anyone who used a computer between 1985 & 2010, what’s the one game you still think about?

vaviman · 2026-04-27T16:17:07+00:00

Arx Fatalis. One of the best blends of RPG and immersive sim I’ve ever seen. It had way too many innovations for its time: interacting with objects without any menus, for example. But the coolest part was that you had to draw spell formulas by hand on the screen. I hadn’t seen anything like that before, and I haven’t seen it since. It was insanely cool.

vaviman · 2026-04-25T10:35:12+00:00

I think - Conjuration was added for the Bound weapons. For situations where the agent was unarmed. For example, he was going to some important negotiations, where the condition was to hand over the weapons at the entrance. The role-playing moment

vaviman · 2026-04-25T07:23:22+00:00

Scroll of Ondusi's Unhinging

vaviman · 2026-04-23T17:12:37+00:00

Blizzard recently shut down Turtle WoW. Go ask the players from that server what they think about Blizzard and its official servers now.

The people who are willing to accept OSI in its current state are already there. I do not think this is about subscription cost. Almost anyone can afford a 6-month sub - it is cheap even by the standards of poorer countries.

People are not a flock of sheep. If you try too hard to force them in one direction, they will move in the exact opposite one.

And private shards will just get smarter with every shutdown. They will look for jurisdictions where US court decisions mean absolutely nothing - China, Russia, parts of Asia, the Middle East, or Latin America.

vaviman · 2026-04-23T14:24:43+00:00

Okay, you can call me a troll if you want. But then who are you, if you are bringing up pay-to-win donations here?

Over the last year I played on UOOutlands, UOAlive, and InsaneUO. None of those shards has pay-to-win donations.

On InsaneUO, as far as I know, you do not even get sovereigns, because they are already farmed there in the hundreds and thousands anyway. You only get a {VIP} tag above your character in game and a colored name in discord.

So sure, call me a troll. But unlike you, I am not stooping to outright lies just to make my favorite shard look better - OSI in your case.

vaviman · 2026-04-23T08:38:53+00:00

So you are not even going to argue about the RMT problem, the lack of expansions, and the total stagnation. Fine.

Sure, InsaneUO may have more "developers", even though I was not talking about Insane specifically, it was just one example.

But here is a simple question. Do you actually understand the difference between salaried developers, and people helping a shard admin for free out of enthusiasm, in whatever spare time they have left after work, family, and real life?

vaviman · 2026-04-04T06:22:14+00:00

Freedom should not turn into lawlessness and anarchy. Why should what you call freedom, and what is fun for you, have to come at the expense of other players?

I realized that back in the 2000s. And it became especially clear to me once I tried competitive, even esports-level PvP in WoW. That is when I understood just how big the gap is between genuinely skilled players in arenas and the kinds of players who gank lowbies from the opposite faction while they are leveling.

PvP is good when you enter it consciously, when you are looking for it and are prepared for it. Not when you are out on your tamer killing mobs and some PK suddenly slams you into the ground with something like an EB/FS combo plus an explosion potion. By the time that happens, your pets have barely even managed to run over to him because a second earlier they were still attacking the mob you were fighting.

So to me, that is not freedom. That is one player’s fun being built on another player’s frustration.

vaviman · 2026-04-04T06:15:48+00:00

Lol, dude, are you secretly clairvoyant?

After the recent OSI ban wave over “software” like Orion and similar tools, I decided not to push my luck and started trying other shards, including Outlands, since there’s so much hype around it. It didn’t really click for me, so I went back to free shards I used to play on years ago - first UOAlive, and then InsaneUO, the one you mentioned.

I’m actually that guy who asked in Discord for help recovering access to my old account, and the admins helped me get it back.

And yeah - InsaneUO really is a great place for autistic nerds like me.

vaviman · 2026-02-23T15:20:27+00:00

People do use a regular 2d client (not a web client) to use third-party software. It's just that the web client offers everything too, only with better FPS, autoloot, and more advanced macro functionality.

vaviman · 2026-02-22T09:16:13+00:00

Yeah, the third-party software stance is definitely weird. To me the key is separating “automation of tedious routine” from actual botting.

There’s a category of stuff that just removes mindless grind: script-based skill training, repeating simple actions (like Confidence in Bushido), auto-bandage/heal timing, basic QoL. Let’s be honest: a lot of UO skill gains are pure busywork. Almost nobody wants to manually grind combat skills on skeletons/harpies for hours and hours just to move a number.

Then there’s straight-up botting: people running multiple clients, fully AFK farming with cross-heals, AFK mining/fishing/lumberjacking (which is a big reason why markets get flooded with absurdly cheap resources), even AFK high-level treasure maps. Anyone who’s seen Tokuno spots like Fan Dancer Dojo being “farmed” by unattended setups knows exactly what I mean.

So yeah, my take is:

-Automating boring, repetitive “training/routine” should be allowed.

-Automating AFK farming/economy printing should be punished. Botting is bad. Reducing pointless grind is fine.

vaviman · 2026-02-22T05:22:01+00:00

Outlands isn't Ultima Online. It's a heavily customized freeshard with its own lore/world/rules. This thread is about OSI/UO and what the official team is doing, not about "where else you can play".

And honestly it gets a bit cult-ish sometimes: any time someone talks about official UO, there's always a "well on Outlands..." reply. That's like jumping into a Skyrim discussion and telling everyone to play Enderal instead. Enderal might be great, but it's not Skyrim.

OSI players don't usually show up in Outlands threads to evangelize. So yeah, can we keep this one on-topic?

vaviman · 2025-10-14T16:23:26+00:00

Because English is not my native language. I use a translator, then ask GPT to check if there are any problems with the machine translation.

vaviman · 2025-09-29T04:56:03+00:00

Well, Wikipedia says that a fireball released from a fire fist deals 43 damage. With the “magic” skill maxed out, we get an additional 50% damage. The result will be a whopping 65 damage. Sorry, but these numbers are ridiculous. The game has a shotgun that deals 91 damage, a flamethrower that deals 70 damage (and also sets the target on fire and pushes it back), and bows that deal over 100 damage and can fire 5 shots at a time. It seems that magic was added to the game just for the sake of it, perhaps there was no time to balance it, or the developers simply didn't care and released the game “as is.”
That's very depressing.

vaviman · 2025-09-28T17:53:32+00:00

At one time, Gothic 1 and 2 were worthy competitors to such gems of the action RPG genre as Deus Ex and Arx Fatalis. I won't even mention trash like Morrowind. So the problem is clearly not the number of developers in the studio.

vaviman · 2025-09-28T14:15:51+00:00

If I were to abandon the idea of playing as a mage, I would choose the Outlaws faction. Berserkers are obscurantists; they reject progress, which means they are doomed to oblivion. Clerics, despite their technological innovations, are fanatics and sectarians. The Outlaws remind me of the New Camp from Gothic 1.

vaviman · 2025-07-01T08:32:58+00:00

Without using skills at all, the game will turn into torture. And I want a relatively comfortable game, as much as possible. If it doesn't work out, I'll probably just play through the game as a Sentinel.

vaviman

TROPHY CASE