Object of This Site
The Ultima Online Travelogues represent my memories of my in-game experiences. I met a lot of new friends in UO, and with some I still keep in touch. All stories really happend and all screenshots are real in-game screenshots. The Travelogues will give you a very detailed impression about what happend in Britannia during the first years, what the highlights and the downsides of the game were. I think that these stories are a rather unique documentation of the first popular MMORPG on the market. I only realized the "value" of this site from the feedback I got from visitors even though I didn't update the site anymore. That's why I decided to keep up this website although I do not play Ultima Online anymore, and probably never will again.
If you want to contact me, send an email to:
How I Played UO
I started playing Ultima Online in December 1997, shortly after the Beta Phase was ended. A friend of mine (known in-game as "Kugelblitz" and "Krys Wyn" told me about UO and it sounded interesting. He helped me with my first steps in the game. I didn't know or care anything about skill levels, stats and game mechanics. I just played for fun and did whatever I liked. My charakter (which I awkwardly named "Mad Biker") wasn't really good at anything and always was the one being killed in player vs. player combat. I didn't know what a mule was; Mad Biker was my first and only character. I didn't even know that some players were exploiting bugs or macroing for skill gain. Mad Biker was not a well planned character. In fact he wasn't planned at all. He was almost daily killed by playerkillers, except in the cases when my recall spell didn't fizzle.
Although I took me almost a year before I even started to care how a powerful character had to be built, I enjoyed the game most during those "months of naivety". My second character "McBykar" was a powerful fighting character and had mastered the skills that were typical for almost every PVP character at that time: Archery and Magery. His abilities opened new doors of adventuring and finally I was able to reach the deep dungeon levels.
Britannia was soon explored, even the most remote corner of the map, and I had to think of something new to have some fun. This is when I created the character Hawkeye Pike.
Hawkeye Pike was meant to be a roleplaying pirate character. Thus he
consequently avoided magery and he was one of the very rare grandmaster fencers
in Britannia. Fencing was a pretty useless fighting skill at that time, because
the skills weren't very well balanced. But I did not care, I purely roleplayed
this character. I must say that this character was the most fun, as I represented
one of the few people in Britannia who didn't follow the Virtues and played a
scoundrel, but without being a player killer. I ganged up with some friends and
together we founded the first pirates guild in Britannia.
One day the developers fixed the weapon balance and suddenly the fencing skill
was a very powerful fighting skill and besides it was very fast.
Suddenly Hawkeye defeated player killers and other aggressors until the rest of
Britannia figured out that fencing had become a cool skill.