Comment by haolez
13 hours ago
UO was the only game that I've ever played where you had "commoner" players. A lot of players failed to scale up, or to obtain top notch equipment. But the game was fun even for underpowered players, so they kept playing. The really powerful players were famous, like celebrities.
It's very different from modern games, where each player looks like the fantasy version of a Marvel super hero.
This is such a good observation. UO had a real economy and social hierarchy because power wasn't handed to you. You could spend months as a fisherman or tailor and still have a meaningful experience. The gap between a grandmaster swordsman in full plate and a guy selling fish at the Britain bank was enormous, and both of them were having fun.
Modern MMOs are theme parks where everyone gets the same ride (with pay per win). UO was a living world where your role emerged from what you chose to do, not from a quest marker telling you where to go next.
My friends mocked me for spending months as a llama herder, until I could tame dragons and grief people by pulling them through portals.
Core memories of carefully setting my fisherman on a boat with `ezmacro` before I got ready for school. I'd come home to either a boat full of fish (to later cook into fish steaks), or be dead from a player killer who found my boat and killed my macroing guy to try and steal the boat.
I always forgot where I parked my boats. Or that I even had one.
1 reply →
> UO had a real economy
Sort of. They disabled big parts of the "real economy" in beta. Turned out that players didn't like it that NPC shopkeepers kept standard working hours and didn't want to buy their 5000 skullcaps from their skill grinding.
Likewise they even more quickly got rid of the real ecology feature, both because it was computationally intensive but also because players would strip mine the ecology.
They disabled NPC participation in the real economy. This gave way to the real player economy which took place in player-run shops built inside player-owned and customized housing.
Players didn't buy those 5000 junk skullcaps either. They wanted stuff that was actually valuable, which meant those practice items were recycled or thrown in the trash.
I remember when the UO team added trash barrels and created the "Clean up Brittania" event. The game's servers were struggling to deal with large numbers of these junk objects that people littered on the ground so the devs decided to enlist the players' help cleaning it up, just like a real-life public park cleanup project! Players got rewarded special items based on the amount of junk they cleaned up.
1 reply →
If starting from scratch, what would an MMO need to replicate that?
I've experienced it first hand, but I can't grasp why it worked well like it did.
I say this unironically, but a lot of bugs. The bugs are what made UO fun, and the team often treated the bugs as features because the community demanded it. The most famous example (I think) is the "true black" dye. Another bug I ran into was when a certain shade of brown hair got turned "true white," I was able to petition a game master to let me keep my true white hair after the bug was fixed because I made it part of my "persona" at the time.
Also there was a whole niche industry of collecting non-droppable items which spawned in the game world but were not fixed on the map (we think they were added post map creation), so they could be "pick pocketed" off the surfaces they were on and taken back to your home every wipe. There was a huge rush after servers came back on after a wipe for folks to go find the most rare items to stock up their towers and keeps.
3 replies →
You’d need to start with the premise that combat shouldn’t necessarily be the focus of the game. Work on making other aspects (farming, hunting, taming animals, etc) to be equally compelling mechanics.
4 replies →
I still think 90% of what made UO unique is the fact there was no Google or central repository of expert knowledge. Yes, UOStratics existed, but it wasn't perfect. A lot of the fun was in the fact basically nobody knew the BEST way to play, and therefore everyone was just doing whatever they thought was fun.
2 replies →
UO didn't have a global concept of a level. You had a maximum number of points per character, which you allocated to skills by doing the corresponding activity. This is how you can skill cap your character without killing monsters or players.
The big problem that UO ran into was that it turned out the people who liked what UO was is a pretty niche audience. In a lot of ways Everquest was a direct rejection of the features that folks like me think of as the golden years.
But to answer your question, there are three different clusters but contradictory sets of answers. And this was the problem.
1) It was a sandbox game developed with a focus on recreate a living world. A real ecology, real economy, skill based character system instead of classes where your skills tracked what you actually did, a focus on all sorts of roles - part of the original pitch was players could be the town blacksmith or whatever. I knew someone who spent several months playing an interior decorator for instance. Some people, such as myself, were attracted to this.
2) The same freedoms from #1 attracted PvP style gamers, especially from the then nascent FPS style games. Griefing, rampant slaughter, that sort of thing.
3) It also attracted PvE players who weren't at all interested in a realistic world and demanded the sort of conveniences we see in modern MMOs: mobs pinned to locations, predictable drops, predictable quest lines, instancing, optional PVP, etc.
You'll note that most of the people you see reminiscing online are from groups #1 and #2. Group #3 by and large hated the game and left as soon as they could. And your typical group #1 player eventually got annoyed at group #2 and just left altogether.
It's a hard problem to recreate UO because of this tension. Without allowing group #2 to exist you don't have the same environment. But by allowing group #2 to exist, they'll eventually take over and chase away everyone else.
At the end of the day, UO was a game that was simply a moment in time that can never be recreated. Too much of what made it great was due to the fact that it was a new thing.
Is scarcity part of it? Making sure there are some jobs people have to do that don't involve combat but still drive the in-game economy?
1 reply →
Well, it was kind of the only game in town. Sure, you had Dark Sun Online and Meridian 59, but in 96/97 you were playing UO if you liked the idea of online worlds.
I think the barrier to entry is the equivalent of several complete, fun, balanced single player games operating together in balanced harmony. Not impossible, but highly improbable.
2 replies →
It’s largely impossible now, it’s not a technical problem, it’s cultural.
UO forced many different types of players to coexist in the same world that simply do not mix anymore. You had peaceful dungeon crawlers and craftsmen coexisting alongside killers, rapists, thieves (wild that stealing items from other players inventory was actually a thing, probably unheard of in today’s MMOs).
The friction between these different types of players is where the magic happened, it’s what created real conflict and higher stakes in the world. When you stepped out of your house, there was always a risk that killers could be lurking ready to murder you and loot your house dry. And if you forget to lock the door, someone passing by will clean your house out for anything valuable.
In a way, old school UO was a true Middle Ages type MMO, everything since then has only grown more civilized, more enshittified. People don’t want to pay for a world that doesn’t give a shit if they have a bad experience. The truth is though there was no “bad experience”, it was all just an experience.
9 replies →
This is why I enjoyed EVE Online. You had to earn it, and if you lost it, that was that.
Being a legendary blacksmith was the whole point. Where crafting was the end game state for crafters. The gear produced was max durability, max dmg, max armor rating. The furniture for your castle had to come from someone, somewhere.
The whole point of the game was to live in this fantasy world, not beat it. There were no quests. No antagonist. Just good and evil and everyone in between. For once I wish a studio would take this to heart and build something like that again. Minecraft exploded due to this sandbox nature. However, you still got to give players a shovel and a bucket.
UO Outlands has been pretty popular for a few years. They’ve implemented a lot of custom aspects (specialties), craft, new dungeons, land, as well as weekly quests and events. My brother and I play it a few hours a week. It’s incredibly popular for the nostalgia and its player base seems to be pretty consistent. It reminds me of early UO where your exploring, learning, and dying a lot. And there tends to be players everywhere you go.
A decade or more ago I ran a custom shard with a custom map and world. There was no “map”. No guide. No quests. Tons of dungeons and bad guy areas. Shops. Towns. Etc. I also contributed to RunUO. I’m a fan of UO:Renaissance. I still have the CD and the old statics files.
UO was the best online game for me. All others stand in its shadow. It was the most "free" in terms of what you could do and the appeal was the non-gamification.
I loved Everquest and World of Warcraft but those didn't feel "raw" enough for me.
The Realm is my dark horse submission for best MMO. (Yea, yea, yeah Meridian 59 and Underlight too)
Right!? Skill loss for dying while red ruined everything for me. Ganking and being ganked is what gave that adrenaline rush.
I still remember those dumb combat clouds.
Sounds like Vanilla WoW before Blizzard killed 40 man hardcore raiding. Only a few guilds on the whole server had the top gear.
I never played it, but from what I've heard, it sounds like the original Star Wars: Galaxies MMO (before they added all the NGE stuff?) had fairly mundane / commoner roles as well.
It sounds like a fan-driven reboot of this game has a fairly decent following, in a very similar way to what UO experiences? It feels like there is still player desire to have mundane sorts of immersive RPG experiences in this way.
I'll forever chase the dragon that is the joy of playing UO. I want to quit my job and play it 24/7.
Which ones? The wyrms or the big baddies? Dragons one-shot. I remember you needed protection, resistance to fire, and a healer/mage who could heal you consistently between volleys to stand a chance at taming, let alone killing one.
I think this changed during the Mondrian era but in my favorite era, SA/Renaissance, those were the baddies that made you run.
Lich King as well.
Oh, lol, not a literal dragon. "Chasing the dragon" refers to inhaling vaporized drugs (like heroin or fentanyl) from heated aluminum foil, creating a moving, "dragon-like" trail of smoke. It is also an idiom for the elusive, futile pursuit of a high that matches the initial, intense experience, which becomes impossible due to tolerance.
1 reply →
Was it actually that hard?
I played on the JP/KR asian servers in a PK/APK/PVP guild so maybe it was just my bubble but it was pretty common to see players with 7 skills maxed out. If I remember correctly
- sparring
- swordsman or fencing
- magic
- magic resistance
I don't remember the rest. It's not quick or easy like modern games, but we would regularly power level each other's alts and it took maybe 2 weeks to max out all 7 skills? We had a bear trapped in the guild house so we could power level wrestling and other combat skills.
Once you figured out a training system, it was easy to pump out 7x GMs. UOAssist was incredibly helpful to reduce the tedium and automate it.
My preferred methods at the time, sneaking/breaking into houses, stealing, and ganking/PKing unsuspecting souls (emphasis on graveyards, dungeons, and miners). Stealing items, often the offensive spell reagents, out of someone's bag before a fight made for no shortage of quality interactions.
It was a sad day when UO introduced Trammel.
Haven and Hearth has "sprucecaps" and "hermits". The elite in these games arise when they are willing to work in groups, willing to use violence against isolated players, and willing to use automation.
Haven't put any time in MMORPGs for 15 years, but aren't there still "exclusive" guilds that do things regular players can only aspire to?
Yup. Tibia you had this too. People begging in the depot for gold and "itens plx"
I've never heard of Tibia, I'll check it out!
I haven't played in 10 years or so, but it's still going.
That game was my life. It's how I learned how to code among many other skills.
yes, this really nails it. UO didn't chase "endgame content" which, imo, is the bane of today's multiplayer games. Designers expect everyone to max out and reach the end of the road so everyone is the same in the end.
This is a big cultural issue. UO was not designed to have a goal. Most players demand they be presented with a goal.
In an odd sort of way I suspect UO would have been better off had it come out a year or two earlier. It'd not have been remotely as popular, but wouldn't have attracted such a large crowd. And because they drew from a much larger crowd than the intended audience there were a lot of people who got disgruntled. But it makes sense because the game was literally not designed with their desires in mind.
> to reach the end of the road...
This is honestly the best way I have ever heard this described! It really is that 'end of the road' feeling that I get, once I have experienced a large chunk of the game loop, that has me disconnect from games and feel hollow.
This is probably why I keep going back to huge modpacks for Minecraft with a friend. It is so open and expansive, with so much to do, that you never really feel like it's the end... You just feel like you have had your fill, until next time.
I personally only got to watch my older brother play UO, and then he brought me into the launch of WoW which was a pivotal experience. But the end game always felt like it falls flat.
I can relate to this part in terms of visuals:
>It's very different from modern games, where each player looks like the fantasy version of a Marvel super hero
But isn't this true for most games?
>UO was the only game that I've ever played where you had "commoner" players. A lot of players failed to scale up, or to obtain top notch equipment.
I guess the main example I'm thinking of is Path of Exile. There is such a massive difference between your average player and the top tier. Or even not the top tier but enthusiasts.
I mean almost by definition most people wont have top notch equipment?
I think you'd like Arc Raiders.
It seems to scratch that same itch for me for some reason. The constant inherent danger, the different skill levels of raiders mixing together and yet people have fun and lose their stuff and it's a blast to play.
Too old for arc raiders :D :D :D !