By the end of the year, it had surpassed competitor Ultima Online in number of subscriptions.

Games such as Meridian 59, EverQuest, Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot were routinely called graphical MUDs in their earlier years.

Players interacting in Ultima Online, a classic MMORPG

" It was originally envisioned to be an " Alternative to Ultima Online " and was mentioned in an article on the Slashdot news website, which became a major source of interested developers.

Ultima Online ( UO ) is a graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game ( MMORPG ), released on 24 September 1997, by Origin Systems.

The success of Ultima Online opened the door for the creation of many new massively multiplayer games.

Ultima Online is a fantasy role-playing game set in the Ultima universe.

Several expansions have been released and the release of Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn in 2007 brought a new game engine which offers a newer visual experience.

As of April 2008, Ultima Online held a market share below 0. 6 % of the massively multiplayer online game subscriptions.

Quoting directly from the Electronic Arts press release announcing the Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn expansion, Ultima Online was " The first MMORPG to reach the 100, 000 subscriber base, far exceeding that of any game that went before it ".

Ultima Online is the product of Richard Garriott's idea for a fantasy game involving several thousand people who can all play in a shared fantasy world.

There were a number of prior games that allowed hundreds of people to play at the same time, including The Realm Online, Neverwinter Nights ( the AOL version ), and Meridian 59 ; however, Ultima Online was intended to be a significant improvement over the previous games, both graphically and in game mechanics.

Ultima Online initial features included persistent player housing, skill-based character progression ( without levels or classes ), a crafting and player-driven economy, and unrestricted player-versus-player combat.

Upon release, Ultima Online proved to be very popular, reaching 100, 000 paying subscribers within six months of release, despite severe lag problems.

Origin was able to make a great deal of money from the monthly fees required to play Ultima Online and many other companies took note and began development of their own massively multiplayer games.

The most successful games after Ultima Online have been EverQuest ( released in March 1999 ), Asheron's Call ( released in November 1999 ), Dark Age of Camelot ( released in October 2001 ), Final Fantasy XI ( released in May 2002 ), World of Warcraft ( released in November 2004 ).

Ultima Online continued the tradition of previous Ultima games in many ways, but due to advancing technology and the simple fact that it was Origin's first persistent online game, there were many new game mechanics as well.

Beginning with the first expansion ( Ultima Online: The Second Age ), the original world gained the " Lost Lands ", with additional land, dungeons, creatures, and terrain.

The worlds in Ultima Online include:

This community has decided to work on something much more significant than a " mere Ultima clone ,"

Since the rules for Baroque were first laid down in 1962, some regional variation has arisen, causing the game to diverge from Ultima.

Since Ultima Onlines prime in 2003, the overall subscriber base has seen a steady decline.

Another problem throughout Ultima Onlines history has been flaws that allowed for cheating.

Ultima Online has had several special releases which were not expansions, but came with boxed or in-game extras.

The 3D client was originally released as a part of the Ultima Online: Third Dawn expansion, but has received poor reviews from both veteran and new players alike due to a large number of performance issues ( especially memory leaks early on ) and what many see as sub-par graphics.

Electronic Arts has referred to the Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn client as " 2. 5d ," meaning that it was written in 3d and then effectively backslid into 2d to make it, in theory, easier for lower-end computers to run.

In every Ultima game that he has appeared in, he is designed to be almost impervious to the player's character predations.

Rinna is a few years younger than Shipon and most of the other students, but because there are few children at Ultima ( it being the newest of the foundations, and still incomplete ), she has little to do with herself but play with simulators.

This is parodied in Ultima VII, where an actor playing the Avatar in a play boasts about how he has hundreds of lines to memorize, only to reveal that every line literally consists of " Name!

It has been proposed by Raph Koster ( lead designer of Ultima Online and chief creative officer ofEverQuest II ) that Diku has resulted in the greatest proliferation of gameworlds due to being the easiest to set up and use.

: Dear Ultima X: Odyssey community members, As of today, development on Ultima X: Odyssey has ended.

In the NES version of Ultima: Quest of the Avatar, one of the mages claims he's working on a book that has 69, 105 pages so far.

Ultima Thule, the station's Sunday evening ambient music programme has been on air for nearly twenty years and in 2005 became the first programme to be podcast on Australian community radio.

Exult has, over time, grown to be almost exact reimplementation of Ultima VII engine, with some notable improvements.

There are two pieces of equipment made from materia in the game ; the Materia Blade ( which teaches " Ultima Sword " to Gladiators and " Ultima Charge " to Mog Knights ) and Materia Armor ( which has one of the highest defensive stats in the game ).

Because Bless Me, Ultima contains adult language, and because some of the content is violent and contains sexual references, it has been included in the list of most commonly challenged books in the U. S. in 2008.

Narciso has a deep abiding loyalty and love for Ultima because of her extraordinary efforts to save his young wife who had succumbed to an epidemic that struck the town.

He eventually gets so sick that Ultima has to come and cure him.

, Bless Me, Ultima has become the best-selling Chicano novel of all time.

On April 10 and 12, 2008, in partnership with The National Endowment for the Arts ' Big Read, Roberto Cantú, professor of Chicano Studies and English, who is intimately familiar with Bless Me, Ultima, produced a dramatic reading as a stage adaptation of the novel at Cal State L. A. Cantú first reviewed the work when it was published in 1972, and has published and lectured extensively on its art, structure, and significance.

The dawn of the modern novel can be seen in Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu ( Concert din muzică de Bach —" Bach Concert "), Camil Petrescu ( Ultima noapte de dragoste, întâia noapte de război —" The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War ").

Also, while not explicitly stated, Akalabeth is seen as the first game of the Ultima series, a very popular and influential series of role-playing video games.

By the time of Ultima VII, Richard Garriott noted that he had grown tired of the moral concept seen in the previous three games, and the Avatar returned to a more traditional role for the player where the moral code was not as strictly enforced.

The Avatar in Ultima VIII was designed to be male, taking away the choice of gender, but still having some of the moral flexibility seen in prior titles.

The term " griefing " dates to the late 1990s, when it was used to describe the willfully antisocial behaviors seen in early massively multiplayer online games like Ultima Online and first-person shooters such as Counter-Strike.