The next best MMO maybe - Ultima Online + World of Warcraft

It's the MMO equivalent of a boxing love child of Frazier and Ali, of a cross between PC and a Mac with Linux on it, of a Islamic Christian religion, needless to say, it's one hell of a heavyweight and it is ready to make some pretty freaking huge waves.

Ultima on World of Warcraft or UoWoW (pronounced you-oh-wow) is a private World of Warcraft server designed to mimic the gaming mechanics and concepts of Ultima Online. While only developed by a small team, its population is growing every day with its reputation.

Ultima first began its life in 1980 as a very basic ASCII RPG. You played 'The Stranger' who takes it upon his/herself to find and destroy the gem that makes the evil wizard, Mondain, immortal. As with all evil wizards, Mondain is causing grief and devastation to all the local villages and towns with his minions and must be stopped!

You didn't just jump straight into Ultima though, you first had to create your character that would be 'The Stranger'. The player could choose between four classes, four races, a gender and statistical layout that would be their character for the rest of the game. Such in-depth character creation at the time, coupled with the open ended nature of Ultima I made this the first real commercial role-playing game.

Ultima Online didn't jump on the scene until after the very rushed and poorly received Ultima VIII in 1997. UO is seen as the first real graphical MMORPG being the first game to reach 100,000 users (as recognised by the Guinness World Records) and still has around 150,000 subscribers almost twelve years on. The rule of thumb generally is, if you've played an RPG recently, there's a damn good chance that Ultima in its many incarnations, has influenced – some more noticeably than others.

Warcraft as a series is the baby of the two giants, being only fifteen years old, as opposed to Ulima's twenty-nine years in the game. For those not versed in the Warcraft series, it didn't start out as an RPG but as a real-time strategy game as the name 'Warcraft' suggests. It was only until 2004, ten years after their first game, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, was released, that World of Warcraft would go online and in to the RPG genre for the very first time. World of Warcraft, their forth instalment in the Warcraft universe, has grow to be the largest played MMO with around 11.5 million subscribers.

Urgh, now the boring history is out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks. So what exactly is Ultima on World of Warcraft? It's just another private server to be perfectly frank with you guys. They've opened up their own server and embarked on making WoW play with all the gaming mechanics and concepts that UO has.

Some of these features include, but not limited to:

• Full world PvP
• Recall rune that can be marked with a players location to recall to whenever they choose
• When killed in PvP by a player within 5 levels of your own, there's a chance to drop items and gear
• Personal storage
• Experience Orb which you can carry around when you're level eighty that absorbs experience that you may give to another toon.
• Personal housing that can be placed anywhere in game (excluding expansion continents)
• Guild Airships and airship combat
• Improved crafting abilities
• Increased experience, gold and item gains
• No travel times when using flight-masters (thank the heavens for that)
• You are able to capture and control the many various cities in the WoW universe
• Player controlled merchants
• Town supply lines of gold and resources. Guilds will have to take out supple lines in order to mount a successful attack on a controlled city.
• The best gear will come from city sieges
• Vehicle and siege equipment
• Three tier's of controllable cities – minor, major and capital.
• You will have to summon a bane stone to attack the major and capital cities, and must own a major city in order to bane a capital city (the more that you own the easier the siege will be).
• The Guild-Leader of the controlled capital will be the reigning king.
• At the moment there will be only one capital city (Ironforge) but a capital city per continent is the planned reality.
• A game-wide city taxing system.

Now remember, this is all still in beta, and these changes are rolling out in a week-by-week, day-by-day basis, but the awesome is flowing and it's flowing fast!

To begin playing UoWoW you just need to follow a few simple steps:

Yours in gaming, Pino…