This topic comes up over and over again. Nothing ever comes of it for reasons detailed extensively here and in other threads, and it is vanishingly unlikely anything ever will. I won't rehash all that--search the forums for the topic and you'll find plenty.
However...
Even if we did somehow magically come to a universal consensus on what a "classic" shard should be and have, and even if Broadsword did have the time, money, and staff to devote to building such a shard, I don't think it would be what most people asking for a classic shard are actually looking for.
Let's think back 22 years ago to the beginning of UO. Where were you?
I was in high school. I used a Gateway computer. I accessed the internet via AOL on a 56K modem and lost connection whenever anyone called my parents' land line. I sat in IRC channels. I had a Tripod page. I drove my parents' K-car, a rusty stick-shift '88 Dodge Aries. I'd never had a cell phone and wouldn't for several more years.
UO was new. The INTERNET was new, at least in a massive, easily available form, and especially as something that people could play massively multiplayer games on. It was an incredible, unprecedented new frontier in a world running out of those. It was science fiction becoming reality, and we all had front row seats. We were all learning everything for the first time, not just in UO but with the whole internet, a whole new world of instant communication. There was no World of Warcraft. There was no Facebook or Twitter or even MySpace. There was no YouTube. There was no Netflix. There was no Google. Amazon was barely out of Jeff Bezos's garage.
But time moved on. The internet become a nearly unavoidable daily staple that's in our homes, in our workplaces, on our phones, in our cars and our TVs and our appliances. MMOs (including WoW) become commonplace and competed for our attention and money. UO changed a lot, but WE changed a lot too. As individuals, as communities, as citizens of the internet and of the world. A lot of us were still literally growing up. A lot of us had children that have since grown up. A lot of us are no longer with us at all. Our expectations are different. We are different.
I don't think UO's current dev team could recreate the experience of early UO, but that's not a slight on them in the least. I don't think ANY team, with ANY amount of resources, with ANY ruleset or special shard, could recreate the experience of early UO. Because it wasn't just about UO. It wasn't Trammel and Felucca, or runaway scripting and cheating, or shard populations, or any particular publish, or item dependency, or the broken economy, or CC vs EC (vs 3D vs KR), or IDOCs, or RMT, or literally anything about UO itself that moved the game away from what really made the experience of the early, "classic" days of UO so special.
It was just time.
As much or maybe even more than the game itself, early UO was about a time and an experience that has and will only happen once in human history. It was about our introduction to a new digital world that was taking shape. Technology has dramatically changed the world in the past 22 years that UO has been around, and UO was the lens through which many of us started to see and feel it.
For one brief, incredible moment, we watched the world begin to transform--and we shared that moment in Britannia. We shared it in a game unlike anything we'd seen before, that broke new ground and introduced us to people we would never have met otherwise, that let and encouraged us to build communities of all kinds of different people from all over the world. We were there! It was amazing! But no amount of shard building and game mechanic manipulation can bring back what was more than just a game. A classic shard, whatever that may mean to whoever may ask at any given moment, won't give you a classic experience. It can't.
I don't think that it can ever be replicated. Many have tried. None have succeeded. Not free shards. Not copycat games. Not modern UO itself. Even if they could make a classic shard that somehow everyone agreed represented "classic" UO, it wouldn't be the same. A classic WoW shard is not the equivalent of a classic UO shard because the context of early WoW and early UO are so different.
That's not to say there isn't room for rethinking and uncomplicating current mechanics. There definitely is, but that's not the same thing. They can change current game mechanics, but they can't recreate an experience that was so inextricably bound to its context in time. Early UO didn't happen in a vacuum, and it was about more than UO itself. It was about an incredible, unique moment in time that many of us experienced in and through UO.
But that moment has passed. We've come too far and we can't go back.
