Nowadays, MMORGPs are about grinding in dungeons and leveling up. In Ultima Online it was possible to become successful without having to level up more than enough to survive.
My main character could be described as a "real estate broker." I made millions in gold by finding vacant lots, placing houses and then selling them. It was a lot more satisfying and exciting than killing the same dragon over and over again hoping to get a rare item.
I haven't looked at Richard Garriot's new game, Shroud of the Avatar. Maybe it has a similar dynamic? I hope not for my sake.
One of the old Stratics crew here, I used to run the Ideas Den back in the day ;) And my housemate is still involved with Stratics, although not UO these days. Both of us are old Europa players, and used to have a house near the Fyde's and Barian! And the housemate was involved in the Trinsic RP scene. Feel free to drop me a line if you remember us ;)
In a strange way, the community that formed around Ultima Online saved my life in more ways than one.
As a hacker, there's a lot we can learn from UO's ups and downs, and especially how much emergent gameplay appeared, and how the developers reacted. Clean Up Britannia being a great case in point, along with Trammel.
And from a pure tech point of view... what the hell was with the low latency of the old 2D client? For some reason it always offered a better connection than any of the multiple attempts to re-write it. That in turn resulted in the community sticking to said 2D client, and the developers cancelling the first '3D' client (still fixed isometric, just 3D rendered). What's fascinating is some of the directions it didn't go in - back before the Kingdom Reborn client was developed, there apparently was a Warcraft 3 style engine under development.
When it comes to game design, Raph Koster is one of the people who literally wrote the (a) book on the subject, having started out in MUDs and then being hired for UO. His blog is extremely worth reading, and if you have any interest into the history of UO's game design, check it out: http://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima-online/
Also from a hacker point of view, let's not forget psychology. Nick Yee studied the minds of players of many of these 'first gen' MMOs, and I strongly recommend his Daedalus Project site - http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/
And as mentioned in the opening to my post above, there was a huge roleplaying community on some shards (servers), who would use the static NPC towns as bases for huge roleplaying communities. One of the most notable features of UO, and one that few other games have ever replicated (I'll come back to this...) was that you could drop anything onto the floor. So people would set up player markets in these towns, placing tables and laying out their wares. Players would roleplay guards, and then deal with any thefts, and sometimes players from another faction would raid and make off with a trader's daughter (another player on an alt character).
In the PvP areas you could effectively run a toll bridge by laying out a road block, and fight those who tried to just push past.
A major difference with later MMOs was that (originally) when you died, your possessions stayed on your corpse. You would have to wander off as a ghost to get resurrected, then somehow get back to your body to get your kit back - a tall order in the middle of a dungeon!
Without any form of global chat, the best you could manage was party / guild chat, but often this wasn't enough to get the help you needed. It became commonplace amongst the community to build a metagame community - you might not be in the same guild in game, but you were friends in the forum or in real life, or perhaps you met eachother in game and wanted a means to stay in touch. This posed a problem - no player-to-player system was really in place, and generally minor roleplaying was common - exchanging email addresses felt wrong and out of character. Thus the "pigeon number" was born - ICQ was the staple communication tool. When gAIM, the open source AOL/ICQ messenger (and others), renamed to pidgin, I can't help but think this was deliberate.... ;)
The huge downside to these interesting mechanics and heavy freedom was the opportunity to grief. Kill someone, loot their stuff, ransom it back. Let monsters kill someone, loot their stuff, ransom it back. Tell a ghost you'll only resurrect at their corpse and... you get the idea ;) I always was a big fan of some of the griefer stories, even if I didn't agree with their ethics - Belan being a prime example http://www.askcorran.com/belan/episodes.html
Ultima Online was classless - you developed skills through their use. This also lead to some of us who roleplayed beggars trying to build the ultimate in useless characters - every single skill point up to the cap spent on skills that offered in total no benefit in terms of gameplay mechanic. Begging in UO was a real artform, and there was so much fun to be had roleplaying a widow and seeing what people would offer you.
And finally, these mechanics that few other MMOs have ever implemented? Ultima Online inspired two UK students to build their own version, which became Runescape. Runescape inspired Wurm Online. And one of the Wurm developers, was Notch of Minecraft fame. For all UO's faults, it is truly an important piece of gaming history
One of my favorite articles on MMOPG economics and social behavior. It's usually behind a paywall so I thought I'd take this opportunity to post it here today while paywall is disabled.
It pairs interestingly with this HN thread from a few days ago:
Glad you were fortunate enough. I decided to drop out of highschool and hit the fast food workforce when I was 15 so I could play this game more often. I may have had a slight addiction :P I did end up selling my in-game property and account for around $1000 so that was cool.. but those years I will never get back.
I was not at the right stage of my life to get into UO, being very busy with school and starting a company. If the timing had been slightly different, I would have wrecked myself upon those shores.
At this stage in my life I try to active avoid things to which I may become addicted.
This article is from 2001. If it was a human, it would be starting to notice changes in its body and becoming interested in the opposite sex (or same sex, whatever).
Nowadays, MMORGPs are about grinding in dungeons and leveling up. In Ultima Online it was possible to become successful without having to level up more than enough to survive.
My main character could be described as a "real estate broker." I made millions in gold by finding vacant lots, placing houses and then selling them. It was a lot more satisfying and exciting than killing the same dragon over and over again hoping to get a rare item.
I haven't looked at Richard Garriot's new game, Shroud of the Avatar. Maybe it has a similar dynamic? I hope not for my sake.
edit = type-o.