Hello and a good day/evening to whoever might read this!
I am a somewhat experienced player when it comes to Ultima Online, meaning that I played the game back in the 2000's (as I am sure many others here did), but unfortunately, never had the chance to play on an "official" shard.
I remember reading about UO in a local PC games magazine (good old days when those were still printed on paper) and the fascination I had with the game just by looking at the screenshots and imagining the described scenarios play out. This was of course before MMORPGs were truly mainstream, so UO was my first ever MMO (and to this day, due to all the fond memories, remains one of my all-time favorite games). I ended up starting off on a truly C-tier free shard (run by a local community of gamers) for a couple of months before eventually switching over to UO Gamer's Demise around 2006. Those last teenage years of mine ended up creating many fond memories and multiple IRL friendships through Ultima Online, despite the fact that we never really played on an official shard.
Fast forward through the years, life happened (a degree, pursuit of a job, moving to a new country, establishing a new home), but I made sure to check on my accounts every 2-3 months or so. Up until the last couple of years. Fast forward (again) to about a week ago, I am talking to a childhood friend (who also used to play UO!), catching up on things, talking about life. He is a father now, has less time for gaming, but still we fantasize about jumping in some multiplayer game whenever it suits us and just having some fun (as we live in different countries and doing anything else together is pretty much impossible). "Man, do you remember our UO characters? Remember the times we had there?"
Nostalgia hits like a truck, and even after having ended our conversation, I kept thinking about UO and whether said characters on Demise have been already deleted, as I have not been disciplined enough to check on them more often. I proceeded to install & configure the client, type in my credentials, and behold - the next screen greets me with a list of familiar names! I log in with my main character, I realize that my house has IDOC-ed and disappeared, but at least all my characters are still there!
This post is an introduction of someone who, like many others (I assume), either felt a pinch of nostalgia or rekindled some childhood/teenage memories and decided to go back and try Ultima Online again. I read a bit about the official servers and the state of the game right now, and quite honestly, I felt a bit overwhelmed. Perhaps I am too used to "that" older version of UO, or perhaps you can't teach an old dog new tricks - either way, I am excited to spend some time, even on a freeshard, and hopefully relive some of the nice moments I used to have with this gem of a game.
I stumbled on ScriptUO as I am definitely looking forward to using some tool(s) in order to automate some aspects of the game. As previously mentioned, adult life is really a thing, free time is limited, but whatever time I can have for UO, I would like to use efficiently. I hope to have the chance to use some of the knowledge that this community has already gathered, and hopefully one day repay it by contributing here myself.
If you've made it this far, thank you for reading through my wall of text, and may you have a new reason to smile today.
to give a poster a reputation bump!