Comment by elif
3 years ago
Be extremely careful with UO nostalgia.
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.
The irony about this is, that Richard Garriott was barely involved in the creation of UO.
He was busy creating a new single-player Ultima title, while a separate team, lead by Raph Koster created UO.
Raph Koster also was the lead on Star Wars Galaxies, imo the only other MMORPG besides Ultima that really deserves that name.
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.
> We were all MMO-naive
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.