If I were to move to another shard besides Great Lakes, I sure wouldn't move to Atlantic. I played Ultima Online during its busiest years. I've seen and done that. I'm a bit older now, and I don't need to see crowds everywhere; all I need is a great game, a few good friends, and a few self-sufficient characters. You can have that on any shard in Ultima Online.
I did take a cross-shard trip to Atlantic one time. Rather than make a new character, I bought two tokens, and took my original namesake character over to Atlantic, just to explore around and see the sights. I visited popular areas and vendors, went shopping, explored unique landmarks and player-built cities, and even took a couple of guided tours, courtesy of some of Atlantic's nicest guilds and players. It was worth the price of the vacation, and it reminded me a little bit of the old days. But then I boarded the gate and went back home.
I do think smaller groups of players and single players ought to get more quality of life features handed to them as time marches on for this wonderful game.
Regarding small-scale and single-player content, let me tell you a story.
Now, I disagree with players who solely use emulators to play UO, but a few years ago, I downloaded the server software for an Ultima Online emulator (not saying which), along with several big files containing a basic world set-up, with NPCs, spawns, and so forth. But my purpose was not what you'd commonly expect to read next.
I wanted to see if it was possible to use UO as a sort of "engine" to build a single-player Ultima experience. My own tale, set in the Ultima universe. A sandbox RPG in an open world with theme park RPG elements. A kind of "adventure construction set," courtesy of EA.
So I learned how to change rules, settings and lots of other things in the emulator's server files. I learned how to create graphical dialogue and quest windows or "gumps", as well as other unique items, using Photoshop and code to tie it all together. And I learned how to program quests and NPCs, with different outcomes based on the choices your characters made, and began chaining them together into a CRPG-length primary story arc, one that took your adventurer all across the lands, as well as several side-quests along the way. I learned how to make companion NPCs a bit more useful, but also geared some quests and rewards toward certain skill sets, in order to encourage any hypothetical player to create multiple characters and to explore the game's challenges from different angles. I learned how to make some of those empty houses in cities purchasable, so that you could move into them, decorate them and store your things. I learned how to make it so that some quest-related items had to be crafted, using unique resources that could only be obtained in quests or hard to reach places.
I learned how powerful this game really is, and I learned how much potential it really has as an interactive story-telling "engine". If I could imagine it, then lines of code could be written to make it happen. If I couldn't figure out how to write it, someone else out there had probably figured it out.
I shared it with a few close friends and family, but out of respect for the game's publisher and studio, decided not to share it with a wider audience. A genius programmer from Brazil (lots of Brazilians play on UO emulators for some reason), who I met via some forums, was one exception. There were some communication issues, but we both understood what we were each trying to accomplish. He mainly enjoyed creating items, such as armor and weapons, drawing them and animating them and then bringing them into the world and giving them properties. And I was world-building, with a focus on stories. It was an excellent team-up, and I enjoyed creating my own grand Ultima adventure immensely. My eyes were opened by all the adventures possible with Ultima Online, and since that time on, I've wanted to see its official developers take advantage of that, and give us some crazy adventures like we've never seen before. The quests and scripted events that currently exist in Ultima Online are the tip of the iceberg of what's truly possible!
is with Atlantic though.
