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

We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

blog.cotten.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 265 posts

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#211

Post by tstrimple »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #201
Ekaros wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or towards hyperinflation when the currency generation out paces any sinks thus driving the price levels to outright stupid levels, with only limiting factor being what players can hold and trade.

Then players simply don’t trade gold. Eventually a new currency appears will facilitate the trades anyway.

This is exactly what happened in Diablo 2. You had a gold limit, and the value for gold was so low that players began using Stone of Jordan rings as currency for other item trades.

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/22688/why-did-sto...

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#212

Post by andrepd »

bovermyer wrote: post #208
andrepd wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultima Online was an absolutely amazing game and it's pretty telling that despite all the technological advances since, no game whatsoever came as close as Ultima Online to fulfilling the promise of the Computer MMO: a virtual, shared, persistent world. Maybe Star Wars Galaxies was the one who came closer.

Playable Worlds is working on an MMORPG that should come pretty close to the original idea. Raph Koster - one of the designers of SWG - is heavily involved.

Wow, I didn't know that! Gonna check it out.

Making an MMO true to the name is probably my dream lifetime project. If I had f-u money it's absolutely what I would be doing.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#213

Post by victorclf »

hoten wrote: post #63
alexose wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was excited to play but I couldn't make it past the character creation screen. There's a bug preventing me from spending all of my attribute points.

Huh, that's odd. I can't figure out how to get that problem to happen. Not even selected a preset works? By the way, if you manage to get it to work, make an account starting with '@' to get admin privileges. You could also explore the local play–it's the same server code, but running in a web worker instead of on my server.

I got the same bug when I clicked create button without filling the "character name" field.

Great demo btw!

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#214

Post by jghn »

bodge5000 wrote: post #167
b0afc375b5 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we just grew old. I recently paid real money just to support a private server of my favorite childhood mmorpg. After playing a couple of days I got bored and never played again.

To be fair it does feel like something changed, online games used to feel a lot more social. As a kid you could just jump into an MMO and make new friends, that seems to have gone away now. I guess they served as a proxy for what we now have with Discord, and now that we have "the real thing", its kind of naturally gone away. Which is a shame, because meeting people over Discord is much more difficult imo, or at very…

> As a kid you could just jump into an MMO and make new friends

Some of us were past "kid" when UO came out :)

But I do think the key phrase here is "as a kid". I was in university when UO came out, and it became my life. I had some strong social interactions with a bunch of people, although they tended to skew my age or older. However there was an obvious pattern. These were mostly people who did not have to take care children, either they hadn't had them yet for one reason or another, or their kids were already older.

There was a bunch of us who stayed in touch and played other games, but as the main pack of late 20-something & early 30-somethings started to have kids, they faded off. This wasn't the only reason, other types of responsibilities pulled people away, but it was the big one.

It's easy to sink time into things when you don't have huge time sink responsibilities in your life. And when you sink lots of time into social things, you tend to make strong connections.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#215

Post by the_only_law »

mod wrote: post #114
the_only_law wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Battlefield 2 Really is a shame what happened to that franchise.

I spent a bajillion hours flying helicopters. Really loved 3 & 4. Haven't played since, though. What happened?

It’s hardly even battlefield anymore

It’s like some unholy amalgamation of every shooter genre that’s been popular with kids in the past few years. It’s like hero shooter meets battle royale meets call of duty meets the battered corpse of what used to be Battlefield. It really feels like some out of touch suits said “see what kids like these days and rip it off”.

The previous game had its own controversies, and many veteran developers apparently left due to the stifling of creative control.

If you don’t mind a shitpost-ey video, I saw this the other day and it probably explains everything better than I can in an HN comment: https://youtu.be/d0lXNq2jrG8

It’s spends a lot of time on performance issues and bugs, but those are usually forgivable to me, at least as long as things get patched.

Also there’s a complete lack of content. Twenty something guns if I recall correctly, and lack of content can kill games, even otherwise good ones.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#216

Post by Alex3917 »

rightbyte wrote: post #183
lethologica wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing happened with me and WoW Classic. I was hoping that classic would recapture the magic I felt playing the game a decade ago but after a few days I was just bored and cancelled my subscription. I guess that feeling is just a moment frozen in time now.

Playing "solved" games is not as exiting. The effect is most clear with boardgames I think. Also if you were a kid at the time way more things are exciting in gemeral.

> Playing "solved" games is not as exiting. The effect is most clear with boardgames I think.

While this is probably usually true, a good counter example is Go, which actually become more fun after computers surpassed the abilities of humans. (Because, as it turns out, the boring parts of the game don't actually matter that much in terms of points.)

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#217

Post by jandrese »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #144
synicalx wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when MMO's were fun like this :(

Maybe we just grew old. I recently paid real money just to support a private server of my favorite childhood mmorpg. After playing a couple of days I got bored and never played again.

IMHO the fun drained away when MMO publishers decided to refocus on making money. Ironically this caused most of them to go to a Free 2 Play model (F2P), which requires the developers to implement ever increasing amounts of grind to create a market that can be monetized. To spend creative energy on building elaborate gambling systems to lock away as much of the content as they can get away with from the majority of the playerbase.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#218

Post by AtlasBarfed »

no_wizard wrote: post #9

Aside from being an amazing story, my other takes are the following: C / C++ are truly powerful and efficient languages for execution. Can you imagine doing this with Java or C# and still keeping the memory usage and speed reasonable, even in 2022? This is the late 90s (maybe early 2000s). C++ is a workhorse, warts and all. Game development is just so different from all other types of development, but I feel like if…

If you arena allocate (which would probably be typical in games), then GC isn't as much a problem.

Most MMOs aren't a graphics problem (usually not pushing the edge) or performance problem (high FPS for twitch isn't as big a thing), they are a database problem.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#219

Post by [deleted] »

bearmode wrote: post #158
sidlls wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, 20 years ago MMOs were also full of racists, misogynists, and others engaging in harassment and “spewing their shitty political opinions” both in-game and out (e.g. guild sites).

>Way more than there used to be If you played 20 years and today, you can surely notice the difference in the community?

[deleted]

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#220

Post by Eumenes »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #144
synicalx wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when MMO's were fun like this :(

Maybe we just grew old. I recently paid real money just to support a private server of my favorite childhood mmorpg. After playing a couple of days I got bored and never played again.

Asheron's Call?
Post reply on HN