

It's a pretty rough and tumble shard. The old rules pre-Trammel are in effect, and the server does a reasonable job of approximating the late-t2a era of UO.

Thieving, house looting, pking, and the like are in place and I don't think all that uncommon.

There are of course ways to mitigate those kinds of play styles. (Good pack protection for thieves, house barriers with tables and appropriate caution using detect hidden and not carrying a rune and house key around, and emergency recall macros and trapped pouches, for example.)

I think it might be pretty complicated for a 10 year old to figure all that out without some help, and maybe a bit discouraging to get stolen from or murdered by pks, or worse, have a bunch of loot they've managed to acquire get taken by house looters.

But the server seems very stable, the admins seem committed, competent and capable, and the attention to detail and desire for era accuracy are high. I really like this shard, but I haven't been playing here that long. So far it's the closest thing I've found that approximates old UO after numerous other attempts at finding a similar shard. I think this one is the best.

Just don't go into it thinking there won't be conflicts.

If you do decide to play, PM me and I can help you out with a small house I never use, and that's in a fairly safe place.

Gbob wrote:How difficult is it to be play on the shard? Are there any barrier to entry that I should be aware of?

you definitely should know better than any of us

It was something we did for love

You just made one of the best video game ever. That's all. And that's why we are still playing at UO, like people in the world are still playing at Tetris or Doom dispite the fact it's very old.

If you want to play here, you should read first the wiki and topics related to house security, how to not be scammed, how to raise a char, etc..

You should also read the "tales of adventure" forum, you will see that players are creative and are not just killing monsters and pvp all the time

I would probably only let a 10 year old play here supervised. For one, he is bound to be attacked, robbed, house looted, etc. For another, the shard, like any video game, is full of teenagers who think it is cool to, for instance, pretend to be Nazis. So it's rough in gameplay style and full of content not suitable for ten year olds. But if you teach the kid how (and when) to recall, how to do a little bit of fighting, and take him out with you, it should be fun.

At the time whence I was not a teenager but a wee kid, I learned how to pretend to be a Nazi on UO.