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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).
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
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.
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
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 ;-)
And I agree. Spent 8 years from 1998 to 2006 on UO. Every other MMORPG I tried, guildwars, eve, etc. Didn't give me that warm feeling when I first started UO. Walking up from Vesper to Minoc and didn't know what I will see. And I tried hard, pretty hardcore I'd say spending way beyond normal hours on each games to fully explore the possibilities. Nothing came close to UO.
There's something about playing a medieval fantasy from Richard Garriott who knows his swords and knives. The amount of detail in the games, and mostly the carried over legacy of the Ultima series was what made UO so enjoyable. But even that only lasted a few years. The last few years of my subscription is basically just banking (chats at the bank), and script mining for fun.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
Shadowbane had a good run and there are still those of us that would log into it if it was still running. There's an attempt to back engineer the game's server at http://www.shadowbaneemulator.com/ .
I'd love another sandbox fantasy game to come on that market that works as well as world of warcraft but all those I've tried since them have lacked the "flow" that blizzard put into their game to keep me coming back.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shadowbane had the following flaws:
* You had to mercilessly camp mob spawns in order to get money for your guild/city.
* It was disasterously easy to quit your guild and join the rival so you end up on the winning side
This made things: boring.
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.
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
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 have to agree. I played Shadowbane and despite how buggy it was it was the best MMO experience I ever had. It encouraged active role-playing and political intrigue. The bugs could of been solved if they used an existing engine and not trying to write one themselves for the first time. As far as group/faction/alliance balance I believe if the mod were more active on the server with events, appearances of gods, etc. They could help equalize things. Sadly the game was closed down as Wolfpack Studios was bought out.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
No one has mentioned http://www.uosecondage.com/ ? Their main goal is to replicate the best times in UO's history.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.