I remember my second day of playing UO back in 1998. I'm chopping trees and making bows in the woods on my crafting character to generate gold for my main character. I'd read to do this in a guide somewhere online. I'm moving along in the woods and I see someone who's obviously disconnected from the game (standing still, not moving) in full golden armor. We're out in the middle of nowhere so I attack them with my hatchet because 11 year old me really wanted that armor set. It takes forever to kill them, and I wasn't aware of how lucky I was since players disappear within 5 minutes of disconnecting. I must have caught the start of the disconnect. They finally die. I loot their corpse: The expected items and a house key!
I take that key and for the next few hours I tried to open the door of every single home in the area to finally find it: A small brick house in a clearing about a 10 minute run from where they died. I ICQ my friends who also only started playing and they help me loot it clean and walk back to town to bank the spoils. This was before housing transfer and managed ownership was added so losing your house key meant you lost 45k gold since it was no longer secure. Later that week I make copies of the keys and yell at the bank that I was selling a house for 20k (half off!). I managed to resell it 3 times to 3 different new owners. Once while showing it to a potential buyer, I run into the original owner who was inside the house and very confused. That's a different story though.
- Large towers in UO were expensive player owned homes that are narrow at the base, but wider on the higher floors. Some players would place them near water and the widest roof area would hang over the water. At that point in UO you could look inside a container if you were close enough to it (3 tiles?) regardless if it was inside of a building. The game does a check to see if you can remove an item from a container based on walls and other rules, so you couldn't get items out of them, only see their contents. For some reason this can-I-take-item check didn't include the Z axis when over water. My friends and I bought a boat and would sail around for hours looking for towers near the water, sail under their wings and loot them.
- UO had items that were stackable (you could place one on top of another, and they would stack up along the Z axis). For most items that allowed you to pass through them, when you're on the same tile as the item stacked, nothing happens: Your character is standing inside of a stack of shirts for example but doesn't have their own Z axis changed. Early in the game, there was one item that didn't behave like this: fur. Players found that if you stacked fur in a certain way, you could make a ladder that would move your character's Z axis up higher and higher. They would stack enough fur to allow a character to walk on to the roof of houses and fall through to break in.
- When you died in UO you were a ghost. Your screen turned grey and you could walk through doors and other objects, but couldn't interact with anything. When a player resurrects another player, the player being resurrected would get a prompt asking them to confirm. Early in UO, players could walk around with the prompt still on their screen. So! You find a house you wanted to break into, kill yourself, have your friend resurrect you, walk through the front door with the prompt up, once inside, confirm, and you'd be brought back to life inside the house.
Reminds me of the Joy of Villainy, a blog site for UO criminal behaviour started by Warik: http://www.wtfman.com/oldjov/ - Click "Stories" to get the list of players and their entries.
UO in 1998 was a special time - I love seeing threads pop up on HN because there are always interesting stories shared by players of that era.
UO definitely had a certain magic that is impossible to recapture - it forced all kinds of different players into a single environment and made for a very rich world. The scams, random PKing, and numerous bugs were part of the charm.
When will someone stop caring about money and make something like this again? Surely, the spending power of people who played UO is more than insignificant, it could at least break even.
Charge $20 a month (roughly the same as $9.95 a month in 1997), focus on creating a world and MUD-level game complexity. Stand on the shoulders of giants and get in front of exploits (which were basically new at the time).
I feel like people are starving for this type of experience again, but forced to feed on the scraps (WoW and clones).
Mortal Online was one such attempt recently, but it wasn't enough of a playable world. And any time someone creates a hardcore MMO, it attracts almost only PKs (because there are so few hardcore MMOs). There needs to be a healthy mix of people, of all Bartle types.
I can't remember where I read it, but I believe Raph Koster once said something like "Nobody pays $9.95 a month to get killed repeatedly by another player". While that is true, I also don't want to pay 10 bucks a month to only win. Surely, there's a way to blend these experiences. It feels very similar to the OSR vs trad gaming schism in D&D...
EVE Online is very much a sandbox like that, but quite different from everything else in theme and _definitely_ in mechanics. However it is the very definition of a Bartle's Killer game.
I think there's a deeper link between the kind of players who play hardcore MMOs and the mechanics of the game itself beyond the lack of games in this genre. The allure of real loss/real displays of skill draws naturally competitive people. Sure, you can pubstomp in TF2 but at the end of the match, what changed? Maybe someone has a new hat. In EVE you can blow up someone's structure that took them hours of space work or real money. There's no real "risk&reward" when the risk is basically nothing, no matter how great the reward is. What kind of person is drawn to this kind of gameplay? Sociop^H^H^H^H^H^H Competitive people.
This is it really. I've tried a few such games over the years and it felt like a majority of people were just trying to get powerful enough to kill & loot other players a little under their strength and then repeat the process to bootstrap themselves higher & higher. Players that want to play that way are attracted to such games, and they inevitably drive out players who want the balance shifted a little in the other direction.
I don't see how game design can easily shift this balance because it's more about attracting a different balance of players than in how you design the game itself.
It's not gone. If you don't like the weird settings on the official servers, you can still play on high quality free servers with healthy populations, like UO Forever. These servers tend to have more old school settings to keep the game more like it was when it launched, introducing new content more carefully.
I agree that it's curious that newer games don't offer the sandbox model though. Instancing is so boring and UO's land ownership concept remains fairly unique.
There's a few games and communities that, I believe, create the same experiences but for a different generation.
But first, remember Eternal September; basically it will never be like it was back then, even if it is exactly the same. See WoW Classic.
Anyway, I think people are experiencing the same things nowadays in games like Runescape, Minecraft and Roblox, where in especially the latter two there are a number of servers offering MMO-like gameplay, including heaps of weird bugs. I wouldn't recommend them for people looking for an UO experience though. I never played any of those myself.
That's a great anecdote. Ultima Online was mind-blowing to me when I first read about it in early 1997 and then started playing later that year. There was something magical about just being in a virtual world where other players would go around doing their thing while you did yours.
Ultima Online server emulators were also what really got me hooked on programming in my teens. I'm now a CS prof working on collaborative systems.
Recently, I've started playing again. I stumbled over a project called Ruins & Riches (http://ruinsandriches.com) that's a total modification of Ultima Online in the spirit of the early Ultima games. I don't do MMOs anymore, but Ruins & Riches can easily be played alone or as a small group.
I was lucky to play UO from the beta days, when a lot of unintentional "features" existed. To name a few good ones:
* monster gating.
Opening a gate (portal) would allow people to travel from one place in the world to another by crossing that portal. The thing is, that also worked for NPE/monsters. So we would go to the craziest dongeons, run around to get the attention of hordes of monsters, open a gate in a tight spot and have this whole group of monster reach some place where they should never be seen. Imagine dragons, Liches & whatnot at the edge
of a beginner's town for instance or worse, inside somebody's house :).
* stealing stuff from somebody in the middle of combat/duel, magic required reagents to perform spells, steal regents = win, finish the player with your bare fists.
The combat system in the early days also benefited from bugs that made it nothing short of a dance, it required to be very good at timing and sparked some complex strategies to win (spell interuption, spell pre-casting, weapon hit timing in between spells, etc etc). You could also "pretend" you were casting a specific spell while in fact another one was being invoked. Luck played very little in duels.
It's also the first mmo where team play started to be a big thing, small tight knit group of players using software like Roger Wilco (ancestor to mumble/teamspeak) handling combats against crazy odds.
It was also full of nasty stuff, accounts/houses/gold had a real world value, hacking was very easy back then and rampant.
I could go on and on about stories about Ultima, it was an incredible game at a time where massive multiplayer gaming was being defined.
It had me learn how to program, learn the english language, build websites and much more.
p.s. I used to play on Chesapeake, with various guilds (WWW, AdJ, Oinland etc) if anyone from these days is around :)
Ultima online was the coolest. Heres one of my stories.
In UO housing was at a premium. Buying a house was a big deal. But if you didnt periodically log in to refresh your house, eventually, it would start to crumble..
Since you could tell which houses were about to crumble, and crumbling means all the belongings in the house would fall to the ground and a new house could be put in its place, this was a big deal. Campers would come from all around to camp out all the falling down house. Guilds would show up.
Anyways during one epic battle at a house near the coast, my buddies and I were camping out at the house to try to get some loot. Battles ensue
At one point, a bunch of role players pulled up in a boat from the coast and started shooting arrows at everyone trying to camp at the house
I have fond memories of this game. I was a thief and would sit in front of the bank, steal a bunch of gold from some poor player, and quickly deposit it into the bank BEFORE the guard could kill me. When they searched my body they found nothing.
Sorry if that was you, I was kind of a bastard, but it was fun. :-)
Before they finally patched the hole, I used to enjoy running through crowds of high level monsters in dungeons to get a whole parade of them chasing me, then quickly casting a portal into the middle of town, usually next to the bank, then ducking behind the portal without going through, as the whole line of monsters walked towards me and popped through the portal and into town!
I use to play a game called the 4th coming. Once saw one player dropping items on the ground for another player. I quickly picked up the items and then sold them back to them.
edit:
Oh I also use to search through a farm area below town, where people would hide items to transfer between characters.
I played an awful lot of Ultima Online in my youth, primarily on emulator servers, with which I later got pretty heavily involved on the development side.
It was a truly special game in its heyday; there have been many attempts but no successes at recreating what made UO so special. The adrenaline of PvP in that game is something I've only seen matched in a small handful of titles since.
From everything I've read and watched, Eve Online comes (came?) pretty close to the same general feeling/atmosphere of UO but to be honest I've avoided Eve because I don't want to get hooked. I don't have time for an MMO addiction these days.
I used to play a shard called Novus Opiate. It was the biggest early shard.
After it died I went on to run a couple of servers and teaching myself to code. Alphanine and Sacred.
When I wanted to drop out of school I wanted to do 3d animation to make a game like UO. But realised I have 0 talent in design but I love programming. So ended up doing that. Thankfully I never became a game dev tho. The stories scare me.
I was so afraid of losing my good equipment I never carried it. I would PVP in underwear, with GM made items and reagents and pots. That's it.
I liked how I could chop a body up and spread the pieces which is really fun when you are at war with your neighbor and you see their ghost standing over their dead body saying OOOoooOoo OooOOOO
>It was a truly special game in its heyday; there have been many attempts but no successes at recreating what made UO so special. The adrenaline of PvP in that game is something I've only seen matched in a small handful of titles since.
The closest thing is probably heavily modded private servers in various games, that are still big enough to feel like mini MMOs. Minecraft has some for sure. Project Zomboid recently. Some very specific Rust or GTA servers. In the past there was some permadeath Neverwinter Nights persistant worlds (there might even still be.)
Check out the new UO Overdrive free server. They recreated that PVP but with a much more modern client and user experience in general which I think is worth checking out if you enjoyed that kind of PVP in those days.
Oh, you could tame animals to make them your pets.
One Halloween I logged into UO, and my character had been transformed into a deer, as some kind of a sick joke! All my inventory was gone, and all I could do was deer stuff.
Then some bastard came along and TAMED ME. That totally sucked! I had to follow him around obediently all day. I guess I'm lucky he didn't skin me and make me into leather armor.
Some years after I read this, I wrote http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/lmu.py, which is a simple one-file text MUD. A little too simple, really: you can dig rooms, create objects, change their descriptions, pick them up, drop them, travel around, look at things, and chat with other players. But there's no way to program the objects to have behavior like walking around and picking things up.
It's a bit verbose for me to include a full transcript in an HN comment, but maybe this edited snippet gives a bit of the flavor, at least if you speak Spanish. Riyhor is the player's name.
? ver
Sipapu
Estás en un lugar borroso, sin mucha forma visible, con un pozo.
Sipapu contiene: Riyhor y pitbull.
? cavar este
Otro vacío
Estás en otra habitación sin características particulares.
Otro vacío contiene: Riyhor.
Hay salida hacia el oeste.
? renombrar aca El living
Ahora aca ya no es “Otro vacío” sino “El living”.
? describir aca como Es un lugar bastante chico con tres sillas y una mesa.
Descripción de “El living” cambiado.
? ver
El living
Es un lugar bastante chico con tres sillas y una mesa.
El living contiene: Riyhor.
Hay salida hacia el oeste.
The game world is pretty much just a Zork-style containment hierarchy, though implemented with Python lists and objects rather than linked lists, so, just as in Ultima, the player's possessions are children of the player, the player is a child of the room they're in, and all the rooms are children of the world. Pretty simple.
But it turned out that, despite having already read this story, I'd implemented my own version of the same bug! When you dig ("cavar") it creates a new exit and by default also a new room, but alternatively you can specify an existing room to dig into. But I'd forgotten to check that the destination was a room! Even though you couldn't program player-created game objects to pick things up, players could pick things up, and you could tunnel into a player, walk through the new exit into the player, pick up objects from their inventory, and walk back out. In fact, you could even dig into yourself. This did not cause other players to appear and start saying "Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich," for some reason.
It was a pretty entertaining bug for a few days of work.
I got a week for exploiting a bug I discovered (maybe I wasn’t the first) involving the shopkeepers who could run stalls for you. Like all NPCs, they would pick up everything not locked down while walking around. And unfortunately (for other people), they could be teleported into people’s houses. Unfortunately I stole I one of a kind object. That was the end of my burglary career.
I also stayed a vampire all the time. Anyone who got in a fight with me would usually win, but would then have to find a cure. I don’t remember why vampirism bothered other people more than me…
Edited to remove my question about whether jails were on all servers - I see in another comment that they were common
I did! In my case it was for exploiting a bug that allowed access to 'Green Acres' which is what the playerbase called the zero elevation empty grassland that occupied approximately 15% or so of the world map. This area of the map was later used as the land area for the 'Second Age' expansion pack, but at the time it was just empty. I had grand plans of dropping a bunch of castles and establishing a real estate empire but the game masters must have had some kind of automated alert that a player had accessed an out of bounds area because I was almost immediately remotely teleported by a game master into jail and asked how I had accessed the area!
They also had some extremely high level custom monsters patrolling the area too, which I thought was kind of fun.
UO has many fond memories for me. So much emergent silly gameplay, so many unintended consequences. Also taught me after playing WoW later that a more controlled and restricted mechanically game can be much more fun while still giving enough freedom for interesting emergent gameplay, it's a fine balance.
One of my favorites (going by memory) was master thieves taunting people into dueling. A thieve had a random chance to steal something from your pack but it flagged them, if dueling though already flagged. If you cast a spell your weapon automatically gets put in your pack while casting, so they would attempt to steal your nice weapon while casting leaving you with no weapon, they could also steal your reagent bag leaving you no ability to cast spells, at this point they could probable kill you easily or just run off with a nice weapon.
Leaving the entrance of town was many times a gauntlet of thieves with houses right outside the guard zone. They would run out steal something from you and run back in and lock the door.
Awesome little anecdote, thanks for sharing. I learned about reverse engineering because of UO. I reverse engineered EasyUO's technique for running macros which involved code injection and shared it with the world. Long live T2A!
We would block ourselves into a corner in the house and just use old school macros that just replayed the same mouse movements over and over to level up casting water elementals in our respective houses. Just keeping that magic at 100% :)
For me that was Meridian 59.
That game taught me so much about everything, network code, packets, reverse engineering, dll injection, objects and oop, cryptography, btree, winapi.
I was not the first but one of the first people ever to write cheats for a, no, the first MMORPG on the planet.
A friend who I've met through m59 and who is way more capable took that to the next level and wrote in game radar which would show players and monsters as dots on the map. That was years later.
Another guy on the team was interested in writing a bot and is now working in robotics.
So yeah those early games are great learning material.
Fantastic anecdote, thank you for sharing. I love these kind of stories. It reminds me of the Dwarf Fortress “dead cats in taverns” bug [0], which just goes to show the detail that goes into these game mechanics.
It also reminds me of a trick used for a subway car in Fallout 3. Instead of actually implementing vehicles, there's an NPC running under the level whose head has been replaced with a train.
My first encounter with programming was RPG maker, however it was UO the first time I started programming for others. It's also when I realized I loved programming more than gaming (I'd rather spend days developing new features for my server than play the videogame).
Lucky at some point I understood my passion was not game development but programming itself. Made a great career out of it (at least so far).
> inventory systems did not use slots but free placement on a coordinate system
Is it me or is this a curious design choice? I mean, discrete (int-based) coordinate system makes some sense, I suppose, if there is a reason containers need it (I don't know, like adjacent object contaminating each other?) - but a float system seems fairly inefficient..
Items could be placed at any pixel location within the bounds of the container. The game used the same X and Y (integer) variables which otherwise denoted the item’s location in the world.
This gave players more degrees of freedom to arrange their inventory as compared to a one-dimensional slot-based system.
The Ultima series was known for its attempts of immersion (in the singleplayer games you are supposed to play yourself), so things like a world simulation were built into it as the games progressed (you want to bake bread - get flour, mix it with water, bake it in an oven, etc).
This spilled over to the UI/UX design - so having a free form inventory meant it felt like you had a backpack.
[+] [-] ctvo|3 years ago|reply
I take that key and for the next few hours I tried to open the door of every single home in the area to finally find it: A small brick house in a clearing about a 10 minute run from where they died. I ICQ my friends who also only started playing and they help me loot it clean and walk back to town to bank the spoils. This was before housing transfer and managed ownership was added so losing your house key meant you lost 45k gold since it was no longer secure. Later that week I make copies of the keys and yell at the bank that I was selling a house for 20k (half off!). I managed to resell it 3 times to 3 different new owners. Once while showing it to a potential buyer, I run into the original owner who was inside the house and very confused. That's a different story though.
UO was so good that I still listen to the Stones theme sometimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mDcGDx4QyA
[+] [-] ctvo|3 years ago|reply
- Large towers in UO were expensive player owned homes that are narrow at the base, but wider on the higher floors. Some players would place them near water and the widest roof area would hang over the water. At that point in UO you could look inside a container if you were close enough to it (3 tiles?) regardless if it was inside of a building. The game does a check to see if you can remove an item from a container based on walls and other rules, so you couldn't get items out of them, only see their contents. For some reason this can-I-take-item check didn't include the Z axis when over water. My friends and I bought a boat and would sail around for hours looking for towers near the water, sail under their wings and loot them.
- UO had items that were stackable (you could place one on top of another, and they would stack up along the Z axis). For most items that allowed you to pass through them, when you're on the same tile as the item stacked, nothing happens: Your character is standing inside of a stack of shirts for example but doesn't have their own Z axis changed. Early in the game, there was one item that didn't behave like this: fur. Players found that if you stacked fur in a certain way, you could make a ladder that would move your character's Z axis up higher and higher. They would stack enough fur to allow a character to walk on to the roof of houses and fall through to break in.
- When you died in UO you were a ghost. Your screen turned grey and you could walk through doors and other objects, but couldn't interact with anything. When a player resurrects another player, the player being resurrected would get a prompt asking them to confirm. Early in UO, players could walk around with the prompt still on their screen. So! You find a house you wanted to break into, kill yourself, have your friend resurrect you, walk through the front door with the prompt up, once inside, confirm, and you'd be brought back to life inside the house.
[+] [-] forgingahead|3 years ago|reply
UO in 1998 was a special time - I love seeing threads pop up on HN because there are always interesting stories shared by players of that era.
[+] [-] idiotsecant|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trh0awayman|3 years ago|reply
Charge $20 a month (roughly the same as $9.95 a month in 1997), focus on creating a world and MUD-level game complexity. Stand on the shoulders of giants and get in front of exploits (which were basically new at the time).
I feel like people are starving for this type of experience again, but forced to feed on the scraps (WoW and clones).
Mortal Online was one such attempt recently, but it wasn't enough of a playable world. And any time someone creates a hardcore MMO, it attracts almost only PKs (because there are so few hardcore MMOs). There needs to be a healthy mix of people, of all Bartle types.
I can't remember where I read it, but I believe Raph Koster once said something like "Nobody pays $9.95 a month to get killed repeatedly by another player". While that is true, I also don't want to pay 10 bucks a month to only win. Surely, there's a way to blend these experiences. It feels very similar to the OSR vs trad gaming schism in D&D...
[+] [-] dj_mc_merlin|3 years ago|reply
I think there's a deeper link between the kind of players who play hardcore MMOs and the mechanics of the game itself beyond the lack of games in this genre. The allure of real loss/real displays of skill draws naturally competitive people. Sure, you can pubstomp in TF2 but at the end of the match, what changed? Maybe someone has a new hat. In EVE you can blow up someone's structure that took them hours of space work or real money. There's no real "risk&reward" when the risk is basically nothing, no matter how great the reward is. What kind of person is drawn to this kind of gameplay? Sociop^H^H^H^H^H^H Competitive people.
[+] [-] ineedasername|3 years ago|reply
This is it really. I've tried a few such games over the years and it felt like a majority of people were just trying to get powerful enough to kill & loot other players a little under their strength and then repeat the process to bootstrap themselves higher & higher. Players that want to play that way are attracted to such games, and they inevitably drive out players who want the balance shifted a little in the other direction.
I don't see how game design can easily shift this balance because it's more about attracting a different balance of players than in how you design the game itself.
[+] [-] kethinov|3 years ago|reply
I agree that it's curious that newer games don't offer the sandbox model though. Instancing is so boring and UO's land ownership concept remains fairly unique.
[+] [-] jahsome|3 years ago|reply
It has its warts, but as far as full loot sandboxes go, I enjoy it more than any other I've tried.
[+] [-] simne|3 years ago|reply
When somebody else will pay for this.
I participated in one uo group, we gather money, buy powerful server, paid for hosting. All this based on big enough group with positive economy.
Exist games which cheaper than uo in terms of need server power, but they are much less fun.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|3 years ago|reply
But first, remember Eternal September; basically it will never be like it was back then, even if it is exactly the same. See WoW Classic.
Anyway, I think people are experiencing the same things nowadays in games like Runescape, Minecraft and Roblox, where in especially the latter two there are a number of servers offering MMO-like gameplay, including heaps of weird bugs. I wouldn't recommend them for people looking for an UO experience though. I never played any of those myself.
[+] [-] bovermyer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clemensnk|3 years ago|reply
Recently, I've started playing again. I stumbled over a project called Ruins & Riches (http://ruinsandriches.com) that's a total modification of Ultima Online in the spirit of the early Ultima games. I don't do MMOs anymore, but Ruins & Riches can easily be played alone or as a small group.
[+] [-] enlyth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zcam|3 years ago|reply
* monster gating. Opening a gate (portal) would allow people to travel from one place in the world to another by crossing that portal. The thing is, that also worked for NPE/monsters. So we would go to the craziest dongeons, run around to get the attention of hordes of monsters, open a gate in a tight spot and have this whole group of monster reach some place where they should never be seen. Imagine dragons, Liches & whatnot at the edge of a beginner's town for instance or worse, inside somebody's house :).
* stealing stuff from somebody in the middle of combat/duel, magic required reagents to perform spells, steal regents = win, finish the player with your bare fists.
The combat system in the early days also benefited from bugs that made it nothing short of a dance, it required to be very good at timing and sparked some complex strategies to win (spell interuption, spell pre-casting, weapon hit timing in between spells, etc etc). You could also "pretend" you were casting a specific spell while in fact another one was being invoked. Luck played very little in duels.
It's also the first mmo where team play started to be a big thing, small tight knit group of players using software like Roger Wilco (ancestor to mumble/teamspeak) handling combats against crazy odds.
It was also full of nasty stuff, accounts/houses/gold had a real world value, hacking was very easy back then and rampant.
I could go on and on about stories about Ultima, it was an incredible game at a time where massive multiplayer gaming was being defined. It had me learn how to program, learn the english language, build websites and much more.
p.s. I used to play on Chesapeake, with various guilds (WWW, AdJ, Oinland etc) if anyone from these days is around :)
[+] [-] devin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingnothing|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dosethree|3 years ago|reply
Since you could tell which houses were about to crumble, and crumbling means all the belongings in the house would fall to the ground and a new house could be put in its place, this was a big deal. Campers would come from all around to camp out all the falling down house. Guilds would show up. Anyways during one epic battle at a house near the coast, my buddies and I were camping out at the house to try to get some loot. Battles ensue At one point, a bunch of role players pulled up in a boat from the coast and started shooting arrows at everyone trying to camp at the house
[+] [-] nu11ptr|3 years ago|reply
Sorry if that was you, I was kind of a bastard, but it was fun. :-)
[+] [-] DonHopkins|3 years ago|reply
Before they finally patched the hole, I used to enjoy running through crowds of high level monsters in dungeons to get a whole parade of them chasing me, then quickly casting a portal into the middle of town, usually next to the bank, then ducking behind the portal without going through, as the whole line of monsters walked towards me and popped through the portal and into town!
I hope they got you. Pththth!!!
[+] [-] gubneor|3 years ago|reply
Doing this before blessed items might have yielded good returns, but there were far more exploitable avenues in that game.
Selling UO gold is how I bought many things in my youth.
[+] [-] blarg1|3 years ago|reply
edit:
Oh I also use to search through a farm area below town, where people would hide items to transfer between characters.
[+] [-] coding123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] na85|3 years ago|reply
It was a truly special game in its heyday; there have been many attempts but no successes at recreating what made UO so special. The adrenaline of PvP in that game is something I've only seen matched in a small handful of titles since.
From everything I've read and watched, Eve Online comes (came?) pretty close to the same general feeling/atmosphere of UO but to be honest I've avoided Eve because I don't want to get hooked. I don't have time for an MMO addiction these days.
[+] [-] philliphaydon|3 years ago|reply
I used to play a shard called Novus Opiate. It was the biggest early shard.
After it died I went on to run a couple of servers and teaching myself to code. Alphanine and Sacred.
When I wanted to drop out of school I wanted to do 3d animation to make a game like UO. But realised I have 0 talent in design but I love programming. So ended up doing that. Thankfully I never became a game dev tho. The stories scare me.
[+] [-] johng|3 years ago|reply
I liked how I could chop a body up and spread the pieces which is really fun when you are at war with your neighbor and you see their ghost standing over their dead body saying OOOoooOoo OooOOOO
[+] [-] KVFinn|3 years ago|reply
The closest thing is probably heavily modded private servers in various games, that are still big enough to feel like mini MMOs. Minecraft has some for sure. Project Zomboid recently. Some very specific Rust or GTA servers. In the past there was some permadeath Neverwinter Nights persistant worlds (there might even still be.)
[+] [-] kethinov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|3 years ago|reply
DonHopkins on Dec 24, 2018 | parent | next [–]
Oh, you could tame animals to make them your pets.
One Halloween I logged into UO, and my character had been transformed into a deer, as some kind of a sick joke! All my inventory was gone, and all I could do was deer stuff.
Then some bastard came along and TAMED ME. That totally sucked! I had to follow him around obediently all day. I guess I'm lucky he didn't skin me and make me into leather armor.
[+] [-] smcl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dstick|3 years ago|reply
So many fond memories...
[+] [-] kragen|3 years ago|reply
It's a bit verbose for me to include a full transcript in an HN comment, but maybe this edited snippet gives a bit of the flavor, at least if you speak Spanish. Riyhor is the player's name.
A slightly longer session is at https://pastebin.com/GSf4Bske.The game world is pretty much just a Zork-style containment hierarchy, though implemented with Python lists and objects rather than linked lists, so, just as in Ultima, the player's possessions are children of the player, the player is a child of the room they're in, and all the rooms are children of the world. Pretty simple.
But it turned out that, despite having already read this story, I'd implemented my own version of the same bug! When you dig ("cavar") it creates a new exit and by default also a new room, but alternatively you can specify an existing room to dig into. But I'd forgotten to check that the destination was a room! Even though you couldn't program player-created game objects to pick things up, players could pick things up, and you could tunnel into a player, walk through the new exit into the player, pick up objects from their inventory, and walk back out. In fact, you could even dig into yourself. This did not cause other players to appear and start saying "Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich," for some reason.
It was a pretty entertaining bug for a few days of work.
[+] [-] red369|3 years ago|reply
I got a week for exploiting a bug I discovered (maybe I wasn’t the first) involving the shopkeepers who could run stalls for you. Like all NPCs, they would pick up everything not locked down while walking around. And unfortunately (for other people), they could be teleported into people’s houses. Unfortunately I stole I one of a kind object. That was the end of my burglary career. I also stayed a vampire all the time. Anyone who got in a fight with me would usually win, but would then have to find a cure. I don’t remember why vampirism bothered other people more than me…
Edited to remove my question about whether jails were on all servers - I see in another comment that they were common
[+] [-] idiotsecant|3 years ago|reply
They also had some extremely high level custom monsters patrolling the area too, which I thought was kind of fun.
[+] [-] Max3000Max|3 years ago|reply
This "jail" was a place on the corner of the green acres, a place for the developers/GMs to test on a endless grass field.
[+] [-] SigmundA|3 years ago|reply
One of my favorites (going by memory) was master thieves taunting people into dueling. A thieve had a random chance to steal something from your pack but it flagged them, if dueling though already flagged. If you cast a spell your weapon automatically gets put in your pack while casting, so they would attempt to steal your nice weapon while casting leaving you with no weapon, they could also steal your reagent bag leaving you no ability to cast spells, at this point they could probable kill you easily or just run off with a nice weapon.
Leaving the entrance of town was many times a gauntlet of thieves with houses right outside the guard zone. They would run out steal something from you and run back in and lock the door.
[+] [-] rootw0rm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johng|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lakomen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Madmallard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shever73|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/how-cats-get-drunk-in-dwarf-fortress...
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nivenhuh|3 years ago|reply
Thats all I got to the story. Didn’t participate in the lawsuit .
[+] [-] acomjean|3 years ago|reply
Richard Garriott (aka lord British) explains in this 7 minute video. https://arstechnica.com/video/watch/war-stories-ultima-onlin...
[+] [-] Fire-Dragon-DoL|3 years ago|reply
Lucky at some point I understood my passion was not game development but programming itself. Made a great career out of it (at least so far).
[+] [-] Chris2048|3 years ago|reply
Is it me or is this a curious design choice? I mean, discrete (int-based) coordinate system makes some sense, I suppose, if there is a reason containers need it (I don't know, like adjacent object contaminating each other?) - but a float system seems fairly inefficient..
[+] [-] ztorkelson|3 years ago|reply
This gave players more degrees of freedom to arrange their inventory as compared to a one-dimensional slot-based system.
[+] [-] ceearrbee|3 years ago|reply
This spilled over to the UI/UX design - so having a free form inventory meant it felt like you had a backpack.
[+] [-] db48x|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] planarhobbit|3 years ago|reply