The author hit the nail on the head perfectly describing "UO golden age" players yearning to fill the void.
I will offer 2 major hazards:
1) what made UO special back then was not the ultra-harsh pvp death mechanics, as mortal online has shown. It was the players that were interacting with the harsh mechanics. We were all MMO-naive, and our mentality affected how we interacted with the core rules. You can never again get an un-jaded MMO population. Players have since been transformed into minmax ultragreedy automatons. No game can simulate the old players.
2) Richard Garriott is out to suck the blood out of your UO nostalgia. He got $8000 from mine with Shroud of the Avatar, insanely more from some of my compatriots. Now he's fully abandoned that project even though he had full ownership (ignoring the 'seed round' of literal SEC fraud). He's working on the next generation of nostalgia exploitation, building an MMO out of NFTs.
Trust me it's time to let UO die. It feels so much better when you've let go.
> You can never again get an un-jaded MMO population. Players have since been transformed into minmax ultragreedy automatons. No game can simulate the old players.
World of Warcraft Classic is an excellent illustration of this. Players trained by playing on retail or private servers for years and an unlimited supply of information, strategies and minmaxing guides have radically changed the experience.
For most guilds, the first contact with Molten Core was a difficult one, brutal even, despite having decent gear. Classic guilds can clear the raid with subpar stuff and even underleveled players at speeds we couldn't reach at the time.
So yeah, something died along the way of people discovering, playing and mastering MMOs and that's not coming back.
This is so poetic I feel like it can apply on a lot of things aside of games... everything is optimisation and min/maxing these days. And along the way we lost our soul doing it for the wrong reasons...
> For most guilds, the first contact with Molten Core was a difficult one, brutal even, despite having decent gear. Classic guilds can clear the raid with subpar stuff and even underleveled players at speeds we couldn't reach at the time.
This was only true at the very beginning of the original launch.
My guild played on the last set of servers released just before Naxxramas was released and on the very first raid timer with a shorthanded raid full cleared MC and cleared all of BWL except for the last boss. Even by that point (essentially the end of Vanilla World of Warcraft) the strategies for every encounter was known. Our guild's only stumbling blocks were the actually difficult mechanics that required coordination (Twin Emperors) and gear-check fights.
It's a hard thing to do though, designing a game encounter that doesn't have one optimal strategy.
Something I would like to see is an MMO built around the randomizer. There are for example Pokemon hacks that have randomizers so all items, pokemon, etc are in random locations with some guarantee that things are available for the story mode. It helps break up that "follow the guide" mentality. What if you made it so every dungeon was randomized within some degree, so paths are not set, some monsters are harder or weaker. Make it so that "follow the meta" just isn't a thing. Maybe it wouldn't be financially successful in the current market, but it would help replicate that old school experience. But this new mindset of players as seen in WoW classic is what really kills the experience for me. The minmax everything I find boring and doesn't create the felling that games should.
Society evolved, but the theme park ride didn't evolve along with it (which was kind of the point of Classic).
MMOs as we know them make no sense as a genre today, but trying to farm theme park ride MMOs for nostalgia must be the epitome of Doing It Wrong. You already know the ride; it can never be like your first time.
> You can never again get an un-jaded MMO population. Players have since been transformed into minmax ultragreedy automatons. No game can simulate the old players.
I had been nostalgic about Vanilla WoW for a long time when Classic came out. I went on an RP server, and had a fantastic time leveling to 60. You didn't even have to RP yourself but most people on there didn't minmax at all. So I think it is possible if like-minded people get together.
You can get an unjaded MMO population, but the average age will be 9. But otherwise, I think you're right, it's a phenomenon of its time. The social meta was still being made.
I would argue minmaxing was a thing from day one in uo, the thing that made it magical was that all types of players were forced to play together because it was pretty much the only game in town. Players who wanted pvp, pve, rp, craft grinding, exploring, hoarding, trading, mentoring, scamming, etc all lived in the same vibrant world. MMOs now are hyper specialized for individual tastes, and are all the more bland for it.
grinding out a 7x was like a 1-3 day task, and while yea, it was technically maximizing the skill advancement system, it bears little resemblance to where MMOs find themselves today, running daily tasks for months to eek out a 0.5% advantage.
Minmaxing is not synonymous with grinding. Minmaxing is theorycrafting a game to find the best combinations to make you win the game. People developed combat styles and skills to maximumize pvp effectiveness very quickly in the history of UO, to the point that there were whole forum groups about the best pvp builds.
Not just that, we were in the dark too. The information out there about the game wasn't very good. Want a map of a dungeon? You'll have to find some crowdsourced hacked-together jpeg. Now, you can watch a full dungeon walkthrough in 4k 120fps on youtube.
> minmax ultragreedy automatons
This has spilled out into the metagame too. People actively complain about anything that moves the game away from a "1-click win button", and will laud any change that moves closet to it. Automatons indeed.
When I first played UO back in ~1998 on a shard. I remember the first day, logging in, landing in Britian, there was a 'Newbie Dungeon' and I went in, and died...
I thought holy shit this game blows.
A week later, the zone.com servers were down so I couldn't play AoE. So I logged into UO, and I just don't remember logging out again, I played for hours and hours. The sense of discovery, gaining items, skills, worrying about losing them and trying to be careful, but also trying to steal other peoples. It was a real fantasy.
I remember when the 'blues' had a war with the 'reds' because they were sick of PKing, so they opened portals to the red towns with ~100 people flowing in, lag following closely behind, and reds getting murdered everywhere. For a couple of hours they were just going everywhere in a giant group murdering all the red players as payback.
I've never found a game since that draws me in like UO did. Ever since WoW, everyone has been following more or less the same cookie cutter template for MMORPGS.
There's so much 'content' but the games are a grind to the end to get to end game content, that's it...
The lack of end-game content in UO made it good, PVP was more difficult, and there was risk/reward.
The best thing about UO was that if you didn't play for 3 weeks, you didn't fall behind your friends.
In WoW if you didn't play for 3 weeks you come back and its hard to play with friends, you end up being carried or neglected. Ashes of Creation is trying to solve alot of these problems tho. Fingers crossed that game turns out good.
> I remember when the 'blues' had a war with the 'reds' because they were sick of PKing, so they opened portals to the red towns with ~100 people flowing in, lag following closely behind, and reds getting murdered everywhere. For a couple of hours they were just going everywhere in a giant group murdering all the red players as payback.
In both cases a group with a grudge decided to massacre the other over 1 day.
From the second link:
> The massacre was planned scrupulously to take place on the same day in several major towns and cities with large Roman populations scattered across Anatolia: Ephesus, Pergamon, Adramyttion, Caunus, Tralles, Nysa, and the island of Chios.
> I've never found a game since that draws me in like UO did. Ever since WoW, everyone has been following more or less the same cookie cutter template for MMORPGS.
Absolutely. WoW made such incredible truckloads of cash that I became the benchmark for what an "MMORPG" was supposed to be. Almost all such games in the post-WoW era, espacially in that period about 2005-2012, followed the same template. Which is a real shame because an MMO with a real sense of exploration is still one of the most amazing experiences I had in front of a computer screen.
The Classic WoW re-release was very fun and had a lot of the old feeling of exploration still in there. Possibly because a lot of players went into it with the goal of reliving the old launch. Not sure how it's gone with the classic expansion releases
When we were kids, I didn't have a computer, however my interest in them was huge. So one day, I read about the game in a newspaper about pc games. I tell one friend, then another,etc. Fast forward half a year and the whole town was playing it. No conversation could skip the part about shields, mining and what not. Everywhere I went there was only talks about Ultima. I never plaid the game:)
Yeah, it would have been nice to explain what it was in the same comment. You can't assume everyone is familiar with it.
Reminds me of : "Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the VP is such a VIP, shouldn't we keep the PC on the QT? 'Cause if it leaks to the VC he could end up MIA, and then we'd all be put on KP" (a quote from Good Morning Vietnam)
Raph Koster (Designer of UO and SWG) is working on a new - yet unannounced - game.
He founded a new company - Playable Worlds - and on their website[0] are a few Blog posts (look for "Riffs by Raph"), that outline some ideas/concepts behind the new game (without giving any concrete details though).
It's not gonna be exactly like UO but more modern - but it seems it will share many of the design-sensibilities that made UO special.
Raph and a few PW-employees also hang out - and occasionally post - on an unoffical Discord dedicated to their new, still unnamed game[1].
One thing I didn’t like about UO was the ability to travel instantly from one place to another through the use of runes.
I feel like if that feature had been removed, it would make locations and travel far more significant.
I remember sailing the seas with my boat and the sense of exploration I had by visiting islands few people had been to.
I also feel like there should have been consequences for logging out in the wilderness, perhaps a strong chance of waking up to some monster encounter and with less than half your HP when you log in. This would incentivize people to seek towns or homes or at least use the camping skill.
I think UO really shines when you lean into hardcore elements.
> One thing I didn’t like about UO was the ability to travel instantly from one place to another through the use of runes.
I think in concept that's a good idea and would create some interesting situations, but I imagine it would get super old real quick. There were already people taking advantage of those ideas, i.e. PKs hanging out at the cross roads, and vendor shops being placed in high traffic locations. When you started the game, assuming you didn't have some IRL benefactor gift you stuff beyond your level/ability, you usually did start as a pedestrian having to walk and use moongates to travel. I personally thought filling your first runebook was a rite of passage and gave me a sense of accomplishment.
Playing Ultimate Online for the first time was incredible. A MUD with full graphics! thousands of people online at once!
But mostly just the mystery of that unknown world. Using just the printed map that came in the box I decided to walk between the town I started and another town. Such an adventure, getting chased by wild animals, meeting real people some friendly some not. And finding that the map wasn’t exactly accurate.
And later on getting together groups of people to adventure into a dungeon. Including the all important wizard who would be able to open a gate so we didn’t have to walk all the way there (after they tried and failed a few times, grumbling about how many regents it was using). The the absolute chaos as we got word from other fleeing players that there was a murderer (a player who’s name had turned red because of the number of other players they had killed) further down in the dungeon. Should we cut our losses and gate back out or were we a strong enough group to take them on?
UO kind of shaped my life. The first piece of code I ever wrote was creating a bow with my name on it. It felt like magic and it was so exciting that I never stopped coding since then.
After two degrees, moving to a whole another continent, and getting my “dream” job, I only can hope to find that kind of excitement again.
I still get chills whenever I hear game’s music. Incredible game indeed.
And every single one talks about UO like it's dead when it's not. The original still exists and there are tons of excellent free servers now too. In addition to the ones mentioned by others elsewhere in the thread one of the best and most popular ones is UOForever.
Sure we can make a UO client and a UO server that emulates the original perfectly, but UO didn't exist in a vacuum. Unless it's 2001 and UO is the only (mostly) large scale MMO in the market it's simply impossible to recreate the experience. The variety of playstyles that were forced to coexist in MMO haven't been seen since and probably won't be seen again now that it's not the only game in town anymore.
One could say that the world players wouldn't have it is the same, perimeter-wise rule-wise. But the people how the interacted what the Norms were and all of that other social human stuff is what we can't go back to.
And all that is a huge part of the game value for people, the Memories they have the feelings surrounding all of it.
My friend to this day is irritated because he got some great lord title as a good guy and at 2 in the morning I accidentally walked through his flame wall. This was considered an all act of evil and it made his title reduce to just lord or something. He stayed up all night getting it back. Gotta love college free time and 90s gaming.
It is a work in progress. I try to make some progress on each day. I don't know now when I will open the beta. Sorry if it was not enough clear, it is written under the logo.
Nothing wrong with a WIP, I do OFPD also. I believe in you, keep your head up. You have my email now, lemme know when we can meet on the beach. I'm a strapping warrior seeking an intelligent psychic :D
I knew a guy who had leveled poisoning to max level and would walk around poisoning fishcakes and leaving them innocently around town for people to pick up and eat no suspecting anything wrong. They would then die and he would loot their bodies. Worked surprisingly well.
UO is responsible for my career. Not the game itself, but the community. A connection I made in that in that game gave a rural kid like me a couch to land on in the Bay Area. The rest is history, as one says.
I dont like these sentimental nostalgia posts. For me UO was a mindless and empty grind, because there was…nothing! It was a barren world devoid of a story, meaningful quests or anything, for that matter (please dont reply with „But…“, because there were some pieces of content here and there, but it is near zero by modern standards). Some remember this emptyness as a great canvas for their fantasies of freedom and roleplay, I rember empty pointless grind and dealing with grifters. Runescape did much better job in creating that kind of UO-like MMO.
I remember making a website for our guild, I think we were called 'The Immortals?'. There were some big guilds out there, I seem to recall one called FuckTards or something like that...
Fond memories of UO. Let’s not forget the live events by role-playing GMs. Like SWG, UO was/is a story telling engine where you could create your oen quests and narrative.
It has already been twenty-five years since we could go to Sosaria together. It was pretty new to play with other people in a graphical game. Ultima Online wasn’t the first online MMORPG (although now it’s assumed the term came with this game). But I do believe it was the best one. Why do I think so? I will get to it.
Ultimate Online was a weird thing for me. I never played it, or EverQuest. I never had a good rig. Back then I had this dilapidated compaq presario with windows 93 that I would play shareware cdrom games on- we lived in a swamp in rural Michigan. Internet was only a thing if you were lucky. I would get pc gamer from the local grocery store and I would fantasize about playing these games on the internet. Print was my only portal to the world of the internet. Eventually I made friends with people who had it though.
I don’t even like video games anymore but back then it seemed like a whole new world. Now it seems like the butt end of a joke. However, I am no longer a teenager.
I never played Ultima Online and sold my Everquest account to a friend a week after playing.
But I lost many, many, many hours to Star Wars: Galaxies. May it rest in peace. (yes, I know there are emulators and private servers, but it's not the same)
Building your first house was a big achievement in the early days, as money took real time and effort to accumulate; much later, the challenge was finding an empty plot rather than affording a house.
Walking through players used something like stamina iirc, so you couldn't just wade through a dense crowd without some forced pauses. And once player population swelled, the bank could be just stuffed full of people just outside, in the doorway, and just inside the bank.
So what you did was carry a couple of empty barrels and water. Drop the barrels side by side in the 2-wide doorway, and quickly fill them with water. They were immovable full barriers once full. But with so many players already piled up in that area, you really couldn't see the obstacles. I believe players already on a barrel tile could move off, but there was no passing through a full barrel.
Within seconds, crowds would be denser on both sides of the (invisibly) blocked doorway, with people shouting MOVE at each other. This shouting was somewhat normal due to that stamina penalty you'd naturally hit in that situation even without a barrel. The barrel just meant you were NOT going through, but you didn't know why. It was a bit griefy, but it was really funny. And when you're an early 20s punk, it's a lot of fun.
There was a time before you could press a key to show names of anyone around. I don't recall how you saw their name, but it wasn't as easy before. When bored, I would stand in dense forest a short distance from a moongate on an island where the land between the gate and the small town was just all jungle. Anyone arriving would immediately head into the forest toward the town. But with my forest green dyed robe, dark hair, and dark skin, they wouldn't see me. One or two spells, and they were dead. Very gangky, but 20s punk fun. Eventually tab or shift was made to highlight all names visible on your screen, so that mini-game was over.
In a similar vein, there was a quiet path between a couple of towns with a little S turn, and a couple of rocks and trees at that turn. Drop one or two gold coins on the path, stand "in" the tree, and use the hide skill. You were visible if someone got close, but very faintly. Same dark green or brown robe. Picking up an individual coin usually took a few clicks to find the hit zone, so it meant anyone wanting the coins would be stationary for a moment. Murder.
And that brings us to corpse mutilation and the eventual reputation system that was added. PvP was the norm, and apparently not everyone enjoyed it. Also, ganking was the norm (not just me!). So murdering had some reputation consequences, but mutilating a corpse and leaving bloody bits scattered around was an even bigger rep hit. IIRC, too low rep and you would be attacked on sight by guards; so that meant no town visits until you had repaired your rep. Good to have a house and friends, (and alts? don't recall); then you were kept supplied and your booty fenced.
Finally, one of the first Christmas holidays of UO (maybe the first?)... there were holiday servers, all snowy and festively decorated. You had to create a new character, and you could start with your choice of a few stats at 70%. And you had random red/green chainmail. And there were no town guards. So it was a fragfest, and it was hugely fun.
Eventually typical human misbehaviors became a bigger and bigger problem, with item duping ruining economies (there was a time when you could gather resources, craft items, and actually sell them to other players who had a genuine desire for your product!), other exploits, gang-style ganking, and the usual problem of reaching essentially max skill development of characters and becoming bored (probably the cause of many of the previous bad behaviors).
Still, in the history of MMORPGs, UO was really a special thing for its time.
- edit bonus - For some time, pickpocketing actually took items out of other players' bags. So a thief with good hide and pickpocket skills could do well stealing from players. And perhaps because of the bank crowding problems (where the bank tellers were originally inside at counters), banks were improved so you could do banking just by standing close outside the bank building. That meant lines of people just standing around waiting to be harvested. Inventories were not fixed slots, so backpack and corresponding items (including bags in bags) were a real chore to fish around in, especially under time pressure. That was part of the thrill. And of course if you got caught (failed the pp roll?), you would have an immediate big guard problem. So you made sure you traveled minimally, and death just meant losing whatever you had just stolen.
> Building your first house was a big achievement in the early days, as money took real time and effort to accumulate; much later, the challenge was finding an empty plot rather than affording a house.
I was a day 1 player and got to witness all of the fun stuff, like the ability to keep your vault open wherever you went, PVP in towns, kiting mobs to towns to be killed by guards, building my first home, spending hours upon hours making furniture, etc. My UO career came to a halt when I loaded one day and spawned inside of a house. Apparently, it was built on the same location where I'd logged off. I waited 60 minutes for a GM to assist, but never got help so I was stuck in there. Same situation happened for the next couple logins and then I eventually forgot about the game.
Oh, and you forgot to mention a trolling move that I saw a lot (and fell victim to once), which is to leave a trapped chest just off a busy road. When a player opens the chest, boom they're dead!
I got so frustrated with Ultima iV that I quit the Ultima Series after that.
There was a huge cave at the end of Ultima iV. I arrived there well prepared and made it all the way to the center of the cave. Killed all monsters along the way and after a long (few hours?) battle I had to realize that I did not have a specific item that I needed. This meant leaving the cave (with all monsters respawning), getting that item, and doing the whole battle again (AFAIR you had to do it all in one go, as you could not save inside a cave). On that day I decided to quit the Ultima Series and never looked back. But I still own the original Ultima IV game package.
I would love to know how it was developed - what languages, technology stack they used before Unity and other things came about to make coding a MMPORG easier.
I contributed replies to both, but there's further detail from others.
There are piles of Ultima Online postmortem materials on my website, https://www.raphkoster.com -- and those and more are collected in my book "Postmortems."
Do you know of any successful MMO made with Unity? I have a hard time believing that it's responsible for any ease of MMO development, but I haven't played MMOs much since WoW/FFXIV so maybe I'm behind.
The author hit the nail on the head perfectly describing "UO golden age" players yearning to fill the void.
I will offer 2 major hazards:
1) what made UO special back then was not the ultra-harsh pvp death mechanics, as mortal online has shown. It was the players that were interacting with the harsh mechanics. We were all MMO-naive, and our mentality affected how we interacted with the core rules. You can never again get an un-jaded MMO population. Players have since been transformed into minmax ultragreedy automatons. No game can simulate the old players.
2) Richard Garriott is out to suck the blood out of your UO nostalgia. He got $8000 from mine with Shroud of the Avatar, insanely more from some of my compatriots. Now he's fully abandoned that project even though he had full ownership (ignoring the 'seed round' of literal SEC fraud). He's working on the next generation of nostalgia exploitation, building an MMO out of NFTs.
Trust me it's time to let UO die. It feels so much better when you've let go.