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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

#51

Post by _qbjt »

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-…

Same! Never used UOX but ran a few small private servers back in the day using SphereServer and eventually RunUO. While it didn't lead to any professional connections in my case, it was my first foray into programming.

Ultima Online in its early iterations was truly a magical game and helped to define a lot of the core design patterns of MMORPGs. The lead designer of UO, Raph Koster, has a lot of great insight when it comes to game design. I recommend his 2014 GDC talk, "Practical Creativity" [1], even to developers who are not interested in game development.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyVTxGpEO30

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

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-…

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by golergka »

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…

You mention RDR as if it was an MMO (which it obviously is not), and omit Eve?

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

#55

Post by DennisP »

wmil wrote: post #49

I've seen plenty of articles along this line, but the author always seems to blame the players for the system failing. To me it looks like their ecological model failed because it was deeply flawed. Real ecologies aren't really closed systems. There's generally constant energy coming in from the sun, and that energy is the limiting factor. Humans, at a simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this ene…

It doesn't seem that unrealistic to me, given how much of the real ecosystem humans have destroyed so far, and continue to destroy. In fact, I'd say the developers could have predicted this outcome with a quick glance at the real world.

You have a good point that the natural world renews itself from incoming energy, but that doesn't save it when it's destroyed at a faster rate than it can renew.

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

#56

Post by jghn »

etxm wrote: post #48

The two things I loved most about UO: * no opt-in required PVP with full looting * the bugs / exploits I had a very high bounty. :D The chance that you could actually lose months worth of work always made the game heart pounding exciting when you were running for your life. Favorite bugs: * mage/carpenter could build tables, stack them, teleport to the top, and jump through people’s roofs to loot houses * stealing we…

Keep in mind that players like yourself are precisely the reason games like this don't really exist anymore.

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

#57

Post by ChuckMcM »

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 more casual games. For example you could sell magic reagents which an enchanter could use to level up their skill, this was a quick way for someone to exchange gold for skill points. It created an economic stream for players who could "farm" the correct materials to disenchant to get the most in demand reagents (as I recall Greater Eternal Essence was a big seller).

Success in an MMO is in part a balance of these opportunities where a character can trade time for value.

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.

A truly successful MMO would provide a way for the MMO owner to tax the activity of the players in a way that generated actual cash for them to pay for servers and developers. Then the game becomes self sustaining.

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

#58

Post by etxm »

jghn wrote: post #56
etxm wrote: post #48

The two things I loved most about UO: * no opt-in required PVP with full looting * the bugs / exploits I had a very high bounty. :D The chance that you could actually lose months worth of work always made the game heart pounding exciting when you were running for your life. Favorite bugs: * mage/carpenter could build tables, stack them, teleport to the top, and jump through people’s roofs to loot houses * stealing we…

Keep in mind that players like yourself are precisely the reason games like this don't really exist anymore.

Games like what?

Buggy games? Yes the do.

Games with real risk? It requires an aggressive player to make that risk real otherwise there is no point to making a game with risk if everyone is just smithing horse shoes for each other.

I’d argue that games like UO don’t exist anymore because most people don’t want to play a game where you can lose everything.

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

#59

Post by swozey »

I'm loving this UO talk, I just found this Postmortem by GDC published in Sep 2018 (so I think it's new? I've never seen it)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0

This is a much watch if MMOs fascinate you. They're very transparent. Absolutely great video.

edit: Oh my god they bring up FlyGuys prostitution ring..

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

#60

Post by WJW »

cosarara wrote: post #50
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…

How are objects created in the first place? If I like your object, can I just make another one that looks exactly the same?

Yes, but then you just trade time for gold again. The whole point was to get something without paying the "time" cost.
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