Recently I have been searching for a game to occupy my free time and in that search I've stumbled upon quite a few of my old stomping grounds. One of them being Ultima Online. I'd never paid for the game to play, and I defintely wasn't about to start. So I started perusing the web searching for a decent free shard. I had remember past experiences where I'd find a free shard that was either totally deserted, or varied so much form the actual game that it really wasn't UO anymore. Finally I had found what I had been looking for.
I found myself at RunUO's website. They're an organization that has done wonders for hosting free shards and creating assistant applications to better the experience of UO (Razor). They also happened to run one of the largest free UO shards on the net - UO:Hybrid. It was a combination of the new we all liked, and the old we all loved. So what did I do but create an account and pester my friends to join me.
The shard has on average 650 - 1000 players, which is enormous compared to what I was used too. There were some new features that I wasn't familiar with either. The faction system was one of them. It took a little bit to learn what they were and to manipulate them to the best of my ability. Factions are basically a guild of guilds. There are 4 of them, and they are constantly at war with each other, taking over the basic cities within the world. Because of this it causes a constant fluctuation in the economy as cities vendors go from selling items to -30% to +300%. It causes for some irretance when trying to purchase reagents, as richer character constantly buyout vendors of all their reagents in the -30% towns. But all in all I like the system, and am very interested in getting started with it with my own guild.
Another new thing that was surprising was the customizable houses. The last shard I played on I had just purchased a Tower and I thought that was awesome! You log into hybrid and run 4 spaces from a city and you find endless forests of houses, towers, keeps, castles, all customized for the most part. Some of them are really cool the way the owners designed the homes. There is definately some thought that was put into a lot of the homes throughout the server. The only downer is just that, there are endless homes. It's near impossible to find a plot of land to place a home. Basically the only way to do so is to find what they call IDOCs (in-danger of collapsing) and hope that you can be logged in when it falls and place your home. The problem with that, is one they're like needles in a haystack to find, and two, a whole ton of other people are doing the exact same thing. I found an IDOC, and sent my poor brother to camp it. It fell and within a minute of it falling he said a band of Murderers showed up and killed him. So the housing market is brutal.
I ended up just buying a house for twice it's cost just last night, a nice two-story 8 x 9. I immediately started playing with the customize tools. They're intense and expensive, but I look forward to customizing the home before selling it to hopefully purchase a bigger one. My goal now is to make the house nice, stock up on reagents, supplies, etc... and start building a few characters up so I can start PVPing and having fun. From anyone that has read my history of gaming then they should know how much I enjoy a game with my friends. So to all you whose interest I have perked whether you've played UO in the past or not, hit me up on UO:Hybrid.
-Gnome
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