Official Site:Â Ultima Online
Studio:Â Broadsword Entertainment/EA (formerly Mythic)
Launch Date:Â September 24, 1997
Genre:Â Isometric Fantasy Sandbox
Business Model:Â Subscription (Cash Shop)
Platform: PC
ultima online
Casually Classic: Eight legacy MMOs to satisfy that old school craving
It was just five years ago in 2018 that MassivelyOP formally recognized an interesting and heartening trend in the MMO space: the rise of...
Massively Overthinking: What should MMOs do when guild leaders vanish?
Last week, we covered that wild story about a "heist" in EVE Online that allowed the perpetrators to make off with trillions of ISK...
The Daily Grind: What are some demonstrably wrong things about old MMOs that people insist were true anyway?
A while back, there was a thread on the MMORPG subreddit arguing that "minmaxing an information abundance has ruined MMORPGs" and posited that devs...
Massively Overthinking: How to alienate your MMORPG playerbase
I am not a Pokemon Go player, but I can't help but stare at its many trainwrecks thanks to the detailed coverage of our...
Ultima Online’s Richard Vogel discusses the horrors of player behavior in an open PvP sandbox
Gaming historians have long documented that Ultima Online was something of a communal wild west when it created its open FFA PvP sandbox -...
Massively Overthinking: The times MMO developers admitted they were… wrong
Earlier in March, Jagex did the unthinkable for an MMORPG company: It admitted it was wrong about something. If you're used to the Blizzards...
Interview: The Wayfinder team on group size, customization, monetization, and more
Perhaps you're interested in Wayfinder because you like the idea of a small-group dungeon-running game published by Digital Extremes. (The studio made another game...
Lord of the Rings Online players are putting on a 30-person adaptation of Sondheim’s Into the Woods this weekend
One of my favorite memories in MMOs is participating in plays and musicals, something I first saw people doing in Ultima Online in 1997...
Bellatores sounds like a full-scale Korean PvP sandbox MMORPG, now aiming for 2024
A year ago, we covered a brand-new MMORPG from Korean dev Nyou called Bellatores, an Unreal Engine title revolving around big-scale progression, PvE, and...
Massively Overthinking: How should MMOs handle in-game criming?
A week or so ago, I fell down a rabbit hole when writing up an ArcheAge post. Kakao was handing out joke titles for...
Vague Patch Notes: The three kinds of sunset in the MMO space
Not all sunsets are the same, no matter how much you may like a given game. This is one of the things that tends...
The Daily Grind: How should player thievery work in a modern MMO?
We just ran a Daily Grind a few days ago in which I used the word "snooping" to refer to checking out characters' attire,...
The MOP Up: Meet Starfall, a new indie Minecraft MMO
So many amazing projects have been birthed from Minecraft over the past decade-plus, including fully formed games. One of the newer of these is...
Ultima Online’s New Legacy should finally hit alpha by summer
The delay of Ultima Online's New Legacy last fall was unfortunately not a huge surprise, though it was a disappointment as it didn't make...
End-of-Year Eleven: The top MMOs to watch in 2023
You know how some people like to push this narrative that "MMOs are dying?" If that were actually true, then my job to round...
The Game Archaeologist’s ultimate MMO archives v6.0
And that's a wrap on this year in history! While everyone says farewell to 2022, here at TGA we're always looking way back at...
Massively Overthinking: Our favorite MMO stories of 2022
It's tradition for us to pick out one big story or narrative arc that defined the year and slap it with an award label,...
End-of-Year Eleven: The biggest MMO stories of 2022
I might be biased - by which I mean I am definitely biased - but 2022 was a year of big stories and big...
Massively OP Podcast Episode 396: Crowfalling
Justin and Bree discuss Crowfall, Blue Protocol, SWTOR, New World, Q3 2022 financials (for Blizzard, Pearl Abyss, Square Enix, NCsoft), and new patches (for DDO, Neverwinter, Blade and Soul, EVE Online, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online), with a mailbag topic covering Shadowbane, Second Live, Secret World, and Ultima Online.
The Daily Grind: What would you say is the best item rarity system in MMOs?
Let's talk about rarity systems in MMOs! The first one I remember was Ultima Online's, and it was text-based without colors and hardly counts....
