Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gametyrant.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 195 posts

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

#131

Post by Raph_Koster »

gluelogic wrote: post #124
Raph_Koster wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It was bad UX because people couldn't easily tell the difference between a vorpal bunny and a weak one. The name wasn't enough. UO had a "consider" style skill but no one used it (I forget the name, "evaluate" or something). Eventually, "consider" was streamlined in MMOs into color coding mobiles, a la WoW. But in UO, people relied on the creature's sprite to assess difficulty.

The energy vortex sprite was a different Easter Egg iirc. And sometimes, you could get energy vortices that were llama-shaped...

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

#132

Post by Raph_Koster »

_qbjt wrote: post #126
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?

1. Lots of lore and whatnot. More than people give credit for, actually.

1a. The prototype was actually based on U6's rendering engine, not U8.

2. Far too long a story. UO2 was a bit of a mess technologically, IMHO. EA disliked Origin in general. UO continued to do well and the question of why have a sequel came up. And more. But I left OSI before it was killed so can't say for sure.

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

#133

Post by DonHopkins »

m0llusk wrote: post #107

In this case players had the ability to move around and attack things. If trapping live animals or training pets were options then players might have tried that instead. Pets in particular trigger protective impulses in people. The issue is not the players but a simulation focused on violence and extraction.

Oh, you could tame animals to make them your pets.

One Halloween I logged into UO, and my character had been transformed into a deer, as some kind of a sick joke! All my inventory was gone, and all I could do was deer stuff.

Then some bastard came along and TAMED ME. That totally sucked! I had to follow him around obediently all day. I guess I'm lucky he didn't skin me and make me into leather armor.

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

#134

Post by pull_my_finger »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #57
Animats wrote: post #42

MMOs as virtual worlds are really hard. Red Dead Redemption online has all the great graphics, but play is mostly people randomly killing other people. No plot. This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other. Look at the success of Fortnite - 8 million peak concurrent players. Second Life has a functional economy, but no NPC ecosystem. The economy is driven b…

Essentially MMOs aren't just one hard problem, they are a collection of hard problems. There are some excellent game theoretic problems in there, the ecology is just one of them. One of the more interesting experiments in the StarWars universe game was the market economics of things like furs. What I noticed during my years of WoW playing was that the market functioned very much like the 'in app purchase' market of m…

> In the Ultima online case the skins were just worth essentially vendor cash, but without that market force in the middle, the economy tanked. Now if vendors paid less and less for hides as the rate of hides redeemed for cash increased, it would provide a natural limiter on the value of that activity.

I don't think players were killing the animals for the skins, I think they just indiscriminately mowed over everything for skill gain or just to kill stuff.

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

#135

Post by nrb »

Raph_Koster wrote: post #106
nrb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resource quality and crafting system in SWG was an absolute masterpiece; I’ve yearned for a game with that amount of depth ever since the combat upgrade patch made it irrelevant.

I led the design on both games, and SWG was of course the application of a lot of lessons learned from UO.

I was going to mention you by name when I was posting that, thank you sincerely for your hand in UO and SWG!

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

#136

Post by debaserab2 »

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…

Hi Raph, I don't normally do the fanboy thing, but you are an idol to me. 12-year old me grew up reading your UO patch updates regularly. When I found your personal blog a few years ago I think I spent a week straight reading through it.

UO remains the only MMORPG that I have ever played that felt like a truly immersive virtual world. It ruined all MMO's that came after it for me. I played the WoW beta for about two weeks before the grind became apparent and I lost interest. Who the hell cares about only completing pre-made quests? In ultima, you defined your own adventure, and if you succeeded in it your fame could actually be known among players on your shard and not just a mechanic of the game's code. To me, this sets the benchmark to what an MMO is supposed to be.

There's also a slightly darker/mischievous part to my experience with UO: Macroing (the act of automating your character via third party programs) really introduced me to the world of programming. At first it was using point and click step-by-step UI recording software, but after a few years I had a fully fledged ore mining bot that could even do things like respond to a red name appearing on the screen by recalling to a safe house programmed in an actual turing complete language. Although I'm sure that had to be a pretty big pain point for you, I'm not sure I'd have a career as a software engineer if that hadn't happen.

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

#137

Post by bredren »

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 cool. I think Minecraft mods did this for a younger gen as well.

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

#138

Post by nrb »

uo_throwaway wrote: post #89
nrb wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree (object serialization was rough, and stop-the-word saves have been a constant issue for the entire life of the project) but the things it did well were done outstandingly better than POL, Sphere, UOX, Wolfpack, etc. I think the killer feature of RunUO was that it compiled the C# “script” files and linked them at runtime, eliminating the need to attach a scripting language that provides some limited…

It actually falls over around 1000 clients if they're actually playing and encountering one another at any regularity. I have been contributing to a new RunUO based shard ( http://www.uooutlands.com ) that has become extremely popular and hit 2k clients online. The lag was pretty extreme at first, but after a few weeks of studying CPU profiles I rewrote a lot of the map search algorithms, plus a few other things, and…

My experience is from ~3000 online peak in the mid 2000s, with a more pure T2A ruleset.

Outlands has a breathtaking number of additional systems and enhancements that I’m sure are exposing weak points in the architecture (timers, pathfinding, and distance checking stuff especially).

Amazing shard btw, I logged some hours the week of launch before I got busy over the holidays.

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

#139

Post by Raph_Koster »

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…

> once EQ showed up and redefined the genre.

I don't think I would frame it that way; more like it reverted the genre back to the Diku mold. See

1. https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/09/what-is-a-diku/

2. https://www.engadget.com/2015/01/03/the-game-archaeologist-h...

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

#140

Post by Raph_Koster »

user5994461 wrote: post #125
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.

This still causes runaway inflation of item power, which results in mudflation.
Post reply on HN