Ultima Online Editorial
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It's always the maze that gets me. Though its appeal has waned somewhat after each subsequent visit, I still hold fond memories of meandering through a seemingly endless tangle of forest and shrubbery - darting past an ettin, a gargoyle, and perhaps less thrillingly, a mongbat - and finding myself at the entrance of a giant hedge labyrinth. Supposedly constructed by the wizard Relvinian with a view to getting daemons to do his laundry, it's a calming, floral little place whose only real perils are the odd troll-under-the-bridge and the nimbus of hellspawn living at its core. It's not tied to any particular quest I know of; it's just sitting there, waiting to be discovered.
That's the Ultima Online I remember: so different to the modern MMO model that it's almost a distinct genre. Where your City of Lord of the Warcrafts like to lay their landscapes out in a linear, tiered fashion - there's room at the top-level dungeons they're telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill fire beetles - UO presented its virtual Britannia just as it had appeared in offline Ultima games: open, detailed, and deeply interactive. It was a tribute to Raph Koster's masterful game design that the utterly mundane - fishing, tailoring, carpentry - became not only addictive, but a viable in-game career- or power-path. You were just as likely to see a grandmaster woodchopper's waterfront castle as you were a more common-or-garden dragonslayer's.
