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After months of harassment by various friends and aquaintences i've decided i am going to start playing some form of online RPG. My dilema is which one?

One group of friends have asked me to play Ultima. I know 10 people who play there and one of them is a Blacksmith who's offered to service my equipment for free. Also the blacksmiths husband Lord Grimly has offered to pay my first 6 months subscription.

However I know an avid Everquest player in work. He has offered me a place in a clan of 30 people which seems sweet.

Which one seems most worth while playing?

I've heard stories of people who spent as much time playing Everquest as they spent working. Translation: little to no sleep.

So, I really don't know... are you asking which one is more engaging, or which one is the lesser of two evils?

Ultima Online is to Everquest what hershey's chocolate is to Rock Cocaine. Both are fun, both are addicting, but one is WAY MORE ADDICTING AND FUN than the other.

I remember back when I was playing the Ultima Online beta .... woah that was such a long time ago ... Australia wasn't even supposed to get the CD, but somehow my friend got his hands on it.

Anyways- I haven't played either. Ignore me. I just don't like the idea of paying for the privelege of online play- paying to buy the game is enough.

Vympel wrote:I remember back when I was playing the Ultima Online beta .... woah that was such a long time ago ... Australia wasn't even supposed to get the CD, but somehow my friend got his hands on it.

Anyways- I haven't played either. Ignore me. I just don't like the idea of paying for the privelege of online play- paying to buy the game is enough.

Amen to that...



The fuckers charge an arm and a leg for new releases as is...and then they try and charge for online play?...that's just not on...sadly there are the poor fools who will pay it though....hence more companies will go down that route eventually..

I'm enquiring which is the most fun to play? like i say i've been offered places on either with well established groups. While i like games i've never played a game that stopped me going to work. Well only Homeworld did that. Which is the easiest to pick up and gain skills?

Eh, not tried either of them personally...if you can get free subscriptions for them...then try both for that period and use it to decide...word of mouth will only do you so much good, usually folk like to try to make sure...

If you're more of a Fan of traditional RPG's, get the Ultima Online CD and then look for Freeshards.

Those are servers that allow playing for free, altough it's far more like a traditional P&P RPG. For example, some have skill and stats caps so you have to choose carefully what you want to be.

A warrior? a Magician? A blacksmith or a tailor?

Aw well i've made my choice. My mate who plays Ultima promised me lost of gold pieces if i joind in with him on Ultima and he also paid for the game for me.

That and being as how NONE of you dead beats even voted made me chose Ultima Online Age of Shadows.

Coaan wrote:

Vympel wrote:I remember back when I was playing the Ultima Online beta .... woah that was such a long time ago ... Australia wasn't even supposed to get the CD, but somehow my friend got his hands on it.

Anyways- I haven't played either. Ignore me. I just don't like the idea of paying for the privelege of online play- paying to buy the game is enough.

Amen to that...



The fuckers charge an arm and a leg for new releases as is...and then they try and charge for online play?...that's just not on...sadly there are the poor fools who will pay it though....hence more companies will go down that route eventually..

And you also gotta pay for the Internet connection in and of itself.

Personally, I never understood why you gotta pay for them. Is it really that different from, say, Battle.net and the Zone, which do it for free on games?

Never played a MMOG before, so I'm askin' ya.

I play EverCrack....I mean EverQuest, and I can tell you this:

If you're not careful, it'll suck all of your life away from you, and then some.

If you are, it's a whole bunch of fun.

RPGs indeed. DO niether, play Planetside. Online MMFPS-RPGs. Much better. Or just do the obvious and wait for Star Wars Galaxies or one of the 'new generation' games that will be coming along.

I was in the UO beta, and played online for a little while after it started offically. It really sucked on a dial up connection. And there was nodoby to talk to, no monsters to fight, and the economy was broken.

I think a lot of that might have been fixed by now. I think you get more chances for RPG in UO and more hack and slash fun in Everquest.

RogueIce wrote:

Coaan wrote:

Vympel wrote:I remember back when I was playing the Ultima Online beta .... woah that was such a long time ago ... Australia wasn't even supposed to get the CD, but somehow my friend got his hands on it.

Anyways- I haven't played either. Ignore me. I just don't like the idea of paying for the privelege of online play- paying to buy the game is enough.

Amen to that...



The fuckers charge an arm and a leg for new releases as is...and then they try and charge for online play?...that's just not on...sadly there are the poor fools who will pay it though....hence more companies will go down that route eventually..

And you also gotta pay for the Internet connection in and of itself.

Personally, I never understood why you gotta pay for them. Is it really that different from, say, Battle.net and the Zone, which do it for free on games?

Never played a MMOG before, so I'm askin' ya.

Basically...it's greed on the company's part....trying to screw every last penny out of the customer so they can play their product...it's a shitty way of doing business....it's why alot of people tend to avoid mmog

so saying that....they are bloody addictive....

Some of the better ones are the likes of a Persistant NWN world...Uo(if you can get someone else to pay for your online time or get a free trial.) or some others...alot of thge persistant online worlds for games like those are usually very large and the spirit of rp in most of them is very very strong..the only problem you get is when you have biased mods

TrailerParkJawa wrote:I was in the UO beta, and played online for a little while after it started offically. It really sucked on a dial up connection. And there was nodoby to talk to, no monsters to fight, and the economy was broken.

I think a lot of that might have been fixed by now. I think you get more chances for RPG in UO and more hack and slash fun in Everquest.

Alot of it will have been fixed...the fans would have simply rebelled otherwise....

In the overall end, I'd take a damn good Rp session over hack and slash anyday....hack and slash grows old after the first diablo like level....whereas, rp can never grow old if you have two excellent rp'ers going at it...

Avid UO player of three years, owned a nice small stone tower near Yew and had a little over a million gold pieces stashed away. Not bad for someone who only ever played a warrior. The game was the best, with infinitely more depth than Everquest could ever dream of having. You could kill a deer, carve some meat, chop some wood, build a fire, and cook. When you needed new armor, you went to the forge and specified the type and material you wanted, and came to an agreement with a fellow player. I once owned the same horse in UO for months, until it finally died. (Alas poor Bruno the Horse, cruelly slain by the Collector of Souls.) You could actually sit in the chairs and drink the booze. There was really no comparison. UO was a medieval Matrix with bad graphics. EQ was just a shallower Diablo 2 with 3D eye-candy.

Then this ABOMINATION called Age of Shadows hit. In short order I collapsed my house, threw my three years worth of loot on the ground, deleted my characters, and cancelled my account. Horrible lag and crashes that a child could have seen coming, due to their suddenly clogging the pipe with an insane amount of data... Previously weak monsters just kicking your ass... Bugs that should never have made it past one day of testing... Entire player inventories just hitting the ground and being scooped up by opportunists... Houses vanishing for no reason... Characters being "blackholed" or stuck unplayable for days on end... The most nauseating display of professional incompetence I have ever personally been witness to.

Pounder, I would be very interested to hear your newbie's impression of the game as it stands. If they've gotten their shit together, I'll rejoin in a heartbeat. Screw the house and loot, it's all just videogame shit anyway. Don't put too much weight on your friend giving you loot. The best times I ever had in that game were as a broke-ass n00b scraping to survive.

EDIT-- PS, regarding the guy who played the UO beta... Means nothing now, in terms of knowing the game. It's been five years, and it's literally an entirely new game, even compared to when I started.

Sometimes i die horribly due to server lag. One second i'm running for my life, the next it stutters and i'm in a gray cloak. As i'm only a week on it i've not lost anything i can't get back, at a cost, in the Haven shops. However it is only a minor pain in the ass. This mainly only happens in the evening. So far i've really enjoyed it. The other users are very helpful and kind. But for £7.00 a month to play i expected a faster server. They say they've put the prices up a bit becase the server's are getting major upgrades and this is also the reason for occasional lag.

The main problem is the house editor. Houses used to only come in certain preset types, and thus all the server had to send to load one was the equivalent of "Load a log cabin!" Now that houses can be customized from the ground up, it has to send the position of every tile worth of wall and floor. Clogs things up to no end.

I've played neither. Online RPG's are a rip off.

On the rare occasion that it's done right, a persistent-world online RPG is the absolute most absorbing form of gaming ever devised.

There was the time, back when I first started, that a grandmaster mage (who later referred to himself as a bounty hunter) disguised himself as a fellow newbie and joined our group. He then tried to lead us into player-killer territory so that he could whack anyone who tried to murder the helpless newbs. We fell for it, but nobody obliged by attacking us. The guy was a good sport, and showed us around a bunch of places it would have taken us forever to travel to on our own.

Then there was this other time... I had acquired a box which, when opened, would spray a poison that meant certain death within seconds. Well there are these things called Communication Crystals in the game, that function a bit like walkie-talkies. Thing is, thanks to ICQ, they're so infrequently used that most people barely remember that they even exist. Well I take one of the "receiver" crystals and manage to get it inside this box. I then drop it on the ground in front of the bank, run around behind the building, and start yelling stupid shit like "Get me outta here!" into the broadcast crystal. Meanwhile, my brother is hiding within sight of the box. Sure enough, some dufus picks up the mysterious talking box and within a few seconds he's taking a dirt nap. My brother then dashes in and loots his carcass. We kept his hat as a souvenier for quite a while.

I'll sell you my copy of Dark Age of Camelot for $10.