Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

It’s hard to believe that one of the earliest MMO’s is still around and just turned 10 years old. It’s taken EA/Origin a long time to get a new client out the door, but Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn is probably the most intelligent way they could have executed the upgrade. It’s a new client connecting up to the existing server base, so the front-end is changing while the back-end is ostensibly staying the same.

The beta of Kingdom Reborn is now available at FilePlanet for existing UO subscribers and FilePlanet subscribers. Taking a look at the before-and-after screen shots takes me back. Ultima Online was my first MMO game, so it has a special place in my heart.

Ultima Online started back in 1997, and the sick thing is that I played the beta and became horrendously addicted to it just using my 28.8 modem. But even my addiction had its limits. The game servers crashed frequently, and when they did crash they would often take a certain amount of progress with them, time-warping your character back to where the last backup managed to catch him. I’d lose stats, items, and so on that were gained in the intervening time and it became too much to bear. Just a couple of months in I quit the game and never went back. But now that I look at those screen shots, the memories of the variety of gameplay it had come flooding back.

This was disorienting in a relatively unfriendly game world — you could pretty easily get lost since the in-game map was quite limited and the wilderness between cities was very dangerous and vast. There’s nothing like walking through the city minding your own business, having the server crash, and then logging in an hour or so later to find your character standing in the woods. When was this backup made? Which way was I going? What was I heading for? Dang I don’t have that tiny little bit of armor that I’d lucked into.

Thievery was rampant, and at any point in town you had a chance to walk into a shop, open your inventory to sell off some bit of junk you’d found outside town, and find yourself short on cash. Did I spend that or did someone get away with pickpocketing? It was rather cutthroat, and high level characters could sometimes withstand the instantaneous wrath of guards that were alerted by seeing theft or by someone calling out to the guards to let them know a thief was afoot. There were also the tricks wizards would play, teleporting onto rooftop tiles in the 2d world, safely out of reach of the guards, and raining down suffering on the townsfolk below.

Theft and PVP killing were all part of the game, so much so that it took years until Origin/EA would cater to players who desired a fully PVE only game and set aside a special server or two just for that purpose.

The crafting system was pretty nice, and actually led to a little bit of a gray-market economy in towns. The tailoring skills were pretty nice, and I got a kick out of dyeing people’s clothing for them. I do recall that players could own shops, and there were bevies of duplication bugs over time that caused player-owned houses to be stacked all across various areas, blocking travel between towns, or even creating little towns of their own. Cooking was also fun, and I do recall waiting forever in line to use practice dummies to bump up fighting skills in towns.

It was a far more open and experimental system than we see in something like World of Warcraft, and it must be doing moderately well if they’re beta testing this new client. I’m guessing the core gameplay hasn’t changed enough to allow for a solo-friendly existence, so I doubt my current gaming habits would allow me to subscribe again. For now, I’ll relive the short adventures I had in UO in my memories.

Anyone else out there play this game back in the dark ages of subscription gaming?

Via FilePlanet.