Over the last years I been thoroughly enjoying playing a mod of Ultima Online called Ruins & Riches. Ruins & Riches (formerly called UO Odyssey) is designed to provide a rewarding single-player RPG experience. Players of old Ultima games will find the world familiar, and a lot of the quests and lore draw upon the old games. The main land of Ruins & Riches is a Sosaria based on the map of Ultima III: Exodus, but the whole world consists of multiple lands to be discovered and a dizzying amount of dungeons.

Ruins & Riches provides an open world experience that can be enjoyed alone or together with friends. You can embark on quests ranging from small artifact pickup quests in a particular dungeon, to massive quest lines that can take days or weeks to complete.

The world and its lore is discovered through books you find on your adventures, and most often they require close reading to comprehend what the next step on your journey is. Collecting clues and finally figuring out how to progress is very rewarding.

Parts of the game will feel familiar to UO players, but a lot of the systems have been changed and whole new skills and mechanisms have been introduced. You can become a priest first by proving yourself by finding a mallet and stake and slaying hordes of vampires, or find the path of the jedi (or the syth!), and a lot more.

The developer of Ruins & Riches, Djeryv, has been building on the game for a decade, and the current version is quite stable and complete. I played Ultima Online from when it launched in 1997 and on and off for the next 10 years both on unofficial and official servers. I’ve often wanted to return, and Ruins & Riches has given me the opportunity to reexperience the excitement like when I first played Ultima Online almost 25 years ago.

Late 2022, the website for Ruins & Riches went offline. Reasons for this are unknown. However, the developer still updates the files at the end of the two google drive links they used for distributing the mod. A fan has made a page with links to them as well as to the manual here: https://ruinsandriches.neocities.org/

While Ruins & Riches can be experienced fully by yourself by hosting it on your own machine, I missed company and set up a small server where we now are a handful of players or two exploring Sosaria. Here’s the link for that: https://www.multiverset.net/ruinsandriches/ You are more than welcome to join us there.

  • cnk@kbin.dkOP
    12·
    1 year ago

    Here, I am about to enter an abandoned mage tower where a crystal ball will trap me on an island in another dimension. It took me a week or two to get out.

    • cnk@kbin.dkOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      You’ll love it! It’s like coming home to an old home, but the home is better than your nostalgia had made it be.

  • smokinjoe@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    Holy nostalgia.

    I still remember battles at the entrance to Covetous during that ~45 minute window before servers would go down every day for maintenance. Just complete free-for-alls knowing that nothing will be saved anyway. Leave your Kal Ort Por at home, and bring your Corp Por.

    OooO oO oooOOooO ooOoOO oOo Ooo

    • cnk@kbin.dkOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      Haha, oh yes. That was chaotic.

      I started playing UO in 1997 from a 28.8bps modem. We called the experience “Multilag Offline”.

  • CtrlAltDelicious@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    I wish we had some magazine like “little known games” for games such as this one. There’s lots of niche stuff out there, and this one’s surely interesting.

  • Yewb@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    Holy shit great opportunity for these old games, I would love to play a completely simulated everquest or ultima online I could just play.

  • cnk@kbin.dkOP
    2·
    1 year ago

    To become a priest you have to find a mallet and a stake and slay a bunch of vampires.

    • cnk@kbin.dkOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      It really is! Haven’t played this much on my computer in a very long time.

  • TehSr0c@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    This has been great for nostalgia!

    Quick question for anyone in the know, I’ve been looking around but finding info on this mod is rather difficult.
    NPCs will just give away all their inventory for free, is this a permanent fixture or one that is disabled by something? Is it possible to disable and if so, is it possible to actually play the game without getting stuff for free?

    Also, is there a way to increase the size of the vendor trade window? it’s rather cramped.

    • cnk@kbin.dkOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      NPCs giving away their inventory for free? That sounds strange, are you sure you are not using stealing on them? There’s a red ruby in the bottom of the trade window that you can drag to extend it vertically.

      In general, you can learn a lot by going to Help->Library on your paperdoll. New lore books you find and read will be added to this library as well.

      • TehSr0c@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        I found out what it was! I was distracted during the intro message, and didn’t see I should use the gamemaster character to make a new account, I thought a new character was enough. But it seems the new character also had gm status. As is the rule with these things, I found this out a few minutes after posting the message.

        • cnk@kbin.dkOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          Haha, yes. And none on the monsters will aggro on you 😅 Glad that you figures it out.

    • cnk@kbin.dkOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      This overlap is surprisingly well and subtly done. Ruins & Riches mixes and matches lore and inspiration from a lot of places. It’s very much in the spirit of the early Ultimas that also mixed sci-fi with fantasy.

    • cnk@kbin.dkOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      AFAIK there is a thriving community around unofficial WoW servers. The official Ultima Online servers are still running. It’s free to play to a certain point now, and the developers (Broadsword) are apparently working on some sort of new seasonal experience.

      UO server emulators goes all the way back to the late nineties. This gives a nice overview: https://www.uox3.org/history/timeline.shtmlRuins and Riches is based off RunUO and scripted in C#.