Ultima Online

The overall effect is dispiriting - not so much because the core joys of UO have been destroyed, but because they've been supplanted in many players' minds by the more tangibly rewarding economy. It feels lonely, then, to be a new player, still chuffed about killing his first gargoyle.

This isn't the end of the story, though. Much to EA's consternation, a completely separate UO community has been evolving since the game's launch in 1997. Intrepid coders have reverse-engineered the first modern MMO, and have not only built free servers out of it, but completely reworked versions of the original game. The legality of the practice is dubious at best, but EA has yet to shut down a single free server (or "freeshard"), so the community has grown unfettered.

There have reportedly even been times when the populations of individual freeshards have competed with - perhaps even exceeded - EA's subscriber servers. When Raph Koster visited China for the first time after leaving Origin, he was amazed to discover how well-known he was there; apparently, hundreds of thousands of Chinese gamers had been playing freeshards under EA's nose.

Just like UO proper, the freeshards community has ebbed over the years, but it lives on. There are shards dedicated to preserving UO at a certain point in its life-cycle - UODivinity, one of the most popular freeshards, turns the clock back to 1998 - whilst others attempt to provide the most up-to-date, EA-esque service possible (UODemise, for instance). Others still retool the experience with custom graphics and environments (Endor, say).

Whichever tickles your fancy, the end result is that EA is in the very interesting position of having to compete with something that offers, cosmetically at least, the very same service, but at no cost to players. So how does the global entertainment conglomerate stack up? I think it's fair to say, despite certain freeshard operators' proclamations, that EA still holds the lion's share of (English-speaking) subscribers - at least, this was my experience. In addition, there's a certain transience inherent to the free service, and not only because your account tends to be purged after several months of inactivity. Freeshards' reliability and stability can certainly be called into question, and, naturally, if you're an economy player, there's very little on offer for you here.

On the other hand, as the Britannia-copies belonging to each shard tend to have spent less time running (and have smaller populations) than EA's servers, the vendor plague is far less apparent. The server-side tweaks may potentially be more appealing to you than what's on offer if you pay to play, and the climb up the social-power ladder is obviously going to be much less daunting. Ultimately, however, you're entering the world of murky legalese by so much as creating an account there, so be it on your conscience.

Beyond this, if you're a UO convert, it seems only just to commend (and reward) EA for continuing to support a service of gradually diminishing returns, especially when so many other MMOs tend to face the axe after a slow launch year. The team behind the extremely popular RunUO shard emulator seem to concur, having decided not to attempt to reverse-engineer Kingdom Reborn. Ryan Adams, RunUO project announcer, announced that "My personal feeling .... is that this attempt to revitalize an already 10-year-old game will fail... but we should definitely give them the chance to prove us wrong. If they pull it off, good for them, and congratulations."

Adams seems to have been proven right over the past year, but EA has one more (perhaps final) ace up its sleeve: the highly anticipated Stygian Abyss expansion, which, in addition to allowing subscribers to play as gargoyles, will also return them to the utterly immense dungeon first explored in Ultima Underworld II. If your memories of Looking Glass are rosy, this should be an exciting prospect.

As for me? Well, after apologising to Jobriath for my brusqueness, I intend to resume my quixotic mission to vanquish the pesky daemons in Relvinian's maze. Hell, after all, hath no fury like a newbie scorned.