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."

Comments

EvE Online?

[OS24Ever]

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.

Re:EvE Online?

[Sobrique]

1/ Learning skills don't do anything. You don't have to spend any time on them at all. If you do, they take days to get to an acceptable level (4/4 in each takes maybe a week in total).
2/ Flying a tiny little ship is lots of fun. Arguably more fun than flying a battleship. I've been flying a Merlin recently - a little piddly T1 frigate - and having much fun flying it, even after 5 years of playing EVE. Despite being able to fly really big ships, I rarely do, and find I'm flying cruiser sized hulls most of the time.
3/ You do catch up. There's only 5 ranks in each skill, once you've got there, you've 'caught up'. By then, you've probably overtaken most players already, as the 5th rank takes 80% of the time, where you can go from 0-4 in 20%. 80% of the benefit, 20% of the time. Even that doesn't make much difference though - square off two pilots, with one on 10x the skillpoints, and you can't predict who would win. The only thing that more skillpoints gives, is more options. It's like in other games, where you've leveled up to the level cap in one class, so you start a new character to find out what a different class is like. Only in EVE, you do it with the same character.
4/ It takes a while to hit the level cap on some of the top tier stuff. Yeah, that's so. So what? It's not like the intervening classes aren't interesting or useful or fun.

Re:UO wasn't that much fun really

[Tridus]

Throughout the entire history of WoW all the way from release until today, PvP realms as a whole have been less popular then PvE realms.

That was true before battlegrounds, arenas, wintergrasp, and even before the gear discrepency between a level 30 and a max level character was so high that "world pvp" wasn't just a one shot affair. (Calling what goes on in STV these days PvP is a joke.)

The reality is that the number of people who find being griefed fun is smaller then the number of people who don't.

Re:UO wasn't that much fun really

[jth1234567]

Throughout the entire history of WoW all the way from release until today, PvP realms as a whole have been less popular then PvE realms.

Interestingly, with European servers the situation was exactly the opposite at least during the first year after launch. I don't know if it has changed since then.

Re:Casual gamers

[stjobe]

I claim you are wrong.

Claim away.

I'm halfway a casual and halfway a hardcore gamer

So you're not a casual gamer, which kind of invalidates your claim.

Anyway,

I'm not a casual gamer either, more like yourself in fact, but the bulk of MMO subscriptions are filled with people who DON'T want to lose any progress, be it from thieves, robbers, PKers, server crashes, whatever. They'll spend their time in the game happily as long as it's a constant progress.

You're right that it's the grind to get back what was lost that makes the casual gamer not want to put up with losing progress, but I'd wager that even if the grind was lessend, a full-on PvP game will never have the mass appeal of WoW. MMO players in general are quite protective of their shiny pixels and don't like to lose them.

Re:UO wasn't that much fun really

[thoth]

I played on a PvP server for several months, recently, and the bottom line is world pvp just sucks. It may have been envisioned as both sides battling it out over quest hubs, and that did occur, but in my experience (anecdotal, yes I know) > 80% of world pvp consisted of a highly unfair situation: either it was two or more vs one, one on one with a large level discrepancy, or a combo of both. And that just isn't fun for the outnumber and outleveled person. The final straw for me was getting one-shotted by a stealthed rogue. So I quit and when I came back, I did a realm transfer to a PvE realm.

Missing the point

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Missing the point

[Dolda2000]

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.

As one of the writers of Haven & Hearth, I have to disagree. The reason me and my friend wanted to write the game is that we wanted a world where the actions that players can perform actually have an impact on the world itself, rather than just another theme park where you can just enjoy yourself withing the very strict frame set by the authors of the game; and those of our current players that seem to enjoy the game the most seem to agree with that. It leads naturally to a game world where the emergent phenomena become the most defining feature of the world, rather than the mechanics that we, as the game authors, build into it. The coolest thing about the world, if I may say so myself, is that there isn't a single structure in the world that hasn't been built by the players themselves.

It is true, of course, that theft and raiding are important parts of that, and the primary enjoyment of many players is the politics that arise out of factions competing with each other; but mind you that theft and raiding does not necessarily equal "griefing". In Haven, despite only having a few hundred players, there are actual wars being played out without us authors having to write a back-story for them. We don't have to write a back-story at all since that can be done entirely by players; and it also leads to a story that the players can actually care about since they are part of it themselves, rather than having had it pushed upon them.

I shan't pretend that Haven isn't buggy and exploitable, but those are things that we do plan to remedy before going into beta without having to rip out the most defining aspect of the game, viz., its mutable world. "Piss-poor GM support", as you put it, is an intended feature: We don't want to set the rules for the game any more than is necessary as a part of writing basic game mechanics, and in the end, we believe that it leads to a more meaningful player experience since players don't have to be bothered by any arbitrary rules of morality that we may set up. The point is that most of our players don't want to be "griefers" -- they simply want to be a meaningful part of the game world itself, which they cannot be in a theme-park game like WoW. I don't want to pretend everyone wants a game like that (there is obviously a reason why WoW has four or so orders of magnitude more players than we do), but it's not like it's just for griefers.

Re:Missing the point

[shadowrat]

i agree. there was something "real" about UO. The experiences in it felt more dynamic and unique compared to the manufactured experiences of Wow and the MMOs that lead to it.

Yeah, there were griefers and horrible fuck ups and oversights on the part of the devs. However, i've always felt it grew into a stable and fair system. Near the end of my time with the game i felt like i knew all the tricks to keep myself alive and my stuff in my posession.

even with the griefing, i remember it as being not so bad. at one point, prior to the housing fixes, when a key to your house was all that gave you ownership, my buddy and i got our house stolen. it sucked. it was my buddy's fault too. eager to impress everyone with our new house, he invited people in, got his pocket picked of the key, and what followed was a weeklong battle to reclaim the house.

In the end, we never got the house back, but my character became a vagabond. i wandered the world in search of adventure, and found it. It seemed to me, not unlike something that another game would script and force everyone through. In fact it's quite common for your character's motivation for adventure to be the loss of everything dear to them. Except in UO, this was totally unscripted and unique to my character.

i know some people find that kind of thing aggrivating. i'm not saying my zen approach to the game is for everyone, but if i want to have stuff nobody can have, i can just draw it in photoshop or blender. nothing wrong with that. I play games to do something interesting. often interesting == challenges that i didn't see coming. If it's an mmo, i like feeling like i have a unique story. i've just never felt that wow and it's ilk give me that.

Re:Also WoW keeps it sane

[sarahbau]

Maybe one way they could counter griefing is to give some kind of risk to the griefer. Most MMOs have no system of law. You can go around killing all the players/NPCs you want, with little more risk than being chased by few guards for 30 seconds. You can then go talk to the baker, who just witnessed you brutally kill 30 peasants, children, and low-level players, but thinks nothing of it. What if killing low level players had consequences, like your character being "executed" (obviously being killed just to respawn 10 seconds later isn't really a punishment, so it could mean something else). What's funny, is WoW originally DID have penalties intended for killing passive NPCs or low-level characters. The rule book talks about dishonor, and how getting enough dishonor would cause you own faction to stop talking to you, eventually even attacking you if you entered town before your dishonor wore off.

By the time the honor system was implemented though, they had removed dishonor (I think initially they did give negative honor for killing passive NPCs, but not for killing low level players). There was no penalty for killing lowbies all day. I played WoW on an RP-PVP server for a while, thinking it would provide some of the world-pvp I missed on my PVE server after Battlegrounds came out. Unfortunately, pretty much the only PVP that exists on PVP servers any more is griefing. I leveled from 1-70 without encountering a single enemy player that wasn't a skull (more than 10 levels above me) until I got to level 61, where they would fly overhead on their flying mount, waiting for me to drop to low health so they could swoop in for the easy kill.

Even though I'm not a "wolf," I wouldn't be opposed to a game including some kind of loss when killed, IF the person doing the killing faced some kind of risk as well. A level 80 player might not be able to get anything of value from a level 30, but they'd kill them all day just for the "fun" of causing them to lose something. In real life (most) people don't go around killing random helpless people because of morals, and a risk of imprisonment. In the game world, neither exists (most people aren't morally opposed to annoying someone).