Ultima Online

Ultima Online, launched in 1997, is one of the genuinely field-defining releases in gaming history. Origin Systems, under Electronic Arts, built a game for large numbers of players sharing one persistent world where your character does not vanish when you log out and where events continue in your absence. The view is top-down and the graphics two-dimensional, a necessary choice on 1997 hardware since a fully 3D world supporting that many simultaneous connections was simply not achievable. Its most consequential design decision was using skills rather than classes: characters improve at whatever they actually do, which made blacksmith, alchemist, fisherman and thief into complete ways to play and left combat entirely optional. The economy rested on player crafting and trade, and players could build houses in the open world, which gradually covered the landscape with human settlement in a way no previous game had allowed. The most argued-over feature was freedom itself, including the freedom to attack other players. That generated constant conflict and eventually pushed the developers into splitting the world into safer and more dangerous halves, a compromise that shaped debates about online design for the next twenty years. In 1997 people connected over dial-up modems, making the whole thing slow and expensive, and it still found a large audience. Today its interest lies in being the origin point: almost everything later online RPGs do was either invented here or first went wrong here. Our entry records its release details and its place in the Ultima series.