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.
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)
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...
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:)
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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'...
> 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!
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
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].
87 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadI 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.
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)
it wasn't for you, and that's okay
Nah, this is just dissecting the frog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0
Seems like the word 'shard' when used to define splitting up DB's etc. on different servers, actually originates from this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0&t=1490s
- Sharding
- Paid early access
- Pre-paid game time in a box
Really pioneers of the gaming industry it seems.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting that art imitates life:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Vespers
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_Vespers
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.
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.
Quora has answers on on the tech stack in this thread: https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-technology-stack-driving-...
Reddit has answers on the rendering engine here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/d3cd2v/anyone_know...
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."
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'...
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.
edit: Is there anything after character creation? It asks me to try out a card game, and SEO tools.
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.
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].
[0] https://www.playableworlds.com/
[1] https://discord.gg/cp2yuQZG4M
Idea: Persistance is value because scarcity is valuable. The final definition of the final game is one that has only one world.
I'll never join the metaverse, or anything created by the Villainous Zuckerberg, Grandmaster Thief.