Ultima Online Devs Building Player-Run MMORPG

An anonymous reader writes: "A group of former developers for Ultima Online has created a game company called Citadel Studios, and they're working on a new MMORPG called Shards Online. '[CEO Derek] Brinkmann described the game as a player-run MMO, which means at the highest level they can run their own servers and change the settings of that world, altering how long nighttime lasts or how quickly players can gain skills. On the next level down, server administrators can take the form of god characters, who can spawn monsters in the world, create items and launch live events. And in the level below that, players can modify the gameplay code. ... The game is set in a multiverse, where players can travel through different worlds. While all the worlds are unified by the same rule-set, Cotten told Polygon that they are each themed differently, and these themes will offer players a different experience. There's a world inspired by high fantasy. There's a world that is coming out of a steampunk industrial revolution. There's a world that consists of a coliseum in which players can fight each other in player-versus-player battles.'"

Comments

well that was new...

[tero]

*cough*MUD*cough*

Re:well that was new...

[Greyfox]

UO very much resembled a MUD. It was also a pretty awesome game until EA took it over and turned it into a WOW-style gear grind and started screwing with the skill balance. It was really the last MMO I've run across where player-crafted gear was the best gear in the game. Even in Eve Online, the best modules drop from rare spawns in low-security space, and although players can now research Tech 2 blueprints, the cartels that control the never-ending ones that were given out in the first couple years of the game have such a price advantage that crafting isn't all that satisfying in the game. At least not to me.

I used to make pretty decent coin in UO selling scrolls, spellbooks and location runes. That and making portals for people. The introduction of the later crap -- PvE-only areas, item insurance that would allow you to bind your best items to you and gear that would affect your stats, all made the game significantly less fun. Not to mention the constant tinkering that was required to try to keep the game balanced in the face of all these changes, so that all the players wouldn't quit in droves. Which they pretty much did anyway.

Re:well that was new...

[Oligonicella]

The introduction of the later crap -- PvE-only areas,

Actually, a lot of people *like* to enjoy the universe of their choosing without some douche who's spent half a lifetime grinding up to maximum constantly coming around and squashing players they're not involved with just to screw with them. Halo isn't for everyone. I prefer the games where you can flip PvP on and off.

Ohhh... they just invented MultiMUD

[Opportunist]

And allow me to dust off my crystal ball to predict how this is going to run.

- People will flock to the "shards" where they gather xp the fastest, then complain about the lack of content.
- Balance will be completely off whack because you go to shard A, get weapon A1, go to shard B and get armor B1 because the monster that carries said armor is very susceptible to A1 (which does not matter since nothing like it exists in world B), then go to shard C where every monster gives tons and tons of xp and loot but is really hard to kill... unless you have weapon A1 which deals a damage these mobs don't have any resistance to (because it uses a different ruleset) and wear armor B1 that makes you invulnerable against mobs on shard C (because they use a different formula to calculate armor which makes the armor rate on B1 insanely huge against shard C while it would be quite normal for shard B).
- Interesting, well designed worlds filled with lots and lots of detail that will be deserted because the builder also took balance seriously, while the shards with no meaningful texturing where you mow down mobs by the dozen for free loot will be overrun, in turn giving wizzes the message that players don't give a shit about eye candy and just want free stuff, culminating eventually in the black room with rows and rows of defenseless drones dropping the Ultrasuperspecialawesome Sword of Pwnage with a dropchance of 99.9999% (with an error margin of 0.0001 due to a spawning error caused by the amount of mobs dying at the same time).
- Dozens and dozens of "twisty passages, all looking alike" because for some odd reason wizzes love to create mazes about as much as players loathe running through them.

Oh yeah, I'm so looking forward to that again!

Re:Ohhh... they just invented MultiMUD

[Charliemopps]

Clearly you never played UO. UO, being the first "real" mmo had fixed all of those problems from the start, by having no XP and items that decayed rather quickly. Basically your character had a capped number of skill points and you could lock skills at their current level or turn them up or down. So once you hit the cap, if you wanted to change how you played by, for example, going from Sword fighting to magic... you would set your swords to down, and your magic to up, and then use magic a lot until your magic capped out. This system had it's problems, but none of them were like what you describe above.

The primary problem with this system was that it was skill based, and I mean the skill of the PLAYER. Which a lot of people didn't like because... they weren't very good at it. Move over to an mmo like EQ and WOW and if you've been playing for 2 years, and some noob comes on, it doesn't matter how good they are. You put the time in, you're level 60, you're going to be that much more powerful than them. In UO, if you were good at that sort of thing, you could be just as twinked out as any other player in the game in a matter of weeks or even days. And even if you weren't you could still manage to kill them in PVP if you knew what you were doing.

Re:a good idea?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I wouldn't play such an mmo. It sounds like a chaos for gameplay to me....

Sort of like the different forks of NetHack? ;-)

In case you missed it...

[duke_cheetah2003]

This has been going on for years already. RunUO.

Re:a good idea?

[LVSlushdat]

Kinda sounds like one *I* would play in....