Suddenly over the last few months I've become quite the Ultima Online player again. I started playing 1997 thanks to my friend Greg, who worked with me at the time and was an Ultima fan as well.

As far as MMO game play goes, I don't find all the other games in the last decade to be all that much better. I have to qualify that. I HATE the regular Ultima Online (for pay) game. I quit soon after they introduced Trammel and all the other stupid crap that they have done to the game over the years.

As I don't have the time I used to put into the game, and I now have a family and a mortage, the free shards looked very attractive to me. But I didn't like some of the little ones with just a few role players that I was playing for a while. Then I decided to try out UO: Hybrid. Now this was a great server. This free shard stripped the official game if its insanity (Like trammel) but kept lots of interesting and useful things that EA did add to the game. There are so many more skill interactions than before its not even funny!

The bottom line is that I'm having fun playing an MMO again, and I'm not having to pay for it! Now if only I could find a guild that doesn't disband after a week or find one who's guild master is actually online.

In the mean time, I'll be farming Shame with my tamer and simultaneously fishing for treasure with my pirate....er "salvager". Arrrrg!

Moral of the story is that if you read this blog and you played UO with me in the old days... come find me on UO: Hybrid! There is no reason why we can't relive the old days. You can go back again (and get ganked outside of Yew by the moongate hehe)!

Now if only .Net would install in Wine so it would run the Razor client... I could play all of this using Ubuntu and really be a happy man.