Ultima Online

"The best just keeps getting more and more"

I have played UO for 3 years (almost 4 now) and I can easily say this is my favorite game of all time. If every game I own or will ever own crashed and burned and were never playable again, I wouldn't care if I still had UO.

First of all ignore the bad review listed, everyone is entitled to their opinion but that person has not been playing long enough.

This game consumes a lot of hours of time. If you don't have atleast 3 hours, you might as well prepare for when you do. Training and building your character takes a lot (depending on what you do of course) mining/smithing/magery are the ones that take the longest and are the most expensive (except for mining... you only need shovels) Being a warrior is easy, you start with 1k gold with that you buy an exceptional weapon and be on your way into the woods.

The game does have PK's, and there are a lot of them for the only way a PK can survive is with another PK (*NOTE* THIS IS ONLY ON THE FELLUCA LANDS!!!! GO TO TRAMMEL IF YOU WANT TO BE SAFE, PK'S ARE NOT ALLOWED THERE AND YOU ARE FREE TO GO WHEREVER TO TRAIN!) PK's are usually mages, they'll paralyze, create a stone wall then ebolt you to death, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you're mining it shouldn't matter because if you mine you should only carry shovels and food... nothing more.

Graphics (8/10) upon appearance you can tell the graphics arn't the greatest... But this is a huge world with nothing but online people so you can't expect the graphics to be top-notch. Given these circumstances I give graphics an 8.

Replayability (10/10) So you're building a mage and you got the stat amount maxed. You get to about 80 magery.. What's that?! You don't want this character to be a mage? Or you hate magery? No sweat, just mark magery down and then build up the other stat that you wish to replace. With this you can keep changing your character to the way you please.

Economy (10/10) Sounds like a weird subject but economy in games are everything. Look at Diablo 2:LoD I'd give that economy a 0, and I'm not lying, people only want so many different items. In UO, gold is very important, and you rarely ever trade item for item. Gold is everything, and it's not exactly easy to come by, you have to work for that Crescent blade of Frost, or hope you get lucky and find one.

I could make more subjects for this, but I'm running low on time online, but basically if you're looking for a long term game, then this is it. Considering UO, EQ, or Asheron's? Get UO, I've played all three, and Ultima is my number one choice. I'd recommend this game to anyone.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 05/13/03, Updated 05/13/03