Ultima Online Forever.

I still have the game box ;)

I played Ultima Online back in my teenage year, so around about 15 or so years ago (christ!) and I loved it. As a true sandbox MMORPG you could do or be pretty much whatever you wanted to be, and I spent countless hours in my bedroom hanging around Brit bank chatting into the early hours (much to my brothers annoyance at the time).

Those Skellies were a menace!

I recently stumbled across a new free shard that's due to go live on the 18th January, having been in BETA for a year. This server is UO Forever and I'm sure you'll agree it looks professional and the fact the admins have put their own time and money into the project makes it deserve old players (and new) support.

I agree that you'll never be able to regain the excitement and enjoyment of an MMO you played and subsequently left x amount of years ago, but as a pick up, put down game I don't think there's anything better. Plus if you've got 30 minutes to burn before heading out why not log in to set up a macro on your Warrior to gain some swordsmanship, craft a few pieces of armour or end up doing what I did and hoard loads of cool armour and weapons and hang around safe towns :p.

The consensus with the tinternets is that a lot of the players currently playing on other free UO shards will migrate over to this one, even though everyone will be starting from scratch - as is the excitement for this project.

Ahh, peace and quiet...

I am going to be playing with the Keen and Graev community who hope to get settled and build a city (which you're free to do in UO!). You can join them too, just head over to their blog or check out their forums. I won't be spending 5+ hours a day as I once did, but I will be as active as I can be until the next MMO I'm waiting for releases (i.e. TESO) and even after that I'll still jump in.

There are some useful guides to the server and what you can expect over at their YouTube page too so I urge you to go take a look and tell your UO loving friends!

Ish