Lately it feels like society (at least the corner of it I see online) is looking backward more than ever. People are craving a simpler time, one that was less digitally connected, less optimized, less… everything. My blog has been saying for the past year that things peaked somewhere in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, and it seems like that sentiment is spreading. More and more folks are reaching the same conclusion.
Just last week I came across someone in the Ultima Online community who has spent the last decade reverse-engineering the original demo of UO that shipped on the Second Age disc. He opened up a test shard so people could finally play the game the way it was truly intended. As someone still subbed to UO today, I can say with total confidence: yeah, it really did feel and play better back then. The systems were simpler, more intuitive. Everything just clicked. Even the classic client felt snappier and more responsive than the one we have now.
But one of the most fascinating parts was seeing the ecology system that was promised but never made it into the final game. The code was still sitting there in the demo and now it was fully developed and implimented into the code. Wolves would actually hunt rabbits and could thin out entire populations. If players came through and cleared the wolves, the rabbits would bounce back and flourish. Birds could pick up items and carry them off to distant locations. It was this living, breathing world—or at least the foundation of one.
That’s always been my take on Ultima Online: it was ahead of its time in 1997, and in a lot of ways, it still is today. The fact that the community is the one finally bringing those old dreams to life just proves it.
It got me thinking bigger though. EverQuest Legends is launching this summer, promising a closer experience to the 1999 original while letting people actually play solo if they want. Difficulty can be adjusted too. A bunch of other quality-of-life changes are coming, but honestly a lot of it flies over my head since I never lived through original EQ in its prime. Still, it’s part of this bigger wave.
Old games are getting remastered, re-released in HD, or rebuilt from the ground up. We’re in this strange moment where everything points to the truth a lot of companies still won’t admit out loud: the old experiences were often just better. They had soul, pacing, and mystery that modern design has largely abandoned. UO doesn’t have the same dev team or resources it once did, but I love that the community is stepping up—going back to the roots and finally implementing features that were cut decades ago.
Hell, even World of Warcraft is teasing some kind of Classic+ experience. And Diablo 2 is still getting new content 26 years later. Meanwhile, the newest MMOs coming out like Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and Monster & Memories are leaning hard into that classic, hardcore feel.
You know what? I’m okay with all of it. Actually, I’m more than okay; I’m excited. There’s something really healthy about this shift. We don’t need massive corporate teams chasing endless engagement metrics. We just need smaller groups of extremely passionate and talented developers who want to build the kind of game they’d actually love to play themselves.
That’s where the magic has always lived anyway. We’ll see where all of this goes and there’s no guarantee that this trend will continue, but there’s something to say about gamers flooding back to an old experience. Especially the gamers that never experienced these old titles but somehow know deep down that this is exactly the experience they’ve been missing out on.
Passion will prevail.
Check out the UO Shard if you’re intersted: https://uo.serpent-isle.com/