UO was the bet game ever made, invented the MMO - but the original 1997-ish release was so much fun and also (I think) invented the idea of PVP (aside from quake, that that was FPS rather than ISO, etc.. so a philosophical argument I guess)
The entire reason I am in computers and tech is because of Ultima 2 which I found on a floppy in the Apple lab at my school.... I then ran a BBS, setup a network and converted the drafting lab from actual pencil drawing to CAD.
Bards tale was a good franchise as well - where we competed to complete them and me and my best friend got into fisticuffs over the fucking cheat book he bought.
UO was great back in the day as was Shadowbane. The whole safe places that MMO's became - and with good reason as more people liked that - disappointed me about the genre.
The player motivated politics and maneuvering and real threat to lose what you've worked hard for and the general scarcity of things in these types of games was unbelievable. Stealing, fighting for meaningful resources and guilds that existed to actually protect resources and players is just not possible in a game like WoW (was very good for different reasons though such as dungeon raiding) and derivatives where getting attacked and killed is meaningless.
WRT game philsophy, one might say WOW is combat focused (dungeon raids) where UO was much more personal-politcs focused (with the combat) and thus I think UO to be an 11 and wow an 8... regardless of how much $$ WOW has made... it is detracted by the fact that its massive, dedicated, userbase has never experienced original UO...
Indeed. WoW was great for that and I enjoyed it but there was always a piece missing.
The politics of games like UO and Shadowbane where a thief stealing a single valuable item from some folks farming for the guild could set off a huge war with backstabbing and deceit and alliances and everything else really made those games dramatic and fun.
Yeah you'd lose your stuff sometimes too and the most scary thing in the game was seeing a group of players from an aggressive guild descending on your farming and XP group. Everyone would scatter like buffalo being hunted by a group of lions.
It was hard to setup towns near valuable farming resources and there would be battles for dominance. All the different player personalities would take on different roles that appealed to them in a guild - some where the leaders who worked out deals and alliances; others were social butterflies who like to chat and farm; others liked to help harass enemies and some were mercenaries ready to work for whoever paid them. And other people enjoyed going solo as a thief and hated by all but other thieves.
It was a world only as good as the players could make it with what felt like real consequence to decisions and actions. Trust mattered.
I'll add that I don't think a game like that can ever really exist again. At least not with the dynamic those games had.
At the time there were no other options for people who wanted to play an MMO. You had to enter that world. So it was made up of all types of people but mainly you could break the community into 2 groups: Wolves and Sheep.
There were always plenty of sheep for the wolves to hunt for and terrorize and for the "hero wolves" to come in and protect. The relationships were real.
As soon as WoW came out anyone who preferred the sheep role (farming, socializing, building community, etc) had no reason to play a game they could be killed and have their spoils taken. It became a hassle when WoW gave them a peaceful world to coexist in. Where your enemy couldn't really hurt you or take anything you've worked for. A nice, safe space. The wolf types just became the hard core raiders competing to get eventual identical gear first and the sheep were the casual raiders and farmers and social butterflies.
did you guys ever read that story, which I believe I found on HN, about the guy who live in SF and wa basically the EVE accountant and manager for an EVE sydicated where he didnt play the game, but just managed monies and logistics?
It was insanely laggy, when the servers were up at all. It probably was the best game ever made for a six month period, between when the servers finally got semi-stable and when they started releasing the expansions, which basically took all the fun out of the game. (What was the point of accumulating wealth and power once you could disable PVP to prevent yourself from getting randomly killed, and when there was now unlimited space for houses? Basically none.)
I agree with the latter half of your sentiment, but to the former, like I said, I was playing on the newest machines intel could build and I had an OC-48... so no lag. but after the housing insanity... it did go down hill.
I DLd the open version(which is incredible how that was reverse engineered in-and-of-itself) and it was literrally entirely populated with house and was no fun AT ALL.
but yeah, there was some where near a year where that game was amazing.
It is funny to think though, even though the game was revolutionary, how quickly it was grokked by people and play strategies were realized.
Fuck, look at twitch and how basically computer game culture has evolved!
there will be PHD level courses on this within 20 years.
one of my deepest historical tech regrets is that I never got into MUDs
I did, however, play Trade Wars and the PIT on BBSs in the 80s...
I recall smoking pot while playing trade wars in about 1991 or so... and I was trying to corner the market on grain, but instead of buying all the supply with my massive bank roll, I accidentally sold all my grain and screwed up my position on the galactic totem pole.
I had tons of notes related to Trade Wars and planning my moves.
I played some MUDs during university in the early 90s, but once I realized how much time I was spending on them, I decided I needed to stop for the sake of my grades. Of course, getting the original Civ game right before exams one year wasn't a good thing either from that perspective.
I got grounded for a month because I was calling the BBS in San Jose from Lake Tahoe, where I lived, to play those games... the phone bill was $926 dollars and my dad was so pissed that I ran up the long-distance bill that high.
I played a lot of Ultima VII and really loved it but got increasingly frustrated with one weird bug: every time I went to sleep (as in "I", not I), the screen went blank and there was no way of going forward.
In the end, after hitting a bunch of roadblocks, I found a way of robbing the bank, bought a ship and started exploring the world. Didn't even know what I was supposed to to at that point, but boy, was it fun.
I figured out that although the big ships had cannons, you had to leave them at the shore. The small rowboats would fit in an inventory slot - inventory was based on slots and weight, so a strong character could carry it. So my group of adventurers walked around in caves and forests with a rowboat in my backpack, and water obstacles were never a problem again.
Tangently related: I bought a copy of Ultima Online Charter Edition off of eBay recently to fill out my Ultima collection/shrine. I looked at the creator credits and was surprised to see only around 15 names.
Amazing to think that such a game that totally changed the world had so few people working on it. Any modern AAA title has a credit list to rival a summer blockbuster.
So when UO came out I was working at intel, we had a game lab (building out and testing the celeron SIMD based machines as intel was goaling for sub $1,000 machine)
We had 6 UO accounts...
We used to be followed around by admins who were invisibe because they were studying how we were so successful at the game.
We did use macros - but it was really about the fact that we had an OC-48 and everyone else was on a 56K modem.... and our Hide skill was 100 - but we played on 6 machines all right next to eachother and we had mule accounts - and nefarious accounts...
So we had Snoop and Sneek our mules with hide of 100, then we had both Great Lord Phlux and Dread Lord Phlux (me) and same for Mym...
We would taunt great lords with our dread lord accounts and then chase them down with our great lord accounts and they would attack us and lose their status and become dastardly and they would lose their shit.
We found this great axe that was bugged. It could kill literally any character with one hit. The mods that were following us around wound up taking the weapon, we were pissed - but they deleted the weapon as it was so bugged that we massacred many a foe.
we were skilled at kiting dragons to the top of our castle, then trapping them in corners of the castl with chests such that we would train our characters on attacking them.
We built houses around the front of the castle to enclose it, then we only used runes to teleport in, but we blocked all the other spots with bags of flour such that you could not rune into the spots...
Draygor (our third member) got too stoned and got whacked by the japanese contingent that we were at war with and he failed to put his rune in the bank....
the japanese team runed into our courtyard, and hid until we opened the door with our castle butler and then attacked and they stole every loot we had in a massive store of chests in the castle....
I have similar stories with UO... it was the best sandbox game every created. In many ways UO felt like an open world crossed between Minecraft and an Elder Scrolls game. Often even the bugs and quirks aided the whole experience too- often quickly exploited to pull off some crazy plan (like trapping a mod). In comparison, WoW and most MMORPGs feel like linear adventure games.
Game philosophy question: I wonder if the difference is between FPS and Isometric WRT how it plays on one mind.
in WOW being FPS, you are the being. in ISO youre mre omnisciently playing.
Think of Populous (not the shitty later versions, but the 80s version) -- even when you are playing as your personality, its easier to express and enjoy that personality at a macro level than a micro level.
The exception to this is that in any FPS, with PVP it is satisfying to conquer a foe directly... think Hitman sniping style... but that is quest based.
When you have an open world like UO that had no quests it much more free.
e.g. ever logged into a game you havent played in a while and been like "fuck I dont recall all these quests I was in process"? -- UO had none of that. UO was "forget damsels, gather loot and power" only and it was glorious.
the FPS genre needs to keep itself to "* Kill that guy without being killed/seen OR adventure*" like you say... but games like UO took game-thought to a new level and you were managing an empire if you could build it...
Now, with that said, I dont game much any more - so the modern version of UO would maybe be EVE, as I mentioned a guy had a full time income from managing an EVE army... thats next level cerebral.
Man, we are going to have Ghost-in-the-Shell future sooner than we planned.
(ALL gaming bleeds into reality... William Gibson and Neil Stephenson should get the Nobel prize in futurism)
Since we had all 6 accounts logged in, and right next to eachother, we would whack a guy in PVP but use our Snoop and Sneek hiding characters to grab the loot.
So if we got killed, your ghost would typically have to run back to your body - but typically the loot was gone obviously. - so we would move the Snoop and Sneek characters along the same path as our Dread Lords - and when we would whack a person with the dread lord, we would have Snoop and Sneek pickup the loot and hide.
Multiple times ppl killed our main character, attempted to loot us, knowing that we had just looted the ppl we killed but then found nothing of their friends loot on our body and were saying WTF... this is why admins followed us around. They didnt get how we were exploiting multiple accounts with such coordination.
Or if our dreadlord got whacked, we could quickly loot our own body, then hide, protecting our loot.
Snoop and Sneek, while skilled little rogues were master mages.
Recall when IN VAS FLAM was bugged and would insta-kill anyone? Yeah Snoop and Sneek have a vast kill roster with that bug.
So my story is I had a thief in occlo and I trained with a guild and we would steal from rich innocent mages. It happened that the Occlo mage shop was so crowded on that little island, it was hard for anybody to avoid us. We had the mages litterely sorrounded by thieves. I grew the character and learned some nice macros. And graduated to dungeons and stealing from lich kings and stealing from players fighting lich kings. My best take was a silver broadsword of vanquishing. The owner, not to happy, found me somehow and tried to fight my blue character in town. I called guards! And stole the rest of his stuff. Good times. I was also an Elder in UO and wow, that's a whole other story.
Similar situation. We had 5-6ms pings to the Lake Superior shard in an era when most people were on modems (IIRC at launch most people weren't even on 56k!). We sat next to each other and could see each other's screen while for other folks even IM was a novelty for team coordination.
When to others it looked like you were warping around and doing 5 things in an instant and you had great communication/coordination with your partners, you could do some serious damage.
I started with VIII and really enjoyed it. UII was great too, UO was just awesome. Ascension was ...different... but still I prefer it over the RPGs these days.
