It'll never happen but I wanted to throw it out there. You never know
Something I really loved about early UO was that the speech appeared over the characters head and there was not an irc style chat. There was a yell but it wasn't even close to zone wide. So if you wanted to talk to someone you had to go over and talk to them.
This was very good for world immersion, built community, and increased character identification (you weren't talking to a bunch of random strangers spread out across the entire zone or game but the character that was standing in front of you.