It's an MMO that was emulated with various teams trying to get it to work the way the official servers do. Now, you'd set up the server software somewhere and players could connect to it with the client software. The gameplay is a world that's just sitting there waiting for you to explore it, with bunches of towns and dungeons with vast wilderness between. You can go out of town and pick cotton or shear sheep, spin the fiber into thread, weave the thread into cloth, tailor the cloth into a shirt, dye it, and put it on so everyone can see how stylish you are. Weapons cause damage to armor, which blacksmiths need to repair at a forge and anvil. You can mine for ore and smelt it into ingots, to make metal goods that adventurers would love to have. Those adventurer players can go trek through the woods or hit a dungeon or hop on a boat and sail to a tropical island of pirates. There are undersea tunnels connecting landmasses, moongates that link worlds, so travel is fast between points but slower when trying to get to a nearby destination. And on the way you ened to be wary of other players, who may slay you and take your stuff, which all drops on your corpse when you die. To respawn you flee as a ghost and try to find a healer to raise you. Or players can, with high level magic.
Some cool things that not every MMO has:
Craftable player housing that exists in the same world as everything else - no instances.
The server staff can make anything craft able, the only issues are game balance.
Plenty of stuff can be set as a rare drop, based on anything - type of monster, location, what you killed it with. So you can set up a cycle where crafters make stuff for adventurers, who gather materials in dangerous places, and return to the crafters to have cool new stuff made.
Your character chooses skills ala carte, meaning the only classes that exist are good combinations of skills that players tend to like using together (like Swordsmanship, Tactics, and Parrying for a sword-and-shield fighter). You improve skills by using them, meaning sparring with other players is worthwhile. and you can set up training areas.
Player guilds already exist in the basic game, and setting up cool guild benefits can be based on that membership. Tying guild benefits in with other stuff going on in the world, like quests, could be a thing.
Or maybe quests don't exist. If you want the Crown of Ra you need to figure out where it is and go get it. Oops, there's a crumbling wall in the way, did you bring explosive potions or an explosive spell, or a pick? Everything is based on tiny obstacles along the way to completing your objective, which exist in the world separately from any idea of a "quest". Someone could walk up to a hut in the woods that's necessary for some adventure elsewhere, and interact with it and leave, without doing anything with that adventure.
Staff can set up events for players that are in-game one-shot adventures, or storylines, or just party games that are a fun way to spend an hour or two.
It's small-scale, meaning it's not an MMO of thousands players. More like hundreds for a successful freeshard with maybe only a couple dozen online at a time. At the start of a shard it's not uncommon to see nobody else on during non-peak times.
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Topic: Anyone want to start a UO shard? (Read 664 times)