Majulaar and Ultima Online

So, I've been following a YouTuber called "majulaar" for a long time, since a time 3 years ago when The Algorithm dropped this gigantic video on my head:

Reviewing a Bunch of RPG Maker Games

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHoCSK1ikfI

It's... he just put so much effort into this, he covers like 10 different weird exciting indie games and that also represents a lot of curation effort: they're all interesting picks.

Majulaar has formed a beat, and that beat so far sort of rotates around "long-form retro RPG explorations", which is extremely up my alley. Also, they just straight up produce, I'd estimate, on average, 90 to 120 minutes of pretty high quality content per month, which for a single person is just a blistering speed.

He has a pretty dry delivery - it's mostly his voice over game footage that's he's captured - which is a pretty solid way to get a lot of long videos.

Various Ultimas

Anyways, since that happened, he's launched a new project, and again - his tremendous speed and thoroughness has made this absolutely insane project complete:

A thorough and very complete look at the entire history of every Ultima game, including a full playthrough and review of each.

We learn about the game's development, its launch, its reception, and then he tucks into a playthrough and his thoughts on what made the game successful (or not) and their effect on RPGs as a whole.

Each video clocks in somewhere between 90 minutes and 3 hours. And he's covered... every single one - well, not all of them yet, but he's reached the early-to-mid-nineties and Origin doesn't have much more gas in the tank.

An Absolutely Mammoth Look At Ultima Online, The First MMORPG

So, how do you properly review Ultima Online?

Well, the answer is: it takes months, and loads of friends. Fortunately, majulaar has both of these things, and was able to spin up a shard of his own.

And so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35SKawn2SDI

This video is 4 and a half hours long.

Unreal Online Is Probably The Most Open-World MMORPG Ever Made

There's a real argument to be made, watching this video, that nobody has ever made something _so_ open ended, so _player driven_, so complex and detailed and systems-driven as Unreal Online: World of Warcraft saw how hard it was to deal with players abusing the many complex and open systems of Unreal Online and closed them all, creating a more "fun" and "focused" and "consistent" experience that became the common template for MMORPGS afterwards. BUT.

Not gonna lie: I could give a shit about modern MMORPGS, they do not hold a candle to Ultima Online, a game I never played because I could not afford the internet, let alone a subscription-based video game, at the same time UO was popular.

The Absurd Origin Of Database Shards

This video reminded me. The term "shard" comes from Ultima Online, where the game's narrative designers and Lord British bristled at the idea that they'd have to separate their users into multiple parallel Brittanias for *load balancing reasons**, and so invented this idea of magical parallel universes: the crystal of reality exploding into shards. The term stuck.

The Assassination of Lord British

One of the things that you expect in coverage of UO are... hijinks. Stories about weird stuff the original players got up to.

And, yeah: he covered the assassination. You have to. It's part of UO history.

But rather than go into detail about the many fun moments of UO apocrypha, what I thought was fascinating was that most of his stories in this clip are new. They're wild stories about the hijinx that .... he got up to, with his friends, in 2025 and 2026, in this decades old game, because it was always built around these complicated, detailed, well-put-together systems.