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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."
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
How about wanking? After all, that's really what MMOs are. Nothing but a giant sausage-fest circle-jerk. Why don't you get your ass out of your hovel and focus on your real life, not some fantasy bullshit where you pretend to be a level 3 elf master, or whatever? The term "gamer" only applies to kiddies living off of their parents' dime, or adults with no social life and no social skills.