UO Online was my youth. I didn't had access to the internet back in 1998 when it went live, so I obsessively read (and re-read) all the stories in game magazines and hoped that one day I will be able to play this game.
Few years later, I finally get my 56kbps modem and spent decade playing the game on so many different unofficial servers as well as being GM and developer of few more shards.
I would say that UO was Minecraft of our generation: especially on unofficial RP servers you had awesome game systems scripted by community as well as sandboxed world where you can do basically anything. During my stint in game I was beggar joking around other players, owned farm, baked my own bread and make beer, been drunken sailor as well as competitive PvM warrior.
It is "real" world, that tends to create nice community of players, some like to chat, some like to joke around, some hunt dragons and another are just pure evil killing noob players, stealing everything they own and then troll them till they cry and leave the game forever.
Try that in your "bring-me-ten-wolf-teeth" click grind MMO game.
- A blacksmith can be a feared person in a given area because anyone messing with him can become target for massive assault by entire communities. Because it turns out this blacksmith would craft and mine in his spare time for r&r and just give free stuff to these guilds just because.
- A guild siege can last a month trying to work 24/7 to destroy someone's property. It wasn't easy, but doable.
- A friend was unfortunately banned for scamming people in town by pretending to be under attack, followed by having the other guy slaughtered by his dragon. It was loads of fun. Yes yes we were assholes, but it was fun assholeness.
- It was the EVE online before EVE. Definitely "place to build" was a rare commodity, unlike EVE.
- Unlike EVE you can just have fun no matter what you did. You didn't have to travel for 2 hours to get somewhere interesting. And building a character from scratch took a few days at most.
One of my favorite "UO was a real world" stories is that when they launched the game animals were to reproduce and prey on each other. The designers hadn't accounted for the fact the players would simply kill everything in site and suddenly they had a world without animals.
I have very similar stories with UO. I ran servers. I wrote scripts, in fact I owe much of my entry into my career to running private servers: it taught me how to run a server, how to setup a forum, how to program, how to setup a site, domain, etc, etc, etc. Ragnarok did much the same for me, it taught me about mysql, php (well I knew some by then). Time-warp and now I'm an expert in Rails/Ruby/Meteor/Node/Devops/etc. I really owe many thanks to gaming for giving me my entry and the devs whoms backs I stood on.
I agree that Minecraft is what UO was to our generation, although I'm a bit worried they're learning java, but I guess php is no better. Oh well, just more tools for the toolbelt. :D
This. It was my youth too.
Besides the fun, it molded my career.
UO was the ultimate reason I did CS. I learned to script in EasyUO to up chars in unofficial servers, and sell it to friends. I learned something about web-development so I could set up reports and graphs of my char progress, and manage that from school, over the Internet. I even learned something about "phreacking" (what a old word) so i could connect to the internet for free.
I feel old. Must be the same thing that people from the commodore/amiga era feels like...
One thing that I couldn't understand: if you bother spending your time and effort on a game, why not go for an official server? I know I could afford this, when I was unemployed (bought heavily discounted WoW box in 2008, what an inventive packaging they had - I'll miss that kind of thing in the coming era of digital distribution)
another are just pure evil killing noob players, stealing everything they own and then troll them till they cry and leave the game forever.
I have always hated people like that. I realize that griefers are a part of the game and even a part of life but they really do ruin the fun for so many people that I'd prefer to be rid of them.
It was really a recurring theme with Origin at its height... games that simultaneously combined being staggeringly ahead of their times with bizarrely broken mechanics, and at release time, generally code that barely ran on the best computers of the time.
The Ultima 7 games, for instance, are both fantastic role-playing stories with deep adult stories that could stand with anything made today, and are also enormous recursive fetch quests of the worst kind that I could never play again now.
There were many great studios at the time of Origin's heyday, but Origin has to be one of the most interesting. Almost every game they made was like somebody time traveled back from the future and was desperately trying to jam a future game on to the primitive machines of the time. (The Ultima Underworlds also come to mind for that. Graphically more primitive than Doom in most ways, but in terms of the world and what you can do in it, staggeringly ahead of their time.)
UO is very much a view into the world that could have been, if WOW hadn't come along and MMORPGs became driven by addiction mechanics instead of depth. (I do not necessarily mean that as a perjorative... I take my own hits on the bong of grind-based (J/W/T)RPGs sometimes. But it's a fair description.)
> Graphically more primitive than Doom in most ways
They didn't use a raycasting engine, though - the maps were full 3D (and so were some of the environment pieces - benches and the ankhs come to mind). Because of hardware limitations, your viewport was limited to about 1/4 of the screen...
In a lot of ways, they were technologically superior to the Doom engine - except they were slow. The same engine ended up being reused for System Shock (and 2, if I remember correctly).
Since playing this from 2000-2002 I have all but quit gaming. Ultima Online ruined other games for me in the best way possible. I have tried to play various MMOs since but none of them come close to having the same freedom that UO offered.
There were gangs, rivalries, people would cast invisibility spells on themselves outside of your door to try to break into your house when you open the door, you could be put in prison if you were an asshole or exploited a bug, you could hunt down miners and if you managed to take them out before they entered a city's boundaries (where guards would appear and protect them from "murderers") you would be able to steal all of their clothes, armour, weapons, ore, etc. GameMasters or Counselors (GMs with limited abilities) would host PvP tournaments - round robin duels, capture the flag, etc.
I used my limited knowledge of programming as an early-teen to host a custom "shard" with SphereServer and had an average of about 200 players on at a time, from all over the world. It was a lot of power for a kid to have. Of course the software was unstable and increasingly so with more users and eventually I had to shut it down because it crashed too often. The name was Alphanine UO - named for the web hosting company that decided to give a kid a free server to host a video game server. http://web.archive.org/web/20020923181726/http://uo.alphanin...
>Since playing this from 2000-2002 I have all but quit gaming. Ultima Online ruined other games for me in the best way possible. I have tried to play various MMOs since but none of them come close to having the same freedom that UO offered.
The genre of games that is the successor to games like UO would be the open-world survival stuff. DayZ and Rust being the most popular but 100s of them are out now.
For a large scale MMO Crowfall looks interesting. They get around the problem of a small group accumulating all the resources on the server by wiping the server and resetting the world frequently. And of course there's Eve Online.
>There were gangs, rivalries, people would cast invisibility spells on themselves outside of your door to try to break into your house when you open the door, you could be put in prison if you were an asshole or exploited a bug, you could hunt down miners and if you managed to take them out before they entered a city's boundaries (where guards would appear and protect them from "murderers") you would be able to steal all of their clothes, armour, weapons, ore, etc. GameMasters or Counselors (GMs with limited abilities) would host PvP tournaments - round robin duels, capture the flag, etc.
I've had all of these experiences on a Rust server, including the PvP tournament and going to prison for exploiting a bug. Plenty of action packed heists involving lots of coordination and subterfuge. Here's an example of people talking about the crazy adventures in the game:
In particular there's a great story about a powerful group fighting a decentralized weak group that can only use terrorist style tactics to strike back, and how the powerful group started to try and win hearts and minds on the server to root out their enemies.
UO had a great risk and reward environment. I remember feeling emotions of anxiety when hunting due to the chance that real people might show up, kill me, take everything I have on my body and move on. It meant using strategy to decide what to keep in your backpack out in the wild and what to leave in the bank or in your private house. Houses could be broken into if you lost your key which meant more danger.
The fact that real groups of people were out in the world hunting each other also meant for a lot of fun and dynamic battles to re-claim property, etc.
>UO had a great risk and reward environment.
This is it.
Playing this game with my best friend when we were 12/13 was a magical experience in my life. There was this awesome sense of freedom/adventure/opportunity/risk that no other game I've played has been able to capture. Though I imagine it is probably due to me outgrowing MMO's I still like to believe a game could come around and sweep me off my feet again. Maybe VR can provide that novel experience again.
The emulation community for UO was what introduced me to programming and now 15 years later I am grateful to say I'm working on my own game in UE4. I owe a lot to Ultima Online.
Funny, I actually just reactivated my account a couple months ago. I've put a few hours into it, but haven't done much. But within five minutes (seriously, I checked the clock) of logging in to the Chesapeake shard (which is not even a terribly high population one) I ran into two friends I had last played with in ~2003/2004!
My fondest gaming memories are all from Ultima Online.
EDIT: I forgot to share my very first experience with the game and I have to share because it's short and hilarious.
I made a new character and started in Moonglow. Barely a few minutes later I walked out of the gate with all of my starting items and gold on me. I think I made it 10 steps out of the guard zone before a group of guys jumped me and took everything I had. I was in shock. I had no frame of reference for what had just happened to me.
I made a new character, started in Britain this time, and got to work building him up so I could go back and get those guys. After that, I was hooked.
I converted from The Realm (Sierra Online, anyone?) to UO:T2A and never looked back. Played on Chesapeake with my brother, a neighbor, and a middle school buddy of mine. Was pretty heavy into PvP in the form of guild wars, Test Center, Britain graveyard fights (in the 30 mins between server saves and shutdown) and anti-PK. Then I learned about Shadowclan via the official UO game guide, rolled a new 'toon on Catskills and I became a hardcore UO RPer.
I roleplayed an orc, then an undead, and an evil mage in the Crimson Alliance. Then I joined up with various other guilds of the day such as The Free Corps, the Yew Militia, the Paladins of Trinsic, the Goblins (so much fun annoying the Shadowclan Orcs), Kingdom of Winterfell, VvV, the Romans, the Wahju (a tribe of traitor orcs), and probably a few other groups I'm forgetting, all over the span of roughly 8-10 years.
In college I migrated to private RP shards: Teiravon, Khaeros, and even got involved in founding one of my own with a group of guys I played with called Requiem.
Ultima Online is the game that taught me about story, roleplay, community, and true sandbox gaming. I've never found anything that's come close since and, given the way the market is going, it's likely I never will.
I feel like I wrote this. I came from The Realm, don't even know HOW I discovered that game. I remember being so excited to become a Helper and getting my green Helpers bardache. I used to run around killing (jumping) Gus Clan members because I was a firebrand little 10 year old who didn't like newbies getting attacked. I also had hacked stats, but I digress. I had a phase where I'd sneak into peoples houses using belts/boots of invisibility. I was such a little shit.
Then I got the UO Alpha and Beta. Man, the game was a serious Alpha. Eventually discovered Catskills and Siege Perilous when it was color wars. It was amazing. I'd hop on and RP on Catskills, mostly Paladins of Trinsic or the Undead, then I'd hop over to SP to get my action fix. Then they turned Siege Perilous into a regular test server. Absolutely broke my heart.
You would laugh your ass off if you knew how simple it was for me to hack my stats in The Realm. They eventually fixed it, but man, I was a little 10 year old whose computer experience at that point was running a couple Quake servers and making Doom wads.
All of these instanced MMOs break my heart. GW2 is fun.. but its so simple, or I've just never played it enough. The instancing kills it for me.
Similar to why many play Asheron's Call. The levels of customization available, the time invested, the friends made.
Both these MMOs were highly player customizable compared to later MMOs where everyone is cookie cutter. Even the world was in a way less cookie cutter.
Plus in some ways developer interaction had been much more personal then. So I would say that investments made early have their pay offs. Get the community built and it can sustain itself. Reinvent yourself a few times along the way will help and hinder at times, but if you give players a means to establish a good community they will stick with it.
Finally, not shutting down when other games would call it quits is big too. Both Origin and Turbine attempted spin offs but neither made it, I don't even think any Origin follow up even launched. Players had their comfort level and moving on isn't all its cracked up to be
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Ultimate Online's private servers (though I guess their legality is probably a gray area at best). Most of the people still playing UO are on those servers where they're running an older version of the game without many of the later expansions, some even add significant amounts of custom content. Last I checked there were servers that have hundreds, or even thousands of active players.
The private servers are technically in violation of the game's EULA/TOS but Origin/OSI and now EA have been happy to let them go unmolested as long as they don't charge players to play.
Of course many servers have gone around this barrier by incentivizing them to donate money to cover bandwidth and server costs and offering in-game benefits in return (skills, items, titles, etc.).
http://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima-online/ has a bunch of blog posts from Raph "Designer Dragon" Koster, one of the original designers of UO. It's amazing to read about how "world like" the original game was, especially compared to the direction that EQ/WoW took the genre.
What keeps me coming back to these old games? They strike a balance between simplicity and complexity that leads to more interesting emergent gameplay than I've been able to find in newer games. DooMII single player has just enough balance between puzzle elements and raw combat, and with the majority of enemies firing non-instantaneous projectiles, dodging and weaving between waves of incoming shots becomes something of an art form. Competitive Descent is all about using the space, outthinking your opponent, using small elements of position and orientation in order to force engagements on your term. A high-level match is like a combination between chess and poker, all inside of an FPS (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb63KIotMMM ).
There are some other factors that helped, which both games have in common and some of which UO also has. They had fantastic player communities and player-run organizations. Both were open sourced a few years after release, allowing the communities to maintain and update the games -- keeping the fundamentals the same while building modern capabilities (like game trackers) around them. Both had relatively easy-to-use content creation tools; making new levels for DooMII or Descent didn't require a high-end PC or a 3D modeling suite, but simply downloading the level editor. And the game makes no particular demands of you -- you can play it on a wide variety of difficulty levels, against computer-controlled enemies or with or against other human players, in new levels or old, for a few minutes or for hours. And for those who played with other people, it was possible to develop deep friendships -- I actually met my wife in Descent, and we named our son for another player.
I played UO 98-99 on Europa. Back then I enjoyed being able to play a game where I could do smithing almost exclusively. Just hanging out with other people who enjoyed a very small aspect of the game, and being able to service others. There was a nice feeling of earning the trust of a community (people had to give you their things for you to fix, and you could theoretically just keep them, but play enough and your character built a reputation as a reliable person in the community, rather than having it rules based or anything) that hasnt been in place in other MMOs that I've played.
I went back to play it last year I think, and it was still an enjoyable, but thoroughly broken game world. For me it was mostly nostalgia, and after a few months of playing it vaned, but the content still held up surprisingly well, especially as it was never really meant to be balanced.
UO was an amazing game and a huge part of my adolescence. I couldn't even begin to tell the stories and lessons I learned playing the game. Making macros was my gateway drug into programming. As the article says, it is one of very few MMO's where you can truly live an alternate life.
It completely ruined all MMO's for me. I haven't been able to play an MMO since because they all feel like single player games that you're just playing together, not an alternate universe full of risks and rewards. I tried WoW during it's beta and gave up within 2 weeks.
I played UO 1997-2003ish. It ruined pretty much every game after that for me too. Occasionally I try to get into other games but they just aren't fun. I wonder how much of it is that I'm older now and don't have time to invest in these sorts of things. But occasionally over the years when I have free time I try to pick up a new game but lose interest before it gets fun.
I never actually played it but I know what you mean about macros. Before UO there was a game called "Flash Attack" for Galacticom BBS and it was a really fast-paced multiplayer game, you had to have a good macro setup in place just to keep up, which led to a lot of creativity that was really fun. This was around 1988 and the latency was mind-blowing fast. And it had in-game multiplayer chat where everyone could chat at the same time and you could see them type every character, which made it a lot more personal. All in text mode.
My favorite gaming magazine had a monthly column about Ultima. It was an interesting read. Then I bought a disk with Ultima around... probably 9 years ago. I don't remember whether I played on the official servers. But my first experience was clicking on a dummy a hundred times to raise my attack skill. Then one of my friends gave me a set of better armor. And then I was randomly killed by some higher-level player. And then I stopped playing. Then I quit.
Frankly, I don't understand why all those "interactive world" features people keep talking about cannot be decoupled from grinding and crappy PvP system.
Though the thing that completely cured me from online gaming was a certain MUD I was playing at the time (for several month, for at least an hour most of the days).
The PvP system was decoupled from UO when they introduced "Facets" with Trammel being the non-PvP facet. Unfortunately, it completely dis-balanced the game in my opinion and was the beginning of the end for my 6 years of playing.
Trammel end-up being over-run with players killing everything NPC in sight. For example, Destard (dragon dungeon) had so many players in it that my client crashed from time to time. Dragons only spawn every few minutes, so with 100+ players, as soon as one would spawn it would be killed. That's hardly fun. Same thing happened throughout. With no risk of being killed and losing what you had, the game became too easy.
The last 3 years of playing, I played on shard called Siege Perilous. It was a shard with skill caps, no non-PvP areas and much higher prices for anything you bought from NPCs. It was a lot more challenging than normal shards and had a much smaller following, but the sense of accomplishment was much more for me and those that played the shard seemed to be on average more respectful than players I encountered in the early days of Trammel.
They probably could be decoupled to some degree, but it's the grindy/pvp games that are popular.
The result of this is that the interactive world aspect of online games have advanced remarkably little. Instead we get some minimal interactive world features added into successive generations of grindy/pvp games.
It was one of the first real MMOs. You could also turn your players into jerky for energy.
"If memory serves, when you cut up a corpse of another player the body parts gained would show which player it was, just like the head does, it should read "a torso of Soma", "a right leg of fwerp", etc, as it is right now, it just reads "a torso" or "a right leg".
Also, if you carved up the body parts further, you would get human jerky which also displayed the player's name, I can't exactly remember if this was in T2A but I do remember that human jerky was the majority of my character's sustenance."
UO was a griefers paradise unfortunately but it had many fun elements.
One of the biggest reasons a lot of people missed about the early days of WoW and the record high subscriber counts, too. 15 million people worldwide played World of Warcraft, because 15 million people worldwide were able to install and competently run World of Warcraft. It originally ran on a Pentium III or a Mac G3. That opened up the amount of people who could even come to the table and consider ponying up a subscription fee.
So when looking back on Ultima, it would literally run on anything. It is a relic approaching the opposite end of the spectrum, from a digital preservation standpoint it's becoming more difficult to run it on things. But you still can. So people do. That's really step one, in my opinion.
UO took over much of my life as a youth. I still have yet to discover a game that has the depth that was found in UO. Every once in awhile I find myself playing on the free shards. The complete customization of everything was what really intrigued me. You could buy a house. You were able to permanently impact the game landscape with this house - you controlled a piece of the game! This concept blew my mind. The economy was also incredibly complicated. I remembering being a part of a player-run auction guild. It was essentially a part time job. I had to build relationships with people in order to secure this job - just like real life.
I always feel it's my duty to chime in whenever the subject of original MMORPGS comes up-- anybody remember Meridian 59? Y'know the mmorpg that came out BEFORE Ultima online?
A great many people love UO because it's organic feeling community (and I'm one of em ), but nothing tops the experience of interacting with people in an online game for the first time. Checkout an article I wrote about it awhile back: http://mmocadet.com/being-a-rookie-for-the-100th-time/
I played that... what I loved about it was that we all looked alike. Cracked me up! I think maybe we could have different colored clothes, but the faces were identical. It might just have been that there were few face options.
I used to talk a lot to Petra Fyde when I still played. She had a shop together with her husband where I bought my everyday bags of reagents (8 different kinds of fuel for casting spells). Seeing her name in this article was surprising and just gave me a wide smile instantly.
While I haven't played on OSI (the official servers) in forever, my username here is an homage to The Nadirian Horde, a guild that existed back in the day on Europa (the main european 'shard' (server)). The leader of this guild, like Petra, was a teacher of the highest degree.
I love UO, but the times I'm talking about, around Y2K, were different than what UO became later. UO is one of those games that very quickly became watered down once EA bought it. It may have found a nice place now, but coming from what it was back then and being right in the middle of the transition was horrible.
Luckily, however, there are a multitude of freeshards to play on that will adopt the older rulesets so that you can still play the same game. They're usually very liberal in the development they do with the game itself too, so it's not uncommon to have them rework some stuff that isn't necessarily perfect in the old ruleset, but keep the general idea there.
(Epidemic from Pink Hat Thugs @ Europa, if anyone from EU's here. :))
Only 18 years, huh? Hmm, if that is ancient, what would 30-40 years be? Lots of people are still playing Avatar (release 1979), EMPIRE (1974), Oubliette (~1977) on PLATO. I still enjoy a good old game of Mahjongg (1983). You can see of these at cyber1.org.
[+] [-] dejv|10 years ago|reply
Few years later, I finally get my 56kbps modem and spent decade playing the game on so many different unofficial servers as well as being GM and developer of few more shards.
I would say that UO was Minecraft of our generation: especially on unofficial RP servers you had awesome game systems scripted by community as well as sandboxed world where you can do basically anything. During my stint in game I was beggar joking around other players, owned farm, baked my own bread and make beer, been drunken sailor as well as competitive PvM warrior.
It is "real" world, that tends to create nice community of players, some like to chat, some like to joke around, some hunt dragons and another are just pure evil killing noob players, stealing everything they own and then troll them till they cry and leave the game forever.
Try that in your "bring-me-ten-wolf-teeth" click grind MMO game.
[+] [-] Justsignedup|10 years ago|reply
- A blacksmith can be a feared person in a given area because anyone messing with him can become target for massive assault by entire communities. Because it turns out this blacksmith would craft and mine in his spare time for r&r and just give free stuff to these guilds just because.
- A guild siege can last a month trying to work 24/7 to destroy someone's property. It wasn't easy, but doable.
- A friend was unfortunately banned for scamming people in town by pretending to be under attack, followed by having the other guy slaughtered by his dragon. It was loads of fun. Yes yes we were assholes, but it was fun assholeness.
- It was the EVE online before EVE. Definitely "place to build" was a rare commodity, unlike EVE.
- Unlike EVE you can just have fun no matter what you did. You didn't have to travel for 2 hours to get somewhere interesting. And building a character from scratch took a few days at most.
[+] [-] shiftpgdn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1qaz2wsx3edc|10 years ago|reply
I agree that Minecraft is what UO was to our generation, although I'm a bit worried they're learning java, but I guess php is no better. Oh well, just more tools for the toolbelt. :D
[+] [-] timruffles|10 years ago|reply
I had a similar 'read about it and waited years to play' experience :) Started playing on Europa in the T2A time I think.
[+] [-] rroriz|10 years ago|reply
I feel old. Must be the same thing that people from the commodore/amiga era feels like...
[+] [-] listic|10 years ago|reply
Also, UO was released in 1997, according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online
[+] [-] LordKano|10 years ago|reply
I have always hated people like that. I realize that griefers are a part of the game and even a part of life but they really do ruin the fun for so many people that I'd prefer to be rid of them.
[+] [-] jerf|10 years ago|reply
The Ultima 7 games, for instance, are both fantastic role-playing stories with deep adult stories that could stand with anything made today, and are also enormous recursive fetch quests of the worst kind that I could never play again now.
There were many great studios at the time of Origin's heyday, but Origin has to be one of the most interesting. Almost every game they made was like somebody time traveled back from the future and was desperately trying to jam a future game on to the primitive machines of the time. (The Ultima Underworlds also come to mind for that. Graphically more primitive than Doom in most ways, but in terms of the world and what you can do in it, staggeringly ahead of their time.)
UO is very much a view into the world that could have been, if WOW hadn't come along and MMORPGs became driven by addiction mechanics instead of depth. (I do not necessarily mean that as a perjorative... I take my own hits on the bong of grind-based (J/W/T)RPGs sometimes. But it's a fair description.)
[+] [-] warfangle|10 years ago|reply
They didn't use a raycasting engine, though - the maps were full 3D (and so were some of the environment pieces - benches and the ankhs come to mind). Because of hardware limitations, your viewport was limited to about 1/4 of the screen...
In a lot of ways, they were technologically superior to the Doom engine - except they were slow. The same engine ended up being reused for System Shock (and 2, if I remember correctly).
[+] [-] ralfd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brentvatne|10 years ago|reply
There were gangs, rivalries, people would cast invisibility spells on themselves outside of your door to try to break into your house when you open the door, you could be put in prison if you were an asshole or exploited a bug, you could hunt down miners and if you managed to take them out before they entered a city's boundaries (where guards would appear and protect them from "murderers") you would be able to steal all of their clothes, armour, weapons, ore, etc. GameMasters or Counselors (GMs with limited abilities) would host PvP tournaments - round robin duels, capture the flag, etc.
I used my limited knowledge of programming as an early-teen to host a custom "shard" with SphereServer and had an average of about 200 players on at a time, from all over the world. It was a lot of power for a kid to have. Of course the software was unstable and increasingly so with more users and eventually I had to shut it down because it crashed too often. The name was Alphanine UO - named for the web hosting company that decided to give a kid a free server to host a video game server. http://web.archive.org/web/20020923181726/http://uo.alphanin...
[+] [-] KVFinn|10 years ago|reply
The genre of games that is the successor to games like UO would be the open-world survival stuff. DayZ and Rust being the most popular but 100s of them are out now.
For a large scale MMO Crowfall looks interesting. They get around the problem of a small group accumulating all the resources on the server by wiping the server and resetting the world frequently. And of course there's Eve Online.
>There were gangs, rivalries, people would cast invisibility spells on themselves outside of your door to try to break into your house when you open the door, you could be put in prison if you were an asshole or exploited a bug, you could hunt down miners and if you managed to take them out before they entered a city's boundaries (where guards would appear and protect them from "murderers") you would be able to steal all of their clothes, armour, weapons, ore, etc. GameMasters or Counselors (GMs with limited abilities) would host PvP tournaments - round robin duels, capture the flag, etc.
I've had all of these experiences on a Rust server, including the PvP tournament and going to prison for exploiting a bug. Plenty of action packed heists involving lots of coordination and subterfuge. Here's an example of people talking about the crazy adventures in the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmH7JI4FEoo
http://rebelfm.libsyn.com/rebel-fm-episode-202-01-18-14
http://rebelfm.libsyn.com/rebel-fm-episode-201-01-10-14
In particular there's a great story about a powerful group fighting a decentralized weak group that can only use terrorist style tactics to strike back, and how the powerful group started to try and win hearts and minds on the server to root out their enemies.
[+] [-] mrbgty|10 years ago|reply
The fact that real groups of people were out in the world hunting each other also meant for a lot of fun and dynamic battles to re-claim property, etc.
[+] [-] mentos|10 years ago|reply
Playing this game with my best friend when we were 12/13 was a magical experience in my life. There was this awesome sense of freedom/adventure/opportunity/risk that no other game I've played has been able to capture. Though I imagine it is probably due to me outgrowing MMO's I still like to believe a game could come around and sweep me off my feet again. Maybe VR can provide that novel experience again.
The emulation community for UO was what introduced me to programming and now 15 years later I am grateful to say I'm working on my own game in UE4. I owe a lot to Ultima Online.
[+] [-] rimunroe|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeremyis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] potato_mochi|10 years ago|reply
EDIT: I forgot to share my very first experience with the game and I have to share because it's short and hilarious.
I made a new character and started in Moonglow. Barely a few minutes later I walked out of the gate with all of my starting items and gold on me. I think I made it 10 steps out of the guard zone before a group of guys jumped me and took everything I had. I was in shock. I had no frame of reference for what had just happened to me.
I made a new character, started in Britain this time, and got to work building him up so I could go back and get those guys. After that, I was hooked.
I converted from The Realm (Sierra Online, anyone?) to UO:T2A and never looked back. Played on Chesapeake with my brother, a neighbor, and a middle school buddy of mine. Was pretty heavy into PvP in the form of guild wars, Test Center, Britain graveyard fights (in the 30 mins between server saves and shutdown) and anti-PK. Then I learned about Shadowclan via the official UO game guide, rolled a new 'toon on Catskills and I became a hardcore UO RPer.
I roleplayed an orc, then an undead, and an evil mage in the Crimson Alliance. Then I joined up with various other guilds of the day such as The Free Corps, the Yew Militia, the Paladins of Trinsic, the Goblins (so much fun annoying the Shadowclan Orcs), Kingdom of Winterfell, VvV, the Romans, the Wahju (a tribe of traitor orcs), and probably a few other groups I'm forgetting, all over the span of roughly 8-10 years.
In college I migrated to private RP shards: Teiravon, Khaeros, and even got involved in founding one of my own with a group of guys I played with called Requiem.
Ultima Online is the game that taught me about story, roleplay, community, and true sandbox gaming. I've never found anything that's come close since and, given the way the market is going, it's likely I never will.
[+] [-] swozey|10 years ago|reply
Then I got the UO Alpha and Beta. Man, the game was a serious Alpha. Eventually discovered Catskills and Siege Perilous when it was color wars. It was amazing. I'd hop on and RP on Catskills, mostly Paladins of Trinsic or the Undead, then I'd hop over to SP to get my action fix. Then they turned Siege Perilous into a regular test server. Absolutely broke my heart.
You would laugh your ass off if you knew how simple it was for me to hack my stats in The Realm. They eventually fixed it, but man, I was a little 10 year old whose computer experience at that point was running a couple Quake servers and making Doom wads.
All of these instanced MMOs break my heart. GW2 is fun.. but its so simple, or I've just never played it enough. The instancing kills it for me.
[+] [-] Shivetya|10 years ago|reply
Both these MMOs were highly player customizable compared to later MMOs where everyone is cookie cutter. Even the world was in a way less cookie cutter.
Plus in some ways developer interaction had been much more personal then. So I would say that investments made early have their pay offs. Get the community built and it can sustain itself. Reinvent yourself a few times along the way will help and hinder at times, but if you give players a means to establish a good community they will stick with it.
Finally, not shutting down when other games would call it quits is big too. Both Origin and Turbine attempted spin offs but neither made it, I don't even think any Origin follow up even launched. Players had their comfort level and moving on isn't all its cracked up to be
[+] [-] fiveoak|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] potato_mochi|10 years ago|reply
Of course many servers have gone around this barrier by incentivizing them to donate money to cover bandwidth and server costs and offering in-game benefits in return (skills, items, titles, etc.).
[+] [-] praxxis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rudolf0|10 years ago|reply
http://crowfall.com
[+] [-] lotharbot|10 years ago|reply
Descent, 20 years old (source port setup instructions at http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php ; 20th anniversary LAN party, July 16-19 in Denver, at http://descentchampions.org/20th/), and
DooMII, 21 years old (source port at https://zandronum.com/ ).
What keeps me coming back to these old games? They strike a balance between simplicity and complexity that leads to more interesting emergent gameplay than I've been able to find in newer games. DooMII single player has just enough balance between puzzle elements and raw combat, and with the majority of enemies firing non-instantaneous projectiles, dodging and weaving between waves of incoming shots becomes something of an art form. Competitive Descent is all about using the space, outthinking your opponent, using small elements of position and orientation in order to force engagements on your term. A high-level match is like a combination between chess and poker, all inside of an FPS (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb63KIotMMM ).
There are some other factors that helped, which both games have in common and some of which UO also has. They had fantastic player communities and player-run organizations. Both were open sourced a few years after release, allowing the communities to maintain and update the games -- keeping the fundamentals the same while building modern capabilities (like game trackers) around them. Both had relatively easy-to-use content creation tools; making new levels for DooMII or Descent didn't require a high-end PC or a 3D modeling suite, but simply downloading the level editor. And the game makes no particular demands of you -- you can play it on a wide variety of difficulty levels, against computer-controlled enemies or with or against other human players, in new levels or old, for a few minutes or for hours. And for those who played with other people, it was possible to develop deep friendships -- I actually met my wife in Descent, and we named our son for another player.
[+] [-] Shorel|10 years ago|reply
I just subscribed to descentchampions.org
[+] [-] jib|10 years ago|reply
I went back to play it last year I think, and it was still an enjoyable, but thoroughly broken game world. For me it was mostly nostalgia, and after a few months of playing it vaned, but the content still held up surprisingly well, especially as it was never really meant to be balanced.
[+] [-] jeeva|10 years ago|reply
...I do miss that sort of thing.
[+] [-] debaserab2|10 years ago|reply
It completely ruined all MMO's for me. I haven't been able to play an MMO since because they all feel like single player games that you're just playing together, not an alternate universe full of risks and rewards. I tried WoW during it's beta and gave up within 2 weeks.
[+] [-] cache7070|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjbrunet|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romaniv|10 years ago|reply
Frankly, I don't understand why all those "interactive world" features people keep talking about cannot be decoupled from grinding and crappy PvP system.
Though the thing that completely cured me from online gaming was a certain MUD I was playing at the time (for several month, for at least an hour most of the days).
[+] [-] sologoub|10 years ago|reply
Trammel end-up being over-run with players killing everything NPC in sight. For example, Destard (dragon dungeon) had so many players in it that my client crashed from time to time. Dragons only spawn every few minutes, so with 100+ players, as soon as one would spawn it would be killed. That's hardly fun. Same thing happened throughout. With no risk of being killed and losing what you had, the game became too easy.
The last 3 years of playing, I played on shard called Siege Perilous. It was a shard with skill caps, no non-PvP areas and much higher prices for anything you bought from NPCs. It was a lot more challenging than normal shards and had a much smaller following, but the sense of accomplishment was much more for me and those that played the shard seemed to be on average more respectful than players I encountered in the early days of Trammel.
[+] [-] drabiega|10 years ago|reply
The result of this is that the interactive world aspect of online games have advanced remarkably little. Instead we get some minimal interactive world features added into successive generations of grindy/pvp games.
[+] [-] TylerE|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rudolf0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawkbox|10 years ago|reply
"If memory serves, when you cut up a corpse of another player the body parts gained would show which player it was, just like the head does, it should read "a torso of Soma", "a right leg of fwerp", etc, as it is right now, it just reads "a torso" or "a right leg".
Also, if you carved up the body parts further, you would get human jerky which also displayed the player's name, I can't exactly remember if this was in T2A but I do remember that human jerky was the majority of my character's sustenance."
UO was a griefers paradise unfortunately but it had many fun elements.
http://forums.uosecondage.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7738&view=...
[+] [-] bittermang|10 years ago|reply
One of the biggest reasons a lot of people missed about the early days of WoW and the record high subscriber counts, too. 15 million people worldwide played World of Warcraft, because 15 million people worldwide were able to install and competently run World of Warcraft. It originally ran on a Pentium III or a Mac G3. That opened up the amount of people who could even come to the table and consider ponying up a subscription fee.
So when looking back on Ultima, it would literally run on anything. It is a relic approaching the opposite end of the spectrum, from a digital preservation standpoint it's becoming more difficult to run it on things. But you still can. So people do. That's really step one, in my opinion.
[+] [-] aklarfeld|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sehugg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnem|10 years ago|reply
A great many people love UO because it's organic feeling community (and I'm one of em ), but nothing tops the experience of interacting with people in an online game for the first time. Checkout an article I wrote about it awhile back: http://mmocadet.com/being-a-rookie-for-the-100th-time/
[+] [-] Macsenour|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Daenks|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnem|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 59nadir|10 years ago|reply
While I haven't played on OSI (the official servers) in forever, my username here is an homage to The Nadirian Horde, a guild that existed back in the day on Europa (the main european 'shard' (server)). The leader of this guild, like Petra, was a teacher of the highest degree.
I love UO, but the times I'm talking about, around Y2K, were different than what UO became later. UO is one of those games that very quickly became watered down once EA bought it. It may have found a nice place now, but coming from what it was back then and being right in the middle of the transition was horrible.
Luckily, however, there are a multitude of freeshards to play on that will adopt the older rulesets so that you can still play the same game. They're usually very liberal in the development they do with the game itself too, so it's not uncommon to have them rework some stuff that isn't necessarily perfect in the old ruleset, but keep the general idea there.
(Epidemic from Pink Hat Thugs @ Europa, if anyone from EU's here. :))
[+] [-] brianstorms|10 years ago|reply