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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."
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.
That was me, i just registered a new account... by the way does anybody know how to match uid to year? i'd like to guess what my old account email address was, i can't remember and knowing the year would be a good clue to begin with. I've noticed i didn't talk about UO at all so, about the UO-versus-current mmorpgs, I think the main difference is freedom and possibilities. Killing and PvP is not just arcade, it's also a form of socializing, versus the current "single-player" achiever-whiner profile that plagues online games. I played UO for a brief period many years ago and what current games lack that UO had is more openness and posibilities, more freedom. But people would rather be locked-in than let others have the freedom to harm them, making the gameplay much less rich and more single-player like.