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Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs?
eldavojohn writes "I have a slightly older friend who played through the glory days of Ultima Online. Yes, their servers are still up and running, but he often waxes nostalgic about certain gameplay functions of UO that he misses. I must say that these aspects make me smile and wonder what it would be like to play in such a world — things like housing, thieving and looting that you don't see in the most popular massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. So, I've followed him through a few games, including Darkfall and now Mortal Online. And these (seemingly European developed) games are constantly fading into obscurity and never catching hold. We constantly move from one to the next. Does anyone know of a popular three-dimensional game that has UO-like rules and gameplay? Perhaps one that UO players gravitated to after leaving UO? If you think that the very things that have been removed (housing and thieving would be two good topics) caused WoW to become the most popular MMO, why is that? Do UO rules not translate well to a true 3D environment? Are people incapable of planning for corpse looting? Are players really that inept that developers don't want to leave us in control of risk analysis? I'm familiar with the Bartle Test but if anyone could point me to more resources as to why Killer-oriented games have faded out of popularity, I'd be interested."
http://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/
Still in beta but it has many things UO also had (building things, crafting, general freedom).
They tried it. It failed.
A lot of of the people who rave about pre-Tramell UO are people who fit the "Multi-player appeal to the Killer" label Bartle uses.
Sadly they needed 1000s of "Multi-player appeal to the Socializer" players to feed on. Beign griefed is not fun for such a person so UO failed to grow. No other game that allows griefign will be fun so you won't see them get developed or launched.
WoW allows griefing on PVP realms - you have to opt in. Most of those realms are empty for the same reason.
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
Constantly we see games becoming more "realistic". Player want more "realism". Want realism, stay with RL.
For me, games provide a disconnect from real world worries. I love cheats and truly enjoy doing the "impossible" stuff.
Casual gamers are what makes up the bulk of MMO subscriptions. These gamers don't want to be robbed of their progress by full-loot, robbery and other nasty things.
The casual gamer will happily spend his $15 if he knows nothing stands between him and the phat loot but time.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
My title sums it up really. Wow in particular has ceased to be a world full of adventure and exploration and has rapidly become just a game full of people who complain if there is anything to do that slows down their getting their loot. The whole game has shrunk from a huge world full of adventure into a tiny game with about 10 instances and raids that people do over and over and over, and complain if there is anything that slows that down. Many other games have followed WoW down this route, and yet I think it's success was despite that, not because of it. The other games may well be "obscure" but that doesn't mean they don't exist or they are no fun to play. Does it matter is there are 3 servers full of people you'll never meet in game, or 200?
As far as penalty driven PvP and PvE (your ship goes boom, no getting it back, and stuff you fit to your ship can go boom with it along with stuff you were carrying)
Owning space regions is expensive & cumbersome, but to be honest I don't remember the housing mechanic real well but it's similar. You can own a Station as well has have Towers referred to as 'POS' (Player Owned Stations)
anything outside of account stealing and real money stealing is allowed and not reversed.
But you're not an elf running around casting things, you're in a space ship.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
It isn't fantasy, but EVE: Online has all the things you mentioned. Thieving, looting, emphasis on killing other players. It is set in space instead of fantasy, but that is a plus in my opinion.
UOGamers is where everyone went. There will never be another Ultima Online. Those who have played and enjoy will never again find tha hole to fill. UO was like that one drug that once you do has you messed up forever. I miss UO!!!
Because any private server would suck some subscriptions from them. Companies open source things because they have something to gain from it, or because its EOL and they want goodwill (or want someone else to maintain it). Where's the upside for Blizzard in doing it?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You can still play classic UO on independent servers. The biggest one is http://www.uogamers.com/
In Eve, the PvP happens alongside (well, sorta -- too complex to go into detail about here) the PvE. Players can build their own "home" -- a space station (but it's not a home for one character, it needs to be built by -- and more importantly -- defended by, a group of people). You can steal from the weak, who in turn hire mercs to have their revenge. Pretty much a complete player-run economy.
No Elves in lederhosen frolicking about in the woods hoping to steal a kiss, but then again, there are the Gallente...
I always wondered how long it would take before an Ultima Online post made its way to slashdot. I played several years on the Lake Superior shard, and after finally selling my account and moving on in 2003 i kept in touch with over 25 people that i was friends with from the realm. from those people 4 or 5 were still playing a UO Hybrid on a private server while others merged into other popular MMO's yet i never found anyone that is still playing a particular MMO. I've played Several MMORPGs after UO but i find the same thing to be true: You just cant compare 2D to 3D when it comes to Online Games like UO. The griefing was pretty widespread, even when OSI/EA released a mirrored world (Felucca/Trammel) for the PvE crowd to play in. Insurance on items so you wouldnt lose them quickly came after that, and the good old Ultima that we all knew started to dwindle and lose its sparkle. The Skill based characters with cap limits also made for more interesting PvP, Only the non-elite would complain about Griefing or PKing. Bringing Harrowers into the game with AoS ment actual boss fights with multiple people. And to think that was almost 6 years after they released the game. and its still going on what, expansion number 7 now? The 2D platform made larger fighters and group battles much more fun. Easier to see everything on screen but you have to know where to look to see where the danger is coming from. An old friend of mine once had a long discussion on why UO was so popular, and especially when it came to PvP i believe it to be the most skill based option for gamers out there. When it came to Dueling you had to time everything right, keyboard shortcuts with UOAssist over clicking spells were key, insta-switching weapons and knowing when to time that stun punch or arm a halberd. As for recreating a success of underground status with lost UO players i dont think it will happen... Most people that enjoyed it will just go back to a player run shard that was pre UO:R.
But the pirate servers are already here, and the pirates will keep reinventing the wheel that was sold to them, wouldn't it save all of us a lot of time just accepting that there will always be order(blizz server) and chaos(pirate server) and if they'd just communicate more (the current communication cap is the user interface, limited by the players ability to write Lua or ability to find people good at writing Lua) we'd build a better playhouse for the children
Have you looked at Tibia (www.tibia.com)?
It was developed and released a bit before Ultima Online, and has somewhat similar graphics and gameplay. There are three server types: Full PVP where PVP is encouraged and unpenalized, Normal PVP servers where PVP is allowed, but players are penalized for murdering too many people in a short time span, and Optional-PVP servers, where PVP is impossible except during guild wars. The Tibia community is usually pretty hostile, especially on PVP servers, with players quick to kill and slow to forgive, and each server has its own politics. Besides the botting problem which CipSoft, the developers, have only just begun to address, it's a great game.
I used to play UO on Siege, the only hardcore pvp server UO has left. I left Siege due to the fact that it didn't have enough players on when i was playing, hours of running around to find a player. Its mostly americans that play there and the europian all leave, because of lack of players in their timezone.
So, i started looking for a new UO like game just like you. I found Darkfall, which was a grindfest and didn't give me the same adrenaline shots UO gave me when running around its forests. Also the Europian server was full of cheats and they didn't wan't to do a server wipe. Recently i tried the open beta of Mortal Online, wow the combat engine really felt sluggish, i hope i was wrong and it will be better, but i haven't logged in after the first hour. Guess thats another game that won't give the UO feel, although its mechanics looked more promising.
But what all these new games lack is the roleplay tools, UO has all these small parts as tables, chairs, flowers, paintings, etc.. You can really build your own scenery to play your character in, combined with a death penalty which makes life in the world much more intense.
If you find a good UO like game, please let me know ;-)
You want this. http://uosecondage.com/ "Second Age is a free Ultima Online Shard that can be accessed by anyone with UO client software. Second Age is the most accurate emulation of the UO: T2A era online today. There are no giveaways. On UO Second Age you will build your character(s) from the ground up." Been running for about 2 years now, good user base and well moderated.
It's not the private servers that would be a problem. It's new for pay servers that would be a drag to Blizzard.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
to play and put every 2-3 hours of your daily life into a game to increasingly progress and then get jumped on by a random group of 2-3 somewhere and all your progress stolen.
it only works when you are a teenager and you have unlimited time in your hands, so you can stomach the loss. but doesnt work for people with little time.
back then in uo days we had that kind of time, and we were stupid enough to stomach that kind of gameplay. but, curiously, i see that contrary to what we did back then, kids of today's generation do not waste their time in that fashion. they just go play proper mmos.
that kind of gameplay only can work in a setting in which you are not required to put inane amounts of time to make progress. if you could make up for the stolen items/whatever in a single session (2-3 hours) that would maybe work. but, else, cant.
Read radical news here
If you want a UO like game, Mortal Online is where it is at. The summary is very unfair, because unlike darkfall, MO is still in beta, with plenty of want for polish. Despite this, I did a long evauluation of current and future MMO's, and keeping in mind I have little time to play in the first place, I wanted one and only one, I ended up getting MO. It is a great game, is very user unfriendly at the moment, but I really love having to theorize about this and that and not having everything handed to me in a cookie cutter style. So I highly suggest you ignore the quick dismissal of MO, and give it a shot. It should be noted that there are massive patches to the beta almost weekly.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
It's a moot point, there is a lot of WoW content that has been reverse engineered and are now running on hundreds of shard servers, some with several thousand players playing :) Heck, I just re-upp'd to WoW and once my 7 day free subscription ends I'll probably switch my client to run on a shardserver and be done with it :)
I'm playing (well, trying to, it's laggy and buggy) the open beta of Mortal Online, and I've followed Darkfall a little, as well as playing EVE and a bunch of others MMOs. What I've learnt there is it is very, very hard to balance a game that allows players to act against each other freely.
Most MMOs restrict PvP to zones, disallow looting, etc. etc. - all those restrictions are mostly there because they make balancing a TON easier. Just read the Mortal Online forums and you can see how difficult it is to get thieving right. If it's too difficult, nobody will use it and you can just as well leave it out. If it is too easy, it attracts all the griefers and assholes who don't steal from people to advance their own character, but merely to annoy other players.
It is unbelievably difficult to find the correct balance once your game has a certain amount of complexity, because all those features interact with each other. EVE did one thing right, and that's why they are still top dog. By setting things into space and a SciFi setting, they eliminated a lot of complexities. The seperation of the game world into solar systems is a natural seperation that players accept. It solves a ton of technical issues without the disturbing portals of other games. The whole cloning and insurance system covers the looting, death and resurrection part from a believable angle that gives the designers lots of freedom in tweaking things. And finally, having security ratings from 1.0 to 0.0 with a smooth transition from "carebear space" to "free for all hardcore space" is a brilliant idea.
Any MMO that doesn't learn from EVE is doomed to fail, I say. And I don't play EVE any more, it's not my game. But they made a good number of brilliant design decisions and have the ability to learn from their mistakes. Kudos for that. Now if you look back at the failed or failure-in-progress games, you will often see devs fanatically defending an original vision that turned out to be impossible to implement. Those who can not adapt, fail.
I still hope MO turns out to be right, but my hopes are fading.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What's in it for them, other then absolutely nothing?
That's kind of the problem here. Blizzard has no reason to do that. They have enough developers, artists, and money that if they want to do something and it's technically doable with their infrastructure, they can. Things that aren't in the game are likely not there for a reason.
All you'd get with them releasing the code is more pirate servers, and people adding stuff to the open source version that Blizzard wouldn't add back into the main game anyway.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Everything on the internet starts off as a group of reasonable, intelligent people. MMOers in the olden days were willing to take sudden extreme losses like having most of their stuff looted and being camped for a few hours, with the understanding that they themselves, with their guilds, were responsible for retribution. Butt then, as with everything, the size grows and the quality of the users and community gets diluted down. Now, we have things like MMOs like WoW where 90% of the effort put into them is just there for the first 6 months of your playing time, until you get to level 80 and just teleport between your favorite instances. The only cure is to start over from scratch.
I've never played UO. What is "UO-like"? What defines it? What do current games lack? Are you sure that they actually lack it?
I can't help but be reminded of people who complain that D&D 3rd-edition focuses too much on moving little figures around a grid, as if it were somehow not the fault of the group playing the game, that they chose to focus on a minuscule subset of the rules.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Some UO fans, that I know, went to "dark ages of camelot" after UO servers became to empty...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Blizz will never *ever* open source their game or let players develop areas because of one main fact. Blizzard is extremely focused on their storyline. Say what you want about their servers, the graphics, or how terrible you think their pvp is. The company can tell a story. Yes, they kill off a bad guy every expansion and are probably running out of baddies to off.. but they stick to their lore. If you're curious about why anything happens in almost any part of the game you can pull out a book and look it up. If any Tom, Dick, or Harry could code an area, throw it up, and let people run wild over it, they will lose complete control over the lore aspect. If the dev's would shitcan anything that isn't 100% in keeping with the lore, they would probably deny 99.9% of areas. We'd hear more bitching about denials on /. then we do about apple's appstore. What's the point? They already have in house people who they can hand a book to and say, Read this, write an instance around the place between pages 55-70.
As much as I hate how Blizz does things sometimes, they have reasons.
1) Getting your shit stolen isn't fun. 2) A game has to be pretty lame if you're spending time in your virtual "house." I don't need to log on to sit around my house.
Reverse engineered gray shards are a FAR cry from what would happen if WoW were open sourced. If you could create your own WoW shard, would you play on any of Blizzards? Sure they lose people to gray shards now, but they would lose a lot more if they open sourced it. MMO are fundamentally a service business and open sourcing your MMO is essentiaslly saying, "feel free to skip using our service". Where exactly does Blizzard gain here? I know where players and those advocating that it be open sourced gain, but where does Blizzard gain?
The only way it might work is if the servers were still closed source, but the content was OSS ( with a restrictive license such as GPL) and modifiable and you essentially rented a server from the company. If you want your own highly customized world, then you can create one and pay the rental fee on the company's cloud. Richard Bartle advocated exactly this on a Terra Nova thread yesterday and I think it has merit.
what was that ? 10 minutes wait to gather some 10-20 or so people to create a raid, 10 minutes to go to the location of the raid, 10 minutes of killing lowbies there until the high levels come, 10 minutes of killing 2-3 high levels until a serious raid forms up from the other side and arrives in your location, then 30 seconds of pvp, death, 5 minutes of running from gy, rezzing and repreparing. after 10 minutes, going back again.
all that 1-2 hour hassle for only a total of 5-10 minutes of pvp. fuck that
there is a reason why pvp battlegrounds are accommodating over 8000 players at godforsaken 03.30 at night in eu servers alone - instant, incessant action.
Read radical news here
If you really are into Ultima-like gameplay then have a look at: http://www.tibia.com/
It looks really old compared to WoW & Co. but the gameplay is amazing and you have all you ask for in it: housing, thieving, looting - everything is there!
I play Tibia since 1998 (with interruptions) and always return, just started again a few weeks ago. I've played many other mmorpgs and they are all fine and nice for a while but grow boring quickly because it's just no thrill involved. In Tibia you'll have plenty of thrill because you can actually lose something. It's probably the hardest mmorpg that you can find on the market, so be warned!
If you need some assistance: drop me a message and I'll let you know who to contact to get started.
Realistically why would Blizzard make it easier for people to build a competitor?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
3D is the problem, and the usual solution, chat channels, only compounds the issue.
What worked about social interactions in UO is that you could read what people were saying only when you were close, and if they were close, you couldn't miss what they were saying if you were pointed the wrong way, because there was no wrong way.
With 3D you can miss what people are saying by facing away from them, and if you sticky the chat bubbles to your UI, identifying which text belongs to whom quickly becomes a real mess.
As soon as you have a chat channel to deal with the problem, you sever the direct connection between the player and their words, and you lose the dierect and potentially intense, interaction between a player's words and their actions.
When EQ came out it was clear to a lot of us what was going to be lost, but as we each in turn got exhausted with the intensity of the UO social experience, we drifted off towards the less-taxing eye-candy of EQ and AC.
I have yet to see social interaction in any 3D game come close to UO. Chat channels severed that connection.
The reason that games like UO aren't developed any more is partly due to the success of Everquest and their choice to go with the D&D class system. Classes are supposed to stop players from rolling a Tank/Mage with the best Health and Mitigation and the highest Damage. However even Everquest and WoW clones are finding out that it's just as possible to make an OP tank that can out parse a DPS class and DPS that can act as a tank. Class systems instead only resulted in the same old story and constant patches to try to achieve the fabled balance.
I put forth EVE Online as the new UO. As far as I can tell (I didn't play UO but friends of mine did) EVE has a similar cutthroat PvP oriented culture where exploits are allowed within the gamerules. I'm not judging either game, just drawing parallels between the two worlds and their willingness to let players make stupid mistakes and pay for it.
I still dont understand why blizzard cant release the WoW engine as open source, I mean if I just want to "steal" the game I'd pirate it and run it on a pirateserver, I wanna play the game however (interaction between people all over the world) and to do that I need the infrastructure they're selling (Physical servers built by people paid SHIT and maintained by devs standing in a sea of fire of corporate interest) Now.. if they'd release the code, free-devs could code whatever idea they come up with and present it the way the custom UI structure of WoW already works, incorporating new and novel ideas to the existing system without having giant penises all over the place the way it ends up on the pirateservers or games that fail at understanding how humans work /rant off, ex-WoW addict
Somebody please, for the love of God, mod this man.......... down. Seriously, what the fuck are you thinking? What in the world would Blizzard possibly have to gain by open-sourcing their game? Are you trolling?
Before graphical, pay-to-play MMORPGs, there were these things called MUDs that were exactly the same thing, only played in a textual medium. Some of you might wonder how anyone could possibly enjoy a game without graphics - it's the same difference between a book and a movie. Ultima Online was the natural extension of MUDs to graphics, and wow it's set in Ultima land! With Lord British (stupidest name ever) as an actual character, really played by Richard Garriot! You could have a house and travel throughout the land having adventures. I remember crafting was a cool part of the game, and was included as early as Ultima VI. The idea was to have a "real world", but set in Ultima.
What happened? People started paying for entertainment, that's what happened. And when you pay for something, you expect to get it. People don't like it when the "real world" intrudes. In addition, there was a huge demand for *novelty*. People want something new, all the time, and Ultima already laid out. Sure, they can "discover" a new island or something, but that's just not the same. The newer MMOs have novelty in spades, for today's bored people.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I've only yet seen 1 game where I thought looting and theft was done 'right'...
Theft - Have to practice your pickpocket skill to get better at it. The better you get, the higher level person you can steal from and the better stuff you can get from them, and from shops.
Anti-Theft - Have to practice your 'perception' or/and pickpocket skills. The better you get, the harder you are to rob. In addition, if you see the theft but can't prevent it, you can report to the nearest guard and the town guards will be watching for them. Also, you can immediately attack the robber and killing them is perfectly legal.
Looting - Known as 'graverobbing' because when you die, you create a mini-grave on the spot. The looter has to dig up the grave (takes about a minute) and then can take whatever. The items are marked as being looted for about an hour. Logging off or hiding in a zone where find-magic doesn't work will see the items returned to their owner immediately.
Anti-looting - Killing a graverobber is fair game. For anyone. Pick on a newbie player and you'll likely find the mob has pitchforks and torches. And they are very eager for some excitement.
What you end up with is a -lot- of petty theft that people generally only lightly protect against, with a few people that go totally nuts and fly into a rage about it. And just a little bit of looting, which everyone gets excited about and has fun with.
I'm sure it wasn't easy to come up with the above solution, and it takes a strong community to make it happen... But it's the only one I've seen do it right so far.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
...plain old UO Shards with Iris2. There are a couple of them.
UO has in my eyes only one major drawback: the client. Since the protocol is fairly researched (see penultima online docs), and there are a lot of emulators very developped (runuo2, sphereserver, uox3, pol and the dead ones (nox, wolfpack, sunuo)), mostly even opensource, and there are a lot of freeshards with very different scriptpacks...
the ideas on freeshards are very cool, often copied by OSI into their own.
but mostly every combat and magic system is trying to mimic the old UO, which is also fairly the fault of the emucode being hard to tamper with at that levels.
knowing the protocol, you can say that UO is pretty much like a webbrowser only reacting on what the server tells it to do, since every drag, every click is transmitted to the server. So basically in my opinion servers are still underdeveloped, a lot could be still implemented, and you can see that because some of them have developed completely unique gaming experience, custom maps, graphics, and everything.
But it leads to one big drawback, and that's the client. The UInterface is somewhat tricky to get into nowadays.
Luckily I think there is hope: iris2
The iris2 client is built upon ogre, is pretty much evolved, uses custom 3d terrain with 3d graphics from UO:TD. It has a 2d rendering engine built in, is scriptable via lua, and could have the base for much more creative mmo's. Especially if someone would develop the graphics / models themselves, they would have a complete free platform (client and servers) to build their ideas upon.
Some servers/freeshards already use iris2 (see list at http://iris2.de). But the scene needs developers. Especially on the server side. Ideas are there plenty. From the simple DOTA-like buildup for a freeshard, to more complex OSI like worlds, the engine could support pretty much everything.
I am concepting a freeshard 7 years now, coming into first development stages, and worked as scripter/devel in some freeshards also in my 10 years of UO fandom. Graphics is not everything, UO has taught us. But a good client engine also allows different gameplay, more action oriented, or more sophisticated for customization.
UO is like the HalfLife of MMO's, completely building upon it's massive freeshard movement, where the game is modded a lot. So if you searching your dream-mmo-server, maybe take on your gloves+1 and try to help some of those freeshards giving you your gaming experience you seek.
Entropia Universe ! The MMORPG with a real economy.
Multiple reasons why no one has made a successful UO type game
First and most important, what many people forget is Pre Tram UO was a failing game (in subscription numbers), sure it had dedicated long term players (was one of them) but the drop out rate for new players was astronomical. Which basically meant, due to simple attrition, the subscriber numbers had started to decline. Any (levelling*) game that forces people to pvp and risk loads from day one is always going to have limited appeal and as the game progress's that appeal will decrease even more to new players due to being preyed upon by established players
UO only reached it's peek after the abomination** that was UO:R, which basically gave people the option to play two versions of the game, one safe (and all reward) and one with pvp and thus risk but with same reward as the safe version, obviously majority went with the safe option as there was no downside. Basically it broke the risk vs reward model
Next reason, a few people have made half hearted attempts to make a UO type game, but because they were all a mess and thus unsuccessful no company will put some serious money into developing a proper game. Every time I see another Dfo type cluster**k of a game (that always try to link themselves to UO) my dreams of having another real UO type game die a little more
Another reason is changing MMO player base, more jaded, younger, more tards. In early days of UO majority were trying to "be good", even majority of PK's picked that path not to be dick's but because they liked the risk (being everyone's legal target, some even liked stat loss *shudder*). Then as more people got online, always on connections became more available you started to get younger and more jaded players, the type who were 7*GM going to newbie areas every night in gangs to butcher the newbie's, just "because they could" (and then of course these were the first to cry when they had no more targets when everyone moved to Tram). 10 years later these types of players have only grown in number and each one can single handily put off dozens if not hundreds of new players
And lastly a personal one for me, fact no one has tried to do an decent Isometric view in a game, sure first person might be more immersive but for me isometric always added a certain "Je ne sais quoi" to pvp, there I felt like a individual combatant as well as a general. The feeling of "player skill" required to win has never felt as great in any other MMO I have tried
Until someone does a decent non theme park MMO, that lets people start off safe before having to cross swords with other players, then gives them reason (beyond just the trill of pvp) to take the risk losing something, keeps massive guilds from dominating thus allowing individual players/small guilds to not only compete by the weight of their skills but also flourish as well we will not see a successful UO type game (Big guilds in PvP games kill individual skill, it all becomes about who has the most people)
Until then, the closest (and also in many ways furthest) you can get to UO is EvE
*And yes, UO like any MMO is a levelling game. 1 day old character in hand's of experienced player still had no chance vs. a 7GM character in a newbie's hand. It just does not hard fix those levels in a straightforward way
**Don't get me wrong, UO:R was not an abomination because it created safe lands, they were more than needed to allow new players to get on their feet before they faced the established players, but rather because it just mirrored the existing lands and all content which meant players never had cross swords with existing players and were not penalised nor limited in any way if they choose not to
I play Runescape. It seems to have a much better following than UO does, and it does have much of the flavor of it. I am also a an Ultima fan, Finished Aklabeth forward, and did play UO for a time, it just cost to much for to little compared to the free / $5 month expanded of Runescape.
Newer MMORPGS are more fun. You don't perma die. You don't get stolen from. Thievery is only fun for one person. And if you can steal from an NPC, you can just farm it, so there needs to be limitations.
God spoke to me.
I'm not a thief.
I don't choose to consort with thieves.
I don't like to live in thievery-prone areas.
Most people feel the way I do.
Simple, really.
I piss off bigots.
While you can be griefed on a PvP server, all that does is make you lose time. You have to go back to where you were. In the event someone is camping you, you can't do anything until that's cleared up, but that's all. You don't lose gold, experience, loot, etc. So it is annoying, but little more. However in UO you stood to lose a lot, and most people don't like that.
You are correct in that what it comes down to is that there's few people who like this sort of thing. There are a fair number who like to be on the giving end, but less who are willing to be on the receiving end. So even if you decided to make a game that catered to grifers, you'd have the problem that many griefers wouldn't want to play it. Since it would more or less be a griefer only fest, they wouldn't have casual players to pick on and it wouldn't be fun for them. A large number of them aren't interested in an equal playing field where they might be griefed as well. They want a situation where they can band together with other griefers to pick on the weak, but that doesn't work.
As such there will be a small market for games like this. You can see this well with EVE. Not only is it rather small, compared to other MMOs, but many of the player base positively HATE WoW. I don't mean they dislike playing WoW so found a new game, I mean they hate that WoW exists and that people play it. Now why would that be? Shouldn't affect them. The reason is because they want all those casual people to come play EVE. They want weak, inexperienced people to pick on and take advantage of. They are mad that these people have other places to play.
What it comes down to is people play games to have fun. What fun is for various people is different, but for an extremely large amount fun means "Not losing everything because of a jerk." They want something akin to a single player game with checkpoints and quick saves and such. A situation where you don't always move forward, but you never move backward. They don't want the equivalent to a single player game that deletes your save if you die.
As such, game companies will make games like that. If they don't make games people want to buy, they'll not be in business for long.
Years ago, I played UO and enjoyed it.
For all of 5 days. Then it became a cringe-making hell for me.
Unless you were one of the uber-elite of gamers out there who knew how to level to demi-godhood on the servers, you were their prey.
The game became less and less fun the more I tried to simply to do something...anything to get better than a lowbie character, the more frustrating it became. I tried mining, and was frequently killed for my hard work. Logging, anything...I was a target for players who wanted nothing more than to kill and enjoy the sweat off of their victim's brow. I couldn't earn money, couldn't advance...
In fact, the only thing I was great at was dying.
Not exactly something I want to sink money into month after month. After 15 days, I gave it up as a bad idea.
Everquest came along with something that allowed the PvP'ers to have their fun and would leave us casual players to progress at our own pace. There was no real need to level to the max in nothing flat just to stay alive, one could enjoy the game. World of Warcraft did something different, but has the same result.
Why are games going this way? Because look at the "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode of Southpark. Once someone was able to kill at will and in fact seemed to get off on ganking lower-than-he characters...people stopped playing the game. The Fictional Blizzard company in the episode saw millions of their user base turning off their computers and going outside to play.
The real Blizzard and other companies running MMORPG games would have a very real version of this problem. In fact, once EQ came out, people jumped from UO to it and most of them said that EQ was far superior not for graphics, or world development...but for the simple fact that they could PLAY the game and not flee anything that was controlled by another player.
That's why everyone maximizes game play and leaves options for people to decide to play PvP without interfering with everyone else who doesn't want to play that game.
Sure it sucks for the PvP'ers, but that's why there are PvP servers. If you want to be that kind of player...there's your world to do it in.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Now that MMOs have gone mainstream, they're games for kiddies who'll go crying to mommy if they can't play safely. So, the style of many great MMOs from the past will never come back again. The possibility of killing and looting other people, posessing world assets(houses or whatever), coordinating with others in gangs (yeah, guilds but they were more like gangs), all that made the games great. You didn't need single-player stuff like quests, because the games itself were so open that just the interactions with other guilds and so on were the real quests. you'd want a certain drop from a certain creature to brew a certain potion and you'd go hunt for it, you'd find some guy causing you trouble, your guilds would clash and so on. That was the real essence and pleasure of playing a mmorpg. Now they're massive "single-player" games, as the players behave as intelligently as non-playing cvharecters anyway... WoW was great in the beginning (i played the USA beta back then and didn't play the game to avoid getting hooked to it), but it has progressively gone to hell. Player interaction is what makes a mmo great and the greatest player interaction of all is being able to kill, loot and play dirty, that's the fun of the game.
The game i've probably liked, enjoyed and played most is Helbreath, a Korean mmorpg. Addictive to the extreme and incredibly fun. If you're missing what i mentioned earlier in WoW or whatever current game you play, look for east asian games, they're the most hardcore players. I've also played other asian games like Mu online but Helbreath was at the same time simple (in the world setting) and complex (in that the world setting was a perfect framework for players to interact). There were 2 enemy cities, you could kill people from the other city without penalties. The "hunting" areas were common and there were raid days in the weekends when you could enter the other city and not be teleported back for an hour (normally it would take minutes). Weh you died you dropped just one random item, if you had expensive stuff you could buy zemstones that would get dropped always in place of any item (zems were drops from creatures, so they were somewhat expensive too).
While helbreath was isometric (almost, actually 120 deg perspective, better than pure isometric), everything was pre-rendered 3D which gave it an outstanding appearance. Another game (now 3D) i've enjoyed a lot was Lineage 2. It had many of the characteristics of helbreath (guilds, controlling guild houses, castles, sieges). The eye-candy doesn't matter so much as the gameplay experience.
So, to sum up, if you're a hardcore gamer and know the joy of taking risks, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, and level up for a reason rather than just for the sake of it, look for small east-asian game companies. Their programmers sometimes suck but the games are sooo great and addictive...
No discussion of UO ever happens without people arguing about PvP, but that's not what this post is about or what one should take from UO when comparing it to WoW and other contemporary games.
The thing that made UO way ahead of its time was personalization. You could wear whatever you wanted, color it however you wanted, and surround yourself with personalized items. People made gold from selling their creations. There's a lot of talk about casuals and how you can't have a UO-like game succeed because casual players won't like it. That's absurd. You don't think all those gamer girls (and most gamers in general) want to dress up their internet dolls? WoW is a very fun game but it's depressing how it not only does not support personalization, it seems to actively resist it. Everyone looks the same in WoW - and maybe that's largely due to technology limitations, but it's still something that they should attempt to address.
Second Life is an awful cesspool of porn and spam, but the only activity that is creative, flourishing, and profitable is the selling of player-designed clothes and other customization for avatars. Personalization is something people want in MMOs, and UO had a ton of it 15 years ago. Not that Blizzard really needs any help digger deeper into the player's psyche, but if they wanted to hook even more casuals, that could certainly learn from UO.
http://www.lordofultima.com/en
I run away from MMORPG forums because they're full of whining people ("The game isn't the same anymore! It caters to casuals now!") and find the same whines here...
Anybody can suggest a good knitting forum?
Methinks that's missing the point. Judging by the summary, what his friend misses isn't crafting or just housing, but the opportunity to be a griefing fucktard with impunity. He doesn't miss just housing (which half the games have nowadays anyway), but more specifically thieving, which in the context of housing really boiled down to exploiting some clipping bug to nick someone's furniture that per the game rules you shouldn't have had access to. Basically he's missing a game that's equally half-baked, buggy, exploitable, and with equally piss-poor GM support, so he can be as big a griefer as in the good old days of UO.
And I seriously doubt that many games aim for the bottom of the proverbial barrel nowadays. Even those who end up there, it's not by design. They may end up an exploitable griefer's paradise by plain old fashioned half-arsed effort, but not by aiming to be a buggy exploitable mess by design.
Arguably even UO didn't aim to be the mess it was for its first years. Lord British and later Raph Koster didn't as much aim to fuck up, but just found rationales as to why and how the players will do all the policing and content so they don't have to bother with that. (Raph Koster would then take this idea with him to SWG, and contribute to that one's ending up barely niche appeal, in spite of the millions of SW fans who awaited it like the second cumming of the Messiah.) UO was not _supposed_ to be a lawless griefer's paradise and driving almost all the player base off, as soon as the first competitor appeared. It was supposed to be the place where players form their own posses and do their own policing and enforcing the rules, so Origin and EA don't have to spend money and manpower on that. All that happened was simply that that idea didn't work: there was nothing you could do in-character to a griefer seeing his character as just a disposable harrassment tool. Even if you could get a bunch of people to form a posse to hunt him down, that just fed the troll, instead of deterring him.
But anyway UO ended up a griefer's paradise more by simple fuck-up, than by design. People and social dynamics were supposed to take the place of coded restrictions, except they never actually worked that way. And the end result was just the result of that "it never worked as they intended."
So, yeah, I doubt that the guy's friend will find many games which _aim_ to be what he misses.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Then have a look at forgotten world. A remake of the old gold box styled Never Winter Nights game.
Or rather, the lack thereof. UO servers were limited in population to a relatively small number (at least relative to today's MMORPGs). When playing UO, the map was small enough and the playerbase was small enough that you could be reasonably certain of who you'd run into at Brit GY or Wind or wherever. They eventually changed the reputation system a bit, and while getting rid of dreadlords didn't kill the game, obviously, I think it promoted the rise of ganking, which is a shame. Another great thing about UO were the server-down fights. Yes, they might be annoying to deal with now, but being able to fight with wild abandon, with no fear of actually losing stuff, led to some incredible moments - and no doubt, was helpful for both game balance from a dev perspective, and new players learning how combat worked. As far as "catch-up" time to get started with a new character - it was insanely low. Sure, your new character was likely to get his ass handed to him, but it was also possible to start a brand new character and kill a fair proportion of players who were of much higher experience, simply because they sucked at fighting. Yes, UO was a skill-based system, but more than that, combat required *skill* - and I'm not talking about learning the timing necessary beat repetitive and predictable WoW bosses by grinding raids until your clan can run it in their sleep. And there were relatively few moments when one build of character was "the best" in the same way that you see guys relentlessly optimizing their talents and gear and all that other bullshit. Okay, maybe viking swords were the shit, or you'd want to make a dex-monkey, but you could also do something wild like a bard, and the game could still be fun. And for all that PVP was a risk, there were plenty of players who had master craftsmen, who mostly chatted with their friends by the bank and never really saw that much combat. Which was fine, because there was also a legitimate (perhap's online-gamedom's only) player-run economy. It's also the only MMORPG I've played where players actually look different from each other, with no real need for all-names or tags, and... God, now you've got me missing UO all over again.
And of course those lowbies might consider that being killed by a bunch 80+ for not apparent reason isn't fun either,
The simple fact is those gameplay elements that you liked in UO is what ultimately led to it being less popular than WoW.
Look at WoW - very simple gameplay, no character stats to worry about, just gear to collect. Automatic group finding for PvP and instances. It's basically a vaguely MMO-ish version of Diablo 2 at this point.
EVE Online has some gameplay aspects that require you to think ahead, and folks constantly show up on the forums complaining about them. Not the folks who actually enjoy and play EVE on a daily basis... But folks who showed up from WoW and are giving the free trial a spin. And they're not happy about the fact that they have to plan ahead, be cautious, think about their decisions, etc. They'd like something more user-friendly.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
As somebody who played WoW at launch on a PvP server I can tell you that the only reason I sticked around was because in the beginning one could not migrate the character to a different server (this was before Blizzard made the facility available).
The truth is that, while at the time non-consentual PvP did add some excitment when playing in the shared areas, this was often spoiled by griefers, which typically were higher-level characters that came to lower level areas.
During the first couple of months after WoW started, the typical difference in levels between characters wasn't that large (in fact, even though I'm a non-hardcore gamer, I kept up enough with the leveling threadmill that I was never faced with a griefer more than 15 levels above me) so one often had some chance against the griefers (often by enlisting the help of other players of the same faction in that region via regional chat).
In fact, one of the best PvP moments I had there was in Redridge Mountains (where most people are around lvl 20) when as a reaction to a pair of lvl 30 griefers (probably from Booty Bay) about 20 or more of us from Lakeshire village took them on (and won). This was before Battlegrounds and even before the PvP Ladder/Rankings (which preceeded Battlegrounds and pretty much ruined the game for me)
That said, I suspect that after those first couple of months griefers pretty much had free reign to do whatever they wanted (think gangs of lvl 60 griefer in a starter area). The 10-fold increase in gratuitous griefing that immediately follow the start of the PvP Ladder (literally from one day to the next huge, never-ending and very laggy battles started around certain key villages and questing became close to impossible due to the roaming gangs of players farmering other players) was a very good indicator of how easilly the game would turn unplayable in a PvP realm (and I was a Rogue, so i could sneak around: other classes didn't had it so easilly)
[I left a little after the PvP Ladder was implemented, because of this and because it's mechanics were such that casual players had no chance to compete (admited by the lead developer in a forum post which was later removed) - so I've been out of it for 4 or 5 years now]
The reasons why PvP realms were popular when WoW started were due to factors (ignorance of how it worked, impossibility of migrating you character, low spread of levels between players) which are not in effect anymore, so I wouldn't use that as an argument.
As someone who played UO from the earliest days (beta 2 in 1996) right up until the downfall of the origin shards (shortly after release of second age) as well some dabbling on player run servers after that, I definitely sympathize with those who miss the type of gameplay UO offered.
I have played a number of other MMORPG since then but never really been immersed in any of them the way I was with UO. Of course, this is partly because I am older now and do not have as much time; however, I have never seen any other game which offers the sense of freedom and social community the way UO did (EVE would be the only one that comes close).
UO didn't really offer any quests or 'raids' or anything like that, it was pretty much just players creating their own stories which forced you to socialize with people.
Also, because there was no real 'objective', ie no items to camp for and no certain area you had to go to in order to gain exp, each player had their own locations where they would hang out so you would frequently encounter the same people. I made many friends playing UO who I still talk to today, nearly 15 years later.. can't say I talk to anyone I met playing EQ/WoW/DaOC or any other MMORPG.
I would say the primary reason that PvP does not work on newer games the way it did on UO is due to item rarity. In UO there were relatively few 'rare' items, and even then.. they weren't *that* rare. If you got killed and lost all your equipment, for the most part it was easily replaced. On EQ/WoW if you were to get killed and lose the rare item you camped for days to get then most people are not going to take that very well. Of course on UO there was the issue of housejacking, oftentimes where people would abuse bugs to break into someones house/castle and steal everything.. many people I know quit over that.
Another issue is that on UO items did not always determine who won a fight. It took a good deal of practice and skill to become a good PvP fighter, and a good player with fast reflexes and the right macro setup could easily take down several opponents with better equipment. None of the newer games I have played can compare in that regard.
I played UO during the "glory days" and after, eventually leaving to play SWG (ha). The reason that, IMVHO, that type of game did not catch on again is because the very things that made UO "cool" were what also made it horrible and eventually prompted major changes in the game. Having everything in your home stolen was NOT any fun. Getting jumped repeatedly for no reason other than the lulz and all your gear taken was NOT fun. Finally getting a house and realizing it was so far from anything to be any use at all was NOT fun, nor was having to wind between a million houses in wilderness areas. People tend to forget that UO jumped in popularity after stealing and house-robbing was taken out, and while they complained that Trammel/Felucia "ruined" the game, there was a reason that players preferred the safe side of the fence. SWG realized the problems with player housing when they too ended up with whole areas of nothing but houses and no one in them everywhere.
I miss UO as well, certain aspects of it, but having played plenty of MMO's without those aspects has shown me that they really weren't needed to have a good time.
~~BlindTyldak
I never liked EQ because I thought the graphics were weak. I suppose it was hard to do 3d and compete with the neat-ness of isometric. I was a huge Ultima fan and played both the alpha and beta for UO. I played through its hey day up until a point where the servers crashed, restored from an older backup and when I logged back in to refresh my house (yes you had to log in every so often to do that) it was gone with all my stuff. That was the last time I played UO.
I had played the WoW beta and thought it was EQish but a step in the right direction. After I quit UO I eventually picked up WoW (a little late to the game post release) after my friends went there. It was very confusing at first going from 2d to 3d. I've played off and on through both expansions. Done endgame work from the first raids to the recent stuff. I really like the lore of warcraft which helps make the game a winner for me. The best thing is while I liked the housing and economics of UO, I don't have to log on at a regular interval to keep my stuff from vanishing. I can play whenever I want. I tried some MMOs along the way (the LotR one, EVE online, etc). I will prob try the Lego MMO when it comes out just for fun. So far nothing as been was well done as WoW.
-Xen
I am one of those guys that waxes poetic about the good ol' days when of pre-Trammel UO. When MMO players were men! (j/k). I think one thing that people have been missing when talking about the viability of losing your gear and getting griefed is that UO had a couple mechanisms to deal with that. I thought they worked fairly well. 1.) Nothing you owned was worth that much. If you were a melee fighter (say, a dexer) you'd have some GM ringmail, some GM chainmail, a GM kyrss, and a handful of potions. If you lost all your gear, so what, it was only a drop in the bucket and you probably had 5 more sets in the bank. UO made losing all your equipment ok because none of it was "Ringo's Flaming Axe of Death and Retribution" that took 97 hours to get. There were good magic items (vanquisher weapons) but they were rare, and you could lose them. This made them all the more revered and as such, they were only used in special situations and by those who were confident in their abilities. 2.) PKs were flagged red. If you wanted to PK people heavily you could, but you'd go red, everyone would know it, and you couldn't go into town. This was a big enough deal that the average person wouldn't go around slaughtering newbies for fun, but those who wanted to be PKs could. In my opinion, this allowed for an excellent balance of "good guys" and "bad guys." 3.) There was no level system or con system. Since you couldn't look at a person and see they were "10 levels above you" or they were "grey" and you couldnt tell from their gear because the biggest newb in the game and the best player in the game used approximately the same equipment you had to be weary of people. It meant you couldn't go around griefing people without a high percentage chance that you would get killed yourself. I think this also added to the fun of the game because there was a sense of the unknown when you left the confines of the town. It was wise to grab a couple friends and take advantage of "safety in numbers." In conclusion, I think the newer MMO's can't support the (imo great) rule set of UO because they focus too much on levels, and loot. UO focused on interaction. There were no classes, no discrete levels, and the equipment was more "realistic." Sean
I kind of hate that the term "griefer" has been so watered down (not necessarily by the poster I'm replying to, the post just made me think of it) as to have become essentially meaningless.
Once upon a time you had to be a serious asshole to be called a griefer, not just someone who kills or steals from you when you don't want to die in a game that allows it. Worse than that is that you now could hear anyone who beats anyone else in any kind of game a griefer, even in games where it has no sensical context -- win a game of Starcraft, somebody's calling you a griefer.
Why does the author constantly use "constantly"?
As a genre is way harder and more expensive to develop to a point where it stands any chance of competing with current MMO and as a consequence big companies tend to prefer to invest in more "safe" kinds of MMOs. Darkfall and Mortal Online are shadowed and ignored not because of their genre, just because they're bad games devolped with not enough budget for a project of that scope. If you take EvE Online for example it has most of the aspects of UO (full loot, free world pvp, ability to build and trade everything, you can build your own stations/houses, you can customize the skills of your character as you wish, etc) and while it doesn't have a HUGE success, it's hardly a ignored or unknown game. Even after all those years since the release.
Actually, "be able to" never played much of a role in UO griefing. The only question was whether you want to be a griefing fucktard or not. Most of the exploits were so trivially simple, that if you could click with a mouse at all, you'd be perfectly able to. (And if you can't click, you wouldn't play UO in the first place.) There were no twitch-reflexes or l33t PvP skillz involved, just the willingness to be a griefer or not.
E.g., since the summary mentions housing _and_ thieving together, that combination simply meant using a clipping bug to steal someone's furniture through the walls. There were no player or character skills involved at all. You didn't even need to be able to lockpick their lock or evade notice or anything. Just click yourself near a corner and do it. That was all.
So, yes, everyone could do it. Maybe not "back", but rather to some other victim, but they could do it, if they wanted to. Some of us simply weren't inclined to spread the grief around.
E.g., you could trap the lock on a chest and leave it by the roadside. (Heck, that was the _only_ use for tinkering skill anyway.) Then some hapless brand-new player would stumble upon it, try to open it, and die. Or poison some food, put it in a sack, and leave it by the roadside. Same deal.
There wasn't even any "social engineering" involved or anything. Just wait for some newbie to spring the trap, before even knowing what they're doing in the game.
E.g., even straight player-killing actually rarely involved any bravery or combat skill at all. Most of those did stuff as lame as waiting until some miner is overloaded with ore, so they can't get away, then gank them. Or they actually grouped to muster the balls to attack some newbie.
Even the character skills involved, were often just gotten through some exploit. E.g., at launch the infamous drop-and-pick-a-coin trick, repeated for a couple of hours, would get you to the strength cap with no risks or adventuring or skills involved. Just brainless clicking or using a script were enough.
Again, it was nothing that a casual player couldn't do if they wanted to. The coin trick was well known very soon, for example. But some people chose to do stuff like role-playing, or building their dream mix of abilities, instead of doing the one-track-minded griefer build.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I forgot to develop the thought about bugs. The reason I brought up UO's bugginess is that knowing the current bugs and exploits was crucial in PKing, because if you didn't know them, the guy you fought very well might. Those who were uninterested in PVP were also rarely aware of the latest developments on that front.
Much of it comes down to the fact that the original game to reach mass market accessibility and popularity was Everquest, which was straightforwardly PVE. Previous games, namely UO and Meridian 59, were PVP-oriented but came out before the internet was a household thing for the average consumer. As is the nature of business, nearly every game developed thereafter tried to copy the most successful business model known to the genre, and as a result you wound up with PVE game after PVE game that ignored what made PVP work in other games.
One giant problem between PVP and PVE games is gear. Today, EVE (for all its glaring faults) is the closest thing to UO mechanically. You have full looting, item loss, and permanent death penalties. These work because in games like Meridian, UO, or EVE, nearly all equipment is generic, easily purchased, and quickly replaced. You purchase new armor identical to what you lost, or you buy a new hull and outfit it identically to what you had before. Warcraft really can't have item loss like this because nearly every item is unique (e.g. from quests) or requires a commitment of time and coordination (e.g. raiding). If someone in full raid equipment lost everything upon death, the player would face a steep climb back up to where he was through pre-raid, (possibly) old raid, and finally current raid content, potentially competing against strangers for everything. For many people, facing that gear grind again and again would drive them to quit. Ultimately Blizzard's best option is to make PVP death (and thus PVP play) meaningless while extending gear inflation and gear grinding to keep people obsessed with numbers.
Another problem is the nature of character advancement. Because of skill-based progression, in Meridian 59, UO, or EVE you can make a char and within an hour take your newbie mace/sword/railgun and start whacking at years-old veterans with varying degrees of success. In PVE-oriented games with level-based progression you can quickly become so powerful that lower level people can't land a hit on you at all. To use Warcraft as an example, this is made all the worse by item levels and the enormous endgame gear gap between even a newly level-capped character and one who has been raiding.
n it's heyday, I feel like Star Wars Galaxies was the last hugely successful game of this type. Player owned housing, maps that measured 10 square kilometers, very little instancing, and PVP that could happen anywhere at any time. This was the greatest MMO imho. It had a place for the casual player and a place for the hard core. It had places for people who didn't even want to fight, and just played socially. This game had it all until Sony (Whom I havent bought a game from since) completely at utterly destroyed their game, and consequently, their subscriber base. Ever since SWG, my heart just isn't in it anymore. MMO's lost their magic the day they turned my lightsaber into a nerf bat.
Housing that is part of the landscape. That is something I never really saw in other games. You could have a house outside the entrance of dungeon, town or off in the middle of no where.. People ended up building player towns, GMs decorated the towns (back in the day at least). When you were a newbie you lived out of your bank, then maybe a boat or small house. Some people had a castle with a large tower behind it, etc. Houses also served as storage for items, I really never used the bank I kept everything (besides gold) in my castle.
;)
Skill based PvP.. Before the Age of Shadows expansion you really could not gain an item advantage to speak of. There was many times I took on 3 and 4 people at once and killed them all never running away to hide or heal, etc. After AoS it was really not feasible to do that anymore. It was hard enough taking on 2 people. But even after AoS the harrower battles & spawn fights made for some of the best PvP ever. Imagine WoW without the instances.. People fight their way all the way to the end boss then some other guild comes in, kills them all, the boss and the loot. Sorrta like anyway. Some times you had 3 or 4 guilds fighting over one, made for some real fun.
You could also trade everything in UO. Best armor and weapons in the game for sale.. There was only around 2 items you could trade but werent usable by others, personal bless deed and newbie tickets.
There was bad things about UO of course. They would release a new patch, unbalance things way way too far and take a year to fix it.. Several times they put in a small 'fix' to stop something somewhat irrelevant and caused all sorts of issues. Their bug testing was just terrible. I found bugs on the test servers reported them and it still went live. (inscription with level 1 cost mana to scribe a level 8 scroll when they changed the menu one time)
UO could have used an auction house like WoW.. We had vendors we could put in the houses making houses close or even in towns worth much more but it still was annoying compared to WoW. The economy in UO got screwed terribly all the time also.. It slowly dropped down to $20 a mill which wasnt bad. By the time I left it was $1 or $2 a mill, making it near worthless in some aspects.
Travel in UO was great.. You had runes (later on runebooks) you could mark anywhere. One book would have all the dungeons, one spell and 2 sec later your outside (or inside before one of the patches) your favorite dungeon. So even if I only had 20 minutes to play I could get where I wanted to instantly and actually accomplish something, unlike WoW (although it improved some).
But... The reason there isnt more games like UO is it was Skill based.. period.. The day tram came out 98% of the population went there and almost never came back. So you had 98% of players playing a non pvp social networking 2nd life with dragons... aka WoW with housing. They had little insensitive to fix pvp issues and other issues we had when those things didnt effect 98% of their customers at all and those customers had their own problems they needed fixed.. So.. here we are talking about glory days of UO..
sry I like to ramble about UO, it provided me so much fun. notice my name uolamer
s/©//g
Life in early UO was often nasty, brutish, short, and fun. If you were in town you had to be wary of thieves and scams, and if you were out of town you had to worry about being attacked at any second. But, you picked up good friends and forged great memories doing it because it was the only game in town. It's like my father reminiscing about the great depression - all the bad things created some good memories, but given the choice no one would go through that again.
He may want to check out Dawntide. Currently in very early development, but looks promising for the style of play that he is describing.
If you're talking an MMO someplace in the neighborhood of 100K players, there's lots of them out there.
If you're talking a WOW-style anomaly with a few million RMT accounts and a few hundred thousand players, you're bound to be disappointed.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I've recently started ranting on this to a few of my friends, but it seems like the people who really enjoyed UO T2A were the same people who really enjoy MOBA (massively online battle arena) games like Defense Of The Ancients of League of Legends. It's not about the resource gathering or the roleplaying, it was about the small scale (5v5 or so) fights.
So with no other place to go, (figuring that there was miridian 59 and some NWN on aol.) Ultima Online had a collection of players. It had all styles of players because it was the only thing out worth playing for an MMO. You had your PK's, you had your adventures, you had your social players and crafters. The majority of the players couldn't stand getting murdered and losing their items, but what other game was available to them. There was none, that is why when EverQuest hit the market there were tons of non-PK's jumped ship to a safer world. So OSI/EA decided we need a safe place so we don't lose the majority of our adventurers. So they created the two facet world with a safe zone trammel. This pleased the sheep and some of the wolves died out.
So then you had a split player base and without enough sheep(non-pk's) to feed the wolves(pks) the game lost the whole heart racing excitiment of fight or flight for your life.
So as the MMORPG market kept opening up. The player base and game kept changing. Shadowbane came about, more wolves left. WoW came about, nearly everyone who could run WoW on their computers left UO.
OLD UO can not work in today's market. People have choices in their games now. What pu&&y is going to choice a safe RP wow server over a game where they can craft bad A&& gear but they have to worry about it being ripped away from them because their combat skills suck.
Basically games that have a realistic set of player vs player rules, that involving killing your oponent and enjoying the loot of their corpses; is not nearly as fun for the wolves without the sheep.
Wolves vs Wolves you might as well be playing arena in WoW or playing a first person shooter.
P.S. Tell your friend to check out UOSecondage.com
That is the closest as it will come to restoring glory days.
Seriously. You can do as much or as little PvP as you want. But even in high security space (hi-sec) you can still get your pasty ass ganked if you aren't careful. Hulkageddon is likely to occur with some regularity, and sticking your nose in a null-sec and even some lo-sec systems is just asking to get yourself jumped. Granted, the community here is a lot smaller--probably around 150,000 active players as opposed to the millions sported by WoW--but they're pretty hardcore about the whole thing.
It is so stupid that everyone ignores Runescape
The number two MMORPG, and of course the number one free to play one. Free to play version is kind of like a starter and indeed is missing many of the functions you want, however the full version ($5 monthly) has most.
It has been around since 2001 and is developed in England. The pay version still has weekly updates.
Runescape is a skill based MMO (where every skill is trained semi-independantly), there are no character classes, every skill is open to every player.
Thieving: most NPCs can be pickpocketed, thieving is a skill that can be leveled. Only in a few scenarios can you actually steal from other players though.
Looting: Runescape still has a very harsh death tax. In PvM, if you die you lose all but the 3 most expensive items you are holding (there are modifiers to this of course, you have 5 minutes to retrieve your corpse, unless a party member "blesses" your gravestone.) On PvP worlds, you lose all but your 1 most expensive item, and on certain worlds all of your gear is dropped as loot, but not every time. Griefers don't get a full loot drop, cerial noob killers get hardly any drop at all.
Player housing: There is a skill called "Construction" which you use to modify and improve your house... adding things such as a wardrobe (can store certin kinds of clothing without taking up bank space), repair bench(discounting the cost of repairing high level gear), teleport room (access to many "free" teleports if you have the magic level to build them), combat room (where you and your friends can have friendly, safe fights for fun). Player owned housing is instanced, unlike UO, so it is not as "epic" since there is not limited real-estate, but the housing is more useful, especially for Clans and group trips (imagine meeting in one place, where you can resupply, buff, etc then one guy teles the whole group to the action)
All that being said, Most MMOs are "barely 3D" at best, and RS is only really 3D in polygon terms... There is no need to jump, there are plenty of multilevel dungeons and things like that, but terrain usually doesn't matter and targeting is very simplistic... like most mmorpgs, but RS wears it on the sleeve a bit more, and it is 3rd person perspective.
If you thought the user-friendliness and simplicity is what drove people to WoW, you should see how many more people are suddenly being driven into Mafia Wars, Castle Age, and Farmville on Facebook. No, my friends, I do not want to friggin' click your button to help you kill Sylvanus.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Your best bet are MUDs. Graphically, I wouldn't say they quite reach 3D levels, but you have far greater freedom and a really cool userbase.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
Well, your analogy has merit in its own right, but it's actually a bit mis-leading in the context of UO and generally of online griefing.
RL oppressing and exploiting the masses was at least generally done for personal gain. Some guy got to make some money or have a big castle or whatever, by oppressing those peasants.
In UO the somewhat surprising thing for many players was that a lot of people were not motivated by any kind of gain. They just wanted to make _you_ miserable. There was not even an attempt to enforce their will upon you, as in "you must do X because I'm the boss." They just wanted to make you miserable, that's all.
My perfect example is the way some people tried (and for a while succeeded) to screw up the economy. It's not the most grief-worthy thing, mind you, but it's an illustration of something done not just without any personal gain, but often even at a personal loss.
E.g., UO at launch required two wolves to make a third wolf. Some people took it upon themselves to exterminate the wolves, not to gain anything themselves in the process, but to keep the other players from having stuff to kill.
E.g., UO at launch tried to have a maximum total quantity of metal in the world, including in swords and armours and whatnot, and would only spawn more ore when some metal items got destroyed. (Sold to vendors, despawned, etc.) That was their idea of enforcing some realistic level of supply and demand. But then some people started filling their and their alts' bank vaults with swords and armours and whatnot, just to prevent more ore from spawning. Not to corner the market and make a profit later, or any other kind of realistic motivation. Just for the sake of screwing up the economy for everyone else. Just to keep _you_ from finding ore if you want to play a smith.
E.g., even plain old ganking, the stereotypical ganker didn't even own anything other than a cheap replaceable halberd. They didn't even bother getting new armour after being killed, but would just run around in their death shroud. They didn't kill you for your money or your posessions, except in as much as to prevent you from enjoying those money or posessions.
What I'm trying to say is that RL history actually favoured more those who actually knew how to profit from others, not the plain old psychopath. To be a successful king RL you needed not just to make the peasants miserable, but to drum up popular support, make alliances, play the piety card big time, etc. UO was the other way around. It favoured the psychopaths who really had no other plan than spreading the grief.
The real key is what you wrote at point 2: the lack of consequences for the griefer. And I don't mean as in "permanent death" or anything, but rather the more mundane realization that there's nothing you can do to someone's character that'll matter, when they only see that character as a disposable griefing tool. It's akin to making a murderer wear a different shirt for 5 minutes as a RL penalty for murder: you can probably see how some people would then run amok every day. Not because they gain anything, but just because they can.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
im sorry maybe i was unclear: they get to keep their servers and their, in my honest opinion, AWESOME way of making games and telling stories, however, with releasing the bits that made all that awesomeness, free creators could make content to give away for free (because the joy of creating is reward itself) back to blizzard and they get to choose what they put in it. Themselves say they wish they had more content to put in and people are standing outside the wall with tons of ideas they'd love to share. Look at the UI again, it was released free and people have been developing it for years eventually leading to products that made it into the game. What do they gain by holding on to marketshares and stuff, it was the playhouse for the children that made that market possible to begin with?? sorry i seem to have lost my concentration, luckily my government is working on building a camp for people like me
Devloping an MMO is a long, expensive, and therefore risky proposition. Great rewards if you succeed, devastation if you fail. And a failure can poison your future opportunities, too - how many people are going to avoid the next Star Wars MMO after disliking the first?
From a certain point of view, the history of MMOs since the late 90s has been one of a race for each generation of game to copy whatever was most successful from the previous generation. Less risky that way, right? Well, UO wasn't the most successful of its generation; Everquest was, and, in the far east, Lineage was. That's why we got level-based (or level-grind-based) MMOs from there. WoW's absolutely stunning success in particular has locked us into this rut.
The PvP question is an equally important one. People hate griefing, but the *reason* they hate it is mainly the lost time/progress. Games that balance that have a chance to succeed, games that don't balance it very rarely succeed. EVE is the one high-risk success outlier we can point to - but even then, compared to WoW, which one is a developer going to copy? WoW.
In practice, you could probably do a game based on the core ideas of UO, with modern adjustments added in, and be successful. UO had a lot of things going for it. Its approach to a player economy, its complete decoupling of trade skills from combat skills, and its comparatively low dependence on gear were all Good Things, in my opinion. Now add in modern conveniences like a UI that doesn't suck, auction house, soulbind-on-equip/soulbind-on-pickup items, better banking/party/guild/raid support, modern WoW-like quest system, instancing (but don't overdo it - those open dungeons were fun too), and so on. And, when you think about it, those changes would almost be enough to make UO's open PvP bearable, wouldn't they? Most of your good gear would be unlootable, as would the bits of monster parts from your current kill-x-collect-y quests, so there'd not be much penalty for your first player-induced death, and the other guy therefore only stands to lose by sticking around - you'd actually have a chance of killing him and taking back your stuff. The kind of NPC guard presence we see in WoW would also make for a lot less griefing too, since any place with questgivers becomes a small bubble of safety from the standard career criminal.
A lot of people assume that the point of any MMO is to gain levels, items powers and build a character over time, to defeat big monsters, and that anything that detracts from that is bad. Alternatively, you could make a point of a game that isn't about attaching yourself emotionally to some glorified ProgressQuest, and whose interest is the conflict. There's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of the combination of varied builds, fast leveling, player lootings, permanent death, and meaningful in-game factions. Lots of people like quake, and lots of people like MMO style pvp. So what you do is you make a game that combines the interesting aspects of experimenting with a reasonably complex character skillset system, which is something people like about PVP in MMOs, with the action and general painlessness of dieing in Quake.
The other thing wrong with PVP in MMOs is that it is very rarely balanced well. It's often the case that there's either NO pvp or unlimited pvp. A system that allows pvp within a certain power range (as determined by levels, for example) is a way to make it so that PVP doesn't devolve into griefing. Most of the real griefing problems come from letting people of maximum power freely attack those of minimum power. By restricting it within a range that creates at least a reasonable baseline of parity while allowing freedom to fight otherwise, you avoid the stupid kind of pvp which is not fun, and you get a fun style of competition using the RPG style combat mechanics.
I play a mud called carrion fields which works on this model, but it's still a mud (and combines roleplay with the pvp focus I described, which will be a turnoff to people who want pure quake-style action). I've always hoped to see an MMO which applies the same kind of rules, but so far I haven't seen any.
The PKing by toons with names like L3ftNutz and R1teNutz, who were using macros, auto heals, auto target, etc, and exploiting (having homes and castles broken into and looted/defiled) was the final straw for me and my guild. When EQ came out we all migrated within weeks. Garriot created an amazing universe, the Internet filled it with cheating sploiting ftards, and the PVP environment forced you to interact with them. As far as UO vs EQ in terms of immersion, I still remember making my first run from Qeynos to Freeport, running through West Karana in the rain and watching a Hill Giant emerge from the fog - I shit you not I got goosebumps when that happened!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
See subject.
Having actually been one of the early adopters of WoW, I wonder where you found that adventure and exploration and where do you think it disappeared. The same original zones are still there, the same quests are there, and people always just wanted a good game.
And most importantly, again, this is the same kind of people we had from day 1, and this is the kind of things they've asked for. I just need to remember the history of the plugins and sites, to realize that the average player always just wanted to be shown where to go to hand it in and collect his loot, and that's how they played the game.
Compared to other games, WoW offered the _least_ mystery and exploration, and people actually _liked_ it that way. E.g., it was very much appreciated that you actually saw a big yellow mark over the head of everyone who could give you a quest. As opposed to actually having to go talk to every single stupid NPC, only to see that 99% still have nothing for you, like in a couple of other online games.
But anyway, really, exactly which place you used to adventure and explore in, that no longer exists?
Methinks that the only thing that changed is you. You were seeing it back then through the eyes of someone who's all new to it, and for whom discovering a new town was an exciting new thing. You're now a jaded old veteran who not only knows exactly where that town is, but also where every single NPC is, and what quests they have, and what items they sell. That's really what killed any sense of adventure and exploration, not anything Blizzard did.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you like PvP, check out this ultima shard that I used to play, that appears to still be running in full force (judging only by the website).
http://www.tdsuo.com/
Maybe he needs to try Siege Perilous.
I'm familiar with the Bartle Test but if anyone could point me to more resources as to why Killer-oriented games have faded out of popularity, I'd be interested.
I feel like I should be marked redundant for how often I mention it, but I feel it worth mentioning on the topic of MMO's and particular since you mentioned the Bartle Test. If you're familiar with the Barlte Test are you familiar with his book: Designign Virtual Worlds?. The book is a bit dated by todays terms but still very insightful in the genre of MMO's. I believe the book mentions a little bit about Dark Age of Camelot as it was the "new" thing that was barely out when the book came out. Even then, the points he makes remains true. It's worth a read. He mentions why "PvP" centric games don't work for the masses and it's as obvious as you would expect: "Griefing". Most people don't want to spend their time playing "their" game to have someone else take most or all away from them, particularly without much recourse as a truly open world allows some much more powerful person to prey on the less powerful for shits and giggles.
There are some people who enjoy that kind of game, but not enough to get some AAA development house to make a game for it. MMO's aren't cheap to develop and their not easy to do right. Even looking at World of Warcraft, the game is pretty different now than it was at release (this might be a good time to mention I started MMOing at the early days of Everquest, missing UO and MUDs, but I've tried most MMOs since that point) and it's still scheduled to change quite a bit with the next expansion. And I mean this by saying, when WoW game out, it was criticized for being far and away the most casual friendly MMO there is... and it pales in comparison to how casual friendly the game is now.
Anyway, I digress. PvP games will always be niche and less successful simply because they can't design around "griefing" without getting to the point that for all the safety measures you put in place to protect the weak from the powerful until some level of equality is reached makes it to the point that you might as well just remove PvP all together and just implement power (often translated into level) restricted "arena/battleground" areas.
Onto the question about player housing. That's more along the lines of a development issue. Do you spend your man-hours working on new dungeons, lands, weapons, content, balance issues, spells, etc or do you spend it on implementing something like housing? And what does housing do to a game? How does it fit with the guided flow and purpose of said game?
Blizzard has recently stated why they haven't implemented housing (as one of the most popular requests for player generated like content or world customization) and that reason is that it both doesn't seem to have the value of spending resources on it vs other things as-well-as housing could (and likely would) have a negative impact on the atmosphere of the game. Guild houses and personal houses will become little cities onto themselves and people will segment farther into their own little cliches and cities will become more and more desolate. You could try to design around that. Force houses to be in cities or to reach it you can only enter leave through a city. Prevent houses from being any more than empty space that you could perhaps put some digital art.
But all developers simply ask themselves, what does this do to make the game better? Not much. Games like WoW can't just popular houses anywhere in the world. Like DAoC, you'll have to create special instanced zones that can have housing, so you can create as much or little space as you need as needs grow. If you allow people to build houses anywhere, then you'll have the issues of people placing stuff that just breaks the atmosphere.
And you could say "what's wrong with t
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
I played UO from retail release in September 1997 until WoW came out in 2004. I was a long-time Ultima series player and had high hopes for UO. It greatly disappointed on that point. The first few months were pure frustration due to bugs, stealing and PKs. Sheer determination and attraction to the world of Britannia kept me playing. I am certain these issues and 'features' of the game steered others away.
I tried to get my wife and friends interested in it multiple times over the years, but each time PKs and the sheer tediousness of repetitive tasks to increase skills left a bad impression. I kept playing because there was nothing else like it. EQ came out, but had such horrendous artwork (trying to be realistic with too low graphics/technology) I avoided it. I beta tested and tried many other MMOs, but they were all still learning, too: poor interfaces, weak mechanics, no story, pure PvP.
UO was a major stepping stone for MMORPGs. While the open-ended skill system is a good method for skill based systems, the PvP system, or lack thereof in the first years, was a good example of how NOT to design a game.
Eye candy, easy interface, easy to learn, tons of information, low system requirements, appeal to casual, hard-core, PvP players all around... WoW learned all it could from its predecessors and put it all together correctly. There is a reason there are not games similar to UO; people learned well from its mistakes.
The game closest to the UO experience I've found was Shadowbane. The game was pvp only, so you knew what you were getting into when you joined. There were no "sheep." Unfortunately it had two problems. The game was horribly bugged and once a group/faction/alliance got the upper hand on a given server, there was little to balance it.
Seriously, you have no idea what's going on inside someone else's brain. I wish I had the points to mark you a "troll", because that's about the best we can say when you make suppositions about someone's motives from so little information.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
As many have pointed out, Eve is a spiritual descendent of UO, and I think DAoC is as well.
I think the lessons from Eve and DAoC are very simple - you need "timeout" areas; places where people can go to avoid the full-on PvP. Eve also has consequences for being a pirate - you can't enter high-sec space anymore.
Finally, I think Eve has a skill & equipment system that allows new players to enter PvP fairly easy. Unlike most games, it's not simply "bigger=better"; all levels of ships have a role in combat, and quite frankly what you see in low-sec areas (I can't speak to 0.0) is mostly frigates, cruisers, and battle-cruiser classed ships.
So distinct pvp regions and an easy entry for low "level" players is what's necessary.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
Ultima Online had the loosest pvp rules. This kind of play absolutely has appeal to competitive players. However, most MMO's tend to end up putting the balance of power, in terms of competition, towards those players who have been in the game the longest and who can spend the most time playing the game. This much is of course obvious, but consider the ramifications a few steps beyond that.
If you are a competitive player, but you cannot spend massive amounts of time in game, after a short time, you are not going to be able to compete effectively against the best. The game then stops being fun for you and you move on. You simply wont stick around very long. If you are the strongest, pretty soon viable competition will go away, and you will get bored. Unless your a griefer and really enjoy newbie stomping. If you are a newbie and you get into the game late, you are never going to be able to compete well against the top end players. So over time, the supply of newbies will dry up, and even the griefers will stop playing.
With UO, if you liked PVP, while pick pocket was possible, it was not very easy to practice the skill without getting murdered a great deal. And if you like the pvp, you are going to eventually leave when everyone worth playing against has also left.
Most newer MMO games, such as World of Warcraft, have chosen to address PVP by making it an opt in proposition. This will protect the newbies, but it still creates less gameplay for competitive types, and it negates any real means of looting or PvP theft. Until someone comes up with an alternate solution to PVP that will protect newbies and permit game elements like theft, it will not be a viable option in any successful MMO game.
END COMMUNICATION
www.darkagerp.com
Has been going strong for 7 years now.
I would say it is because balancing a game as complex as ones with classes + skills is a order of magnitude greater than doing the same for a level based system. These days, with companies wanting a quicker release in order to profit from the game sooner, it is very difficult to get the funding to develop a skills based game. I say skills based, but usually those include a lot of other aspects of UO like housing and such.
Huh? [devShell.org]
It would have been awesome if they had made it to where the players were able to log in as the monsters. Such as a monster client where you started out as a lowly evil creature. If you made a kill you were given the option to control more powerful creatures in succession. Yes, there would be all kinds of collusion between monsters and people (friends gaming the system) but would also cause enough excitement/confusion to make the game fun. Non monster players would never really know until they fought a creature if it were being controlled by a wiley human. It would have given pvp/pker's a chance to be murderous within the limits of their monster type/stats. Not sure if this idea has been used by any MMOG's yet, but if not and someone wanted to use it, please do.
Actually, sorry, I've actually helped code for a MUD before and generally even reading the boards was enough to form an opinion.
I've _never_ seen one complain about griefing oportunities (e.g., about thieving like in the summary) from a genuine "I like it when it happens to me" perspective. The people doing the arguing for it were invariably the same griefers who'd do it to _others_.
Oh, they argued lots about how fun it is for the ones ganked or otherwise griefed, straight out of the newbie area, and how everyone will leave your game if they aren't ganked or scammed within half an hour of joining. Basically just arguing why other people should be forced to be their victims.
And the occasional smart guy even went and posted the occasional lie account about how much fun it is when it happens to him. Except if you went and looked in the logs, it wasn't the guy who made a newbie so he can be ganked, but the guy who brought his max level char to gank newbies again. The whole "look how fun it is from the victim's point of view" was just a lie, and they were just hoping you're stupid enough to actually believe it.
Just helped lower my opinion of the whole psychopathic bunch of them some more.
But at any rate, it's not entirely guesswork. I've had that kind of idiot whine at me as to why the MUD should become pure, mandatory PK, and how everything else is not fun, more often than you'd think. So, you know, I think I can be excused if I do an extrapolation based on _that_ very real data, when someone complains twice in a paragraph about the lack of thieving.
No, sorry, he's not whining that people don't steal from him. He's whining that he can't steal from newbies.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I played UO for several years back before they implemented their deterrent system and trammel and all of that nonsense.. I just wanted to say, nothing, no game, has ever incorporated such a real experience other than UO.. Simply put, the range of emotions and experiences that were apart of UO, have never been developed into new games. It was the only place, besides the stock market, that could get my adrenalin flowing, my heart beating, and simply cause a over-all feeling of fear just for being around other players..
Yes, I did see many new players come and go, the experience was hard to put up with for many people and of course this influenced the developing company OSI to make changes. UO, simply put, was hard to play by yourself, there was always someone out there looking to kill and loot your corpse and your entire past hour of work and take advantage of your skills and knowledge IF you didn't prepare for it.. It was the wild west, and anything goes.. You don't see that anymore.. And I think that is the main reason old UO players miss the good ole days. The player had much more control..
Today's MMOs have a cookie cutter scheme they like to follow, and limitations they all have in common are the ones that prevent the true chaos and freedom found in UO from blossoming again - The minor (and pointless) details, the emotions, the limitless freedoms, are all lost in today's virtual worlds. It really is a complete different experience that I have yet to see duplicated or replicated in any way even a decade+ later.
No one has mentioned http://www.uosecondage.com/ ? Their main goal is to replicate the best times in UO's history.
One of the cooler features of UO pre-trammel was the bounty boards. You could post bounties for PKers and anybody could bring the PKers skull back to get the reward. Was pretty cool, and definitely not a free-for-all like some have suggested, there were repercussions to being evil. For example, if you died as a murderer, you could only be ressurected by another player - who would then become a criminal. There was only one town where murderers could go without being killed instantly by guards, and it was on an island inhabited by pirates. Even though I was never a dread lord, I definitely preferred the freedom of UO to the canned "amusement park" gaming of Asheron, Everquest, WoW, or any other "level-based" mmo. I played from 1997 til maybe 2004, and in that time I learned that the best massively multiplayer roleplaying game is real life.
I was a longtime member of the Shadowclan Orcs southeast of Yew on the Catskills (and later Siege Perilous) servers. Thanks for the shoutout!
Despite trying many games (EQ, AO, SWG, and WoW), I've never found an experience that matched the orc fort in the woods. UO's freeform, non-level based play allowed new characters to interact meaningfully with experienced characters. Compare this to WoW, where character level determines level of interaction. The orcs held the fort despite (and because of!) constant attacks by griefers, thieves, and PvPers. As UO restricted nonconsensual player interaction, our ability to roleplay & fight with the larger server population diminished. Siege Perilous was a haven when it opened, as the Catskills ruleset was slowly killing the clan.
Griefing sucks. The orcs had class and didn't grief those who didn't grief us. What stopped us from being intolerable buttheads to the rest of the server? An internal, player-based, player-regulated code of conduct. I think that we were the exception; most PKs/thieves probably didn't have such internal restrictions limiting their antisocial conduct. We kicked out quite a few wanna-be orcs who refused to fight "honorably" or griefed unnecessarily.
We were antisocial, but honorably so -- we were orcs, after all! Trespass on our lands, refuse to pay tribute, and you'd be "clomped."
UO was far more then houses and thieves. It was skill based so you had the ability to custom build a character to match your playing style. You could combine magic, swords, spears, maces, ... healing, potions, traps, ... stealing, hiding, stealth, ...
There were a ton of powerful combination of skills.
It wasn't all about grinding, lvl'n, and talent paths.
It was about building a solid character and knowing how to combo macros to take down an enemy or accomplish a task.
One of the biggest nostalgia factors of UO is housing. While other games have implemented instance housing or a rare few incorporated it into the main world (Star Wars Galaxies), no game has come close to copying what UO offered. UO offered not only function (storage of items) but the ability to decorate your house anyway you like. There is literally no limit to how you can design your house to look. And that was before custom house designs were introduced. That is all some people played UO for, it was the ultimate experiance for casual gamers. UO has huge potential still and always will. Unfortunately the game is owned by EA and they constantly fire people, even when the game is seeing improvement in subscriber base.
Housing (without any of the thieving aspects) was implemented well in Dark Ages of Camelot. There was no auction or mail system in DAoC, so people could set up their own consignment merchants at their houses to sell items they had found or crafted.
As members of guilds bought housing near each other, little communities built up centered around the guild house. You could assign "house-friends" that you give permissions to access items (such as personal or guild vaults) within the house.
It has been 5 years since I played, but I still miss it somewhat.
It is like backyard basketball, either you play for fun or you play seriously.
In the first, it is a friendly match between friends and the outcome is irrelevant.
The problem is that people in MMO want friendly care-bare style fights.
So...you are saying that people in MMO want the equivalent of a "friendly match between friends and the outcome is irrelevant?" If so, why is this a problem, and why does it earn the MMO players a demeaning nickname?
Or do you think that everyone who wants to play a friendly game of backyard basketball deserves this same demeaning nickname?
I further think that the "CareBear" nickname is an odd choice. Casual MMO players do not reject high-death-penalty-PVP MMO's out of concern for the people they might defeat, but rather out of concern for losing their own hard-earned rewards. Their motivation is entirely selfish. They don't "care" about others at all. Wouldn't "crybabies" or something suchlike better describe what you are getting at?
What you consider a "griefing fucktard" we consider part of the game. If the game allows us to kill someone, guess what, we may make use of that ability. This is why I do not play WoW. I did for a while, but not being able to kill people in my same "faction" was a deal breaker. If someone was annoying you, what could you do? /ignore their username? What if they physically followed you around? It's a perpetual world so you couldn't just change instances (unless you went into an actual dungeon/raid without the person). So THEY could theoretically grief you. Sure, you can report them and maybe, maybe, a GM might give them a warning or whatever. Seriously though, the ability to kill anyone, anywhere, for any reason, is what attracts a lot of us to MMORPG's.
There are a few games that cater to this. Eve Online isn't half bad and Darkfall is decent. I personally loved UO and Shadowbane simply for the open pvp. I loved Shadowbane for it's player politically run servers. There was no real PvE content, you killed mobs en mass to level and you pvp till you were exhausted. The servers were ran by players, we decided who controlled what territory, who had rights to what resources. We chose our own paths in the game.
Then you log into game's like WoW where you can only fight persons X, Y, and Z and only in locations A, B, or C. It's so carebear it might as well be Hello Kitty Online with Orcs and Humans. We rofl at people who QQ over being killed in pvp. It's hilarious to watch people break down in a nerdrage of delicious tears over precious pixels they might lose on a digital screen. You would be shocked at grown men weeping over binary 1's and 0's which compose their +5 Sword Mastery gloves they suddenly dropped because they weren't keeping an eye on their surroundings and got wtfganked.
Yes, casual gamers and non-pvp fans make up the majority of mmo games. Sad as it may be. But there IS a market for these games. Darkfall, Mortal Online, Fallen Earth, Neocron, Shadowbane, UO, Eve Online, and more and more and more. There ARE games for the die hardcore pvpers.
As Shadowbane taught us, play to crush. If your ego can't check being killed, you need to go install Runescape or MS Hearts.
Aw Frell this
I've read thru almost all of the replies here and there are quite a few misconceptions of what actually happened during UO. UO was a great game that offered an unrivaled level of freedom in game (especially compared to today's MMO's). Almost every negative post has focused on robbery and out of control griefing as a major concern of the game, but that really wasn't the case. True, there were griefers, i'd argue there are more now in WOW and such (level 80s camping the stupid water elemental spawns for no reason but to piss me off), but for every random PKer or griefer there were 4-5 ANTI-PKs who did nothing but prey on the predators. After the newness of the game wore off, about 6 months, players really starting policing themselves and the majority of the random PKing went away. Instead people joined forces and started large player run cities by aligning themselves w/ other guilds (do that today in any game, not happening), and then guild vs guild play was the majority of the PVPing. Where UO really shined was in the player run housing, sure you can say it could be tedious and such, but thats by today's "i run my wow combat sequence with a click of 1 button macros" standards. Pathetic.
This is a very interesting thread to me, a passionate gamer. As someone who has played many MMORPGs (Everquest 1 & 2, World of Warcraft, Darkfall, Mortal Online beta, Vanguard, and others), I have seen this question brought up and argued over many times on different game forums, and here is my take on it:
The overall breakdown of massive online games seems to be into two general categories, sandbox games like Ultima Online and themepark games like World of Warcraft and Everquest. Sandbox games resemble real life more, by basically presenting players with a background and tools, and then letting them do as they wish, whereas themepark games offer players paths predetermined by developers. As people have pointed out here, most sandbox games have experienced problems with ganking and griefing, and that among other things has led game companies to steer toward themepark MMOs for the most part. There are also other reasons themepark games appeal to the business decision makers. The mainstream gamer, who provides the most lucrative market, is more on the casual side these days, and probably has less time to play, so according to conventional wisdom, short, well defined tasks that provide rewards (e.g. quick dungeon run in WoW) prevalent in themepark games fit such gamers' playing style much better than the open gameplay of a sandbox world. Sandbox games require more imagination as well, with players needing to conjure up their own goals, and that also might not be the mainstream gamer's forte.
However, I happen to believe that sandbox games are the true goal of all game development. Games can be used for many different things, as substitutes for sport (ala Counter Strike), to tell an interesting story (as one of many single player RPGs), or to just burn a few hours while having nothing else to do. While they can be used for each of these purposes, so can other things, like playing basketball outside, reading a book, or talking with people. What truly makes games unique is that they have the potential to allow the player to experience an alternate reality, to do things they can never do in real life, and this is something that only sandbox games can excel at. After all, how can you really suspend your disbelief and think you are THERE, if your hand is constanly held and you can only do what the developer marked as possible. Only sandbox games have the depth, via their freedom, to approximate life. Only in a game where you can attack anything and kill anyone can you have lifelike conflicts and treachery and deep relationships (without risking your life for real). By comparison, a game that holds your hand at every moment, and tells you what you can do arbitrarily, will always be extremely shallow. For that reason, I am a huge proponent of sandbox MMOs, but with a reasonable catch. Like others here, I agree that such a game cannot have endless ganking and griefing, nor do I think that player policing will be enough on its own, as for obvious reasons, players will not behave the same way in games as they do in real life. But I do believe that it is possible to create a game where certain game mechanics (probably difficult to design, so I will not propose them here, not being paid for it and all) "control" ganking and griefing. By "control" I mean it is still possible to kill anyone (retaining the game's free atmosphere), but there is a cost to it somehow, making the would be ganker consider the consequences in a serious way. This, I think, would lead to meaningful PvP, a ganker choosing to risk/face consequences if the target is ladden with riches (as a robber would in real life), but foregoing it if the target is simply a poor nooblet. Sure, people would still die and lose stuff, but this would spice up the gameplay and make people think as in real life (e.g. do NOT leave home ladden with gold without protection), and it would happen in tolerable amounts.
Another thing I want to add is that in the battle between sandbox and themepark, only one game has been massively successful, and that is WoW, and all
I used to have fun back in those days.
but now? games look like shit and I have no idea how I played with the crappy controls.
Tell your friend to quit crying like a little girl and move on with tech, before it moves too far past you.
And quit telling me to get off your lawn, I'm standing in your driveway!
Be seeing you...
When I played UO, I was a rare collector. Yep, a rare collector. My character was built for money making and self defense. I'd use my money to hire crews of warriors to go on live quests with me (or go myself, if I thought I could handle it) simply to get the rarest items I could. The nice thing about UO is that there were some completely unique items, and yet they were abundant enough that they weren't out of my reach. Sure there were perils, and sometimes I lost items worth many hundreds of USD to PKs, or even monsters, though I'd never have sold them anyways, but I still carried on. In my final days of UO I owned a castle with every rare I owned locked down in it. The castle itself was open to the public as a museum. That was my way of playing, sure it might seem lame, but no other game allowed me to express myself and play in my own unique way as much as UO.
Is there a way that I can try out UO? I've always wanted to, and this thread has piqued my interest once again. I didn't think that I would like the game back when it was popular, even though I enjoyed the experience of U6, U7 (and expansions), and even U8. I always thought of Ultima as a singular experience, that you enjoy as a lone player. Now that it doesn't have the popularity that it once did, I thought I might try it. I, like many other people, have grown quite tired of WoW and would like to put a few hours into something else. Is it still available to purchase or has it become OOP? Do I have to buy a standard retail copy and pay the subscription fees or can I pick it up and try a shard sever to see what I think? I was a player of The Realm for years back in Sierra's heyday, so I do have more MMORPG experience than WoW, but never played UO or know anyone that did. I just don't know how it operates now, so forgive me if I sound like an idiot. If it would be some super complicated thing, I'll just check out EvE, but I always wanted to see how the UO world worked. Thanks!
No, nothing to do with Star Wars, but it is in it's own little world.
It's one of the oldest MMORPG games is still going. ( It claims to be THE Oldest still going ).
The Realm Online http://www.realmserver.com/ , though not as popular as EQ or WoW, still has it's cartoonish charm, PvE or PvP, ( You can switch your own PvP on or off, or just attack another PvP flagged player to turn it on ). /evict and using your see invisibility spell to make sure you weren't going to get robbed.
And last I knew, each player still had their own password protected house, with lock chests in the bedrooms, but you needed to get into the habit of typing
I return to The Realm every few years or so, it's such a neat trip down memory lane.. and I'm glad it's still there. And, every time I return, my trusty old characters are right there waiting for me.
Last time I'd played the max level was 1000. And it didn't come easy.
Gee.. Thanks guys... now I'm thinking it's time to renew my subscription.
Well, I guess it won't hurt to help keep a piece of history going !
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
Rock on man! I agree with 1000% of your post, including the sig. I gotta get back and check out The Realm myself. Very nice, and really seemed to start this whole MMORPG thing, via transitioning MUDs to "modern" MMORPGS via tolerable graphical interfaces and reward systems. I waited and waited for someone on this thread to chime in about it. You sir, are the victor. Simple and fun (not to mention affordable), and yet, largely forgotten. I would mod you up, but I really wanted to post a letter of appreciation from another Realm brother!
Great to see your post, BigSes ! I couldn't believe it myself when I searched these posts and saw no mention of the grand-daddy of MMORPG's ! I had to chirp up. :) A male Warriors arse is just too 'butt' ugly to be having to look at on my monitor for hours at a time, even if we are just talking about pixels !
:)
Glad to meet you, if/when you log in to The Realm, look for WebWarrior ( 400 Warrior ), Wryen ( 400 Wizzie ), Kalann ( 520 Adventurer, or MorningGlory. ( Yeah, I prefer watching the female form on my screen all day
Thanks for the Cheers, brother. Made my day meeting a fellow Realmer.
Seeya in the game
And, yeah, the sig, ain't it the truth though ? :)
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
I played UO for 3 years on an EU Server, there was a vast number of players who just enjoyed the community of it all. The whole reason I left WoW was because it lacked the sense of friendship I found in UO where I played as a blacksmith in a guild where I had a lot of very good friends. I could repair gear for people and just have a chat with them while making a bit of money by selling armour etc. WoW is all thick and fast with no feeling in it, people bring materials, the job is done and they leave. I think the auction house is a large part of this, it has taken trading away and has far too much focus on end game and PvP once you reach the highest levels.
I also miss the status symbols of UO like owning a house and rare gear that was entirely useless but expensive but that was because I spent more time trying to be part of the community than dungeon running so why would I spend money on armour and the later *shudder* artifacts. The only way you can get anything like a 'status' symbol in WoW is by raiding and getting a rare drop or taking part in the large new patch/expansion events which quite frankly I find boring.
I think the UO system of almost infinite combinations of skills was also an excellent addition, it meant you almost had to have some combat skill or magic skill to even go and gather resources to become a crafter class, these largely went hand in hand later on as well, gating back to your house to get materials made life much easier.
The karma and fame systems were also great fun for a bit of grinding and your 'Lord' title or 'Glorious' title could easily be lost if you messed around too much, unlike the WoW world of achievements where you do it once and it's yours forever.
I miss UO every day.
Jericho - The Green Man of RAA
Give you any idea why countries in the 3rd World are so pissed at us Americans when we tell them they can't do X because we don't trust them? Why it's ok for us to invade a country for no real reason, to remove and torture for 8 years people we call enemy combatants (in Guantamo and other prisons), but wrong for them to butcher and mistreat their own people.
I remember the outrage I felt at the Vietnamese torture of our troops the, righteousness of seeing Rambo get our poor soldiers back. Now, we have become the Vietnamese and are torturing their people, all the time wondering why we are looked at as two faced for demanding they respect human rights.
We've set an example in the world that is unfortunately being followed, and we wonder why the world is going to hell in a handbasket. If we played by the rules we want them to play by, the world would be a better place.
MMOs want to simulate reality without being reality. That is why PvP isn't liked, the bullies are hated, and those that can go elsewhere do. Those that can't, live in meat space in a third world country.
If the topic is strong enough for a front page story I am sure there is quite enough playerbase who still enjoy the pre-trammel PVP ruleset. I personally ran a private UO server for years that was very successful pre-trammel rules, and no, not everyone was killers. a Lot of them took pride in their houses and would go out in groups to hunt down the local thief, who was usually walking around town naked. I miss those days - I purposely lived in Felucca not only for cheap housing but for the risk of running into some red on my way home. I never liked crybabies. Once a guy was outside my house AFK so I killed and looted him, for him to whine that his kid was throwing up and he had to leave the computer. He should have been hidden and not in felucca to begin with. So I apologized, gave him all this stuff back and then healed him. He said thank you, you are the nicest guy I met in Felucca, most people would laugh and keep my stuff. To which I then proceeded to kill him, and loot him all over again. He then said WTF?! I then said "So was your kid throwing up again this time, or do you just suck?"
Online goods are worth real money, therefore online theft is real theft.
Battlefield 2 may be a game, but an MMOG when the goods are worth something is life. Hence gold farming.
I piss off bigots.
if you want some oldtime UO experience check out http://www.uosecondage.com/ the shard is set in the T2A era
Having played UO for a few years I can tell you that I loved and hated UO. UO's game mechanics early on actually brought a sense of real danger when you went out to adventure. The game was almost free form (as much as any game can be) and players truly could do what they wanted, be it a merchant, or farmer or player killer and have a compelling gaming experience. Imagine Grand Theft Auto as an MMO. If you so desired you could walk up to a nice car, toss out the driver, kick the hell out of them, and drive away in that car. Best of all the player you just jacked would be standing best they're corpse as a helpless ghost watching as you looted them and if you desired, cut up they're corpse and take they're head as a trophy. Modern games simply will not go there. I played WoW for many years and laughed at what people considered griefing. WoW is 2 ply extra soft toliet paper compared to UO's 20 Grit sand paper on your backside.. Wired to a taser.. Served via jack hammer. I liked the more viseceral action of the Conan MMO. Its definitely NOT UO but it certainly isn't WoW either. I was under whelmed by end game prospects and quit after level 40 due to my 1 month free expiration. Check that one out for a more realistic and visceral approach. Its got style and isn't as care bear.
There is remediation for this. If my lowbie Shaman is getting greifed, I simply log out, log back in as my lv 80 Warlock, sound the alarm in Trade chat, then go back out to take care of business. Greifing in WoW is seldom without consequences. The consequence usually is the faction getting griefed will retaliate.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
The main reason is that games like that are hard to make. UO had problems, but they could have been refined into a game unlike any that has yet to exist. However, that would have been very hard to do and less financially rewarding than a reasonably enjoyable game following the Diku model. UO and Star Wars Galaxies trashed what was great about themselves to become more like Diku/Everquest/WoW. EVE is probably doing the best at it currently, if you can accept that your character is a ship rather than a person.
For great justice.
So yeah, I loved UO. Because I got real emotion from playing it. WoW is so stripped of highs and lows, that it really doesn't matter.. like in Equillibrium. You can't take away the extreme sadness without removing the potential for great joy. And stomping a pk or two that made your life miserable early on was truly rewarding.
The biggest thing in the way of an old style UO open world is the popularity of online games today.
Back then, if you were ganked, it was often a lone roamer pk or gang of 3 guys or so. Today MMO's are more popular and guilds are more organized. I call it the irreversible arms race. In todays gaming world, you would never have your mining interupted by a loan pk that added some adventure to your evening. It is much more likely that a huge 40+ person guild would decide they own that mountain range and make it unuseable to you unless you were also in a 40 person active guild. Then the other side fields 60 guys, and so on. The allure of the old style UO days was roaming the world alone and ganking someone, or fighting back and winning vs the loan pk. That will never happen again, it will end up being 100's of players on each side in loose alliances or huge guilds. It might be pvp, mass pvp but it will not be what classic UO did with their sandbox game. Those days are gone forever.