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Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

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Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#121

Post by Raph_Koster »

jghn wrote: post #119
Raph_Koster wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term I used at the time was "virtual sociopath" -- you'd think sociopathy is more common if you glance at forums today, too... but there's a huge element of disinhibition brought about by non-personal contact. It doesn't mean the person is like that in person at all.

via hanging around magical bubba, xavori and that gang I also came across many, well, less refined types who fit this mold. Meet them in RL and they were perfectly normal. They just saw UO as a different kind of game as other folks did, something more akin to Quake where it was no holds barred PvP. There were multiple folks I knew who couldn't understand that someone wouldn't view the game that way.

Of course, even those two were quite different; Xavori roleplayed a lot whereas IIRC Bubba didn't bother.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#122

Post by codezero »

geniium wrote: post #110
codezero wrote: post #68

I need to read this but as a beta and long term player of UO, the bugs made the game even better.

Yeah! Like when the servers were going down we knew the last 15 Minutes weren’t saved and the whole world was going crazy and everyone was using his best weapons and turning red.

My favorite was stacking flour on the shore and teleporting through locked doors from the plank of a ship.

Also there was a massive subculture of collectors who grabbed the rare items not locked down after a server reboot. The game shipped with a lot of bugs that they fixed by adding tiles after the fact and some weren’t locked down so people grabbed them up. My speciality was fruit bowls :P

Once we broke into a GMs house and stole an all red sword.

Also using circle of transparency to mark a rune inside a house.

Teleporting demons and dragons into peoples towers. Gosh the fun never ended.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#123

Post by codezero »

gluelogic wrote: post #120

I love any UO-related post! Speaking of killing everything in UO, in what would be considered the "T2A" era of this game (I'm estimating something like 1998-1999), I remember manipulating the line-of-sight bug that let you attack NPCs inside town in such a way that the town guards wouldn't come (There were many "criminal acts" you could commit, like attacking or stealing from a player, and if you did them in town the…

I played anarchy a bit. It was ok but mostly just pvp and bugs. Shadowbane was where the hardcore pvpers went as well as call of asheron I think?

Edit: Asheron’s Call and Dark age of Camelot.

Oh gosh. Kids these days have no clue! Or maybe they do.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#124

Post by gluelogic »

Raph_Koster wrote: post #113
jeffrallen wrote: post #4

They should have given Bambi a BFG3000 to defend herself.

Early on, creatures learned skills just like players did. In the alpha, this led to wolves who hunted bunnies, and some bunnies the bunnies escaped and learned a little, and eventually there were both dire wolves (their name actually changed to "wise elder wolf" or something) and vorpal bunnies. These latter ones killed many unsuspecting players in the alpha, and we had to remove the creature learning because it was…

I remember the vorpal bunnies. I seem to remember a bug where they would sometimes appear as an energy vortex sprite...

Can you elaborate on why the creature learning was bad UX? Did people get irritated when the wolves were killing their rabbits?

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#125

Post by user5994461 »

jghn wrote: post #8

The promise of alpha/beta era UO really died quickly. Even more rapidly not long after that once EQ showed up and redefined the genre. There were other cool ideas beyond the ecology that got the axe pretty quickly. For instance originally NPC shopkeepers kept hours so you had to show up when they were around. Player didn't like this as it was inconvenient so they made them permanently stationed. Similarly there was a…

I've seen a game that fixed the 3000 skulls problem.

All items could be destroyed to create runes, that can be applied to another item to improve it. Let's say that a skull giving +10 force would give a few runes to add +1 and +3, the later being more valuable.

Everything was recyclable and there was a complete economy about recycling to provide for the one hundred different characteristics.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#126

Post by _qbjt »

Raph_Koster wrote: post #105

I was the original lead designer on Ultima Online and the key designer of this system. A few notes, because this article has MANY inaccuracies. 1. Ultima Online wasn't even in development for three years total. An early prototype was February to September 1995, done by Rick Delashmit. Starting late August and early September 1995, the core team showed up. We showed the game at E3 in spring of 1996 in alpha form. We s…

Thank you for everything Raph! You are a truly a pioneer. A few questions which I’d love to get your response on, although no pressure:

1. How much of an influence were past Ultima games on UO? The game engine itself resembles Ultima VIII, was any of the code from that game reused?

2. Whatever happened to Ultima Online 2?

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#127

Post by chii »

andrepd wrote: post #97
nrb wrote: post #39

I owe my career to this game. I was totally obsessed with UO from the moment I logged in for the first time and created my character, a crafter who was primarily a miner/blacksmith. That’s the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a player-…

>That’s the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a player-killer out to strip the dungeon crawlers of all their loot and gear; or, spending your days baking bread or running your own player shopping mall, your only limitation was your effo…

> we're stuck with WoW (and its clones), which was an excellent game in its own right, but it wasn't a true MMO

because most companies didn't realize what they were copying when they copied WoW.

True MMO - aka, a sandbox game. See this very indepth critique, if you want more about this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#128

Post by Raph_Koster »

hhh wrote: post #102
cosarara wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be possible to rip the mesh of the existing object directly out of the game client's memory? And then import it again as a new (copyable) object.

In the SL world, this is called copybotting.

That would be because of a tool called CopyBot which came out in 2006.

https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/11/15/copybot/

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#129

Post by jccalhoun »

I never played UO and I've never spent a great deal of time playing any MMO. I know it would take a lot of effort but I think a neat solution would be that if all the animals were killed then people would start starving to death.

I wonder if social pressures could somehow be codified into a game. If someone goes around killing all the players then maybe none of the vendors will want to do business with that person or something? Though I'm sure there are ways players could still explain that and I'm sure people who have spent a lot more time thinking about MMOs than me could explain why that wouldn't work

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#130

Post by perl4ever »

manfredo wrote: post #94
chiefalchemist wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the point I was trying to make. I'd like to add, there's a current advert for an Xbox game, the backing track is the Beach Boys "Wouldn't it Be Nice." In any case shooting galore...as a Xmas gift? We're on the cusp of legit virtual reality and our goto is still kill kill kill? This is why we can't have nice things.

I'm not sure why relegating destructive tendencies to virtual worlds is a bad thing. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that humans have innate proclivity to violence. The percentage of men who die violently (as in, at the hands of other humans) is around 25%. This is compared to ~2% in the 20th century, and even less today. Many mammals' forms of play function as preparation for violence (either capturing play,…

"The percentage of men who die violently (as in, at the hands of other humans) is around 25%."

Did you mean to qualify this? You meant at some particular point in time?

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