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.
