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Oh, UO...such good memories. I remember biking down to Cybersmith in Palo Alto to buy pre-paid time since I wasn't old enough to have a card. Used to rock it on the Napa Valley shard back in the day (I wasn't brave enough for Catskills). Nowadays I miss the UO experience but simply don't have time to sink into anything like it.
I wonder if they considered writing their disassembly in the 'pre-C++98 dialect of C++' used in the original, and targeting the original compiler. I've done some disassembly of binaries which ran on vintage systems, and I would've targeted the original toolchain if I could have. It's an interesting philosophical question.
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All of them (except Eve) feel too much like WoW reskins to bother with. This is personal opinion but the feeling probably reflects why they have 1% (estimated by ChatGPT) of WoW’s subscriptions.
Eve is more of an Excel reskin.
HN loves UO. Before this was MUDs on Telnet and the like. Text based but very fun.
My first real programming achievement was building a website for an Ultima Online shard. I wrote some really terrible PHP and HTML, but it worked for 20+ years afterwards. Great memories! I was surprised that there is still an active community around UO! In any case, this is very cool. Thanks for sharing!
Similar experience, I helped to build the website, manage the forum installation, and overtime the people running the shard invited me to also code for the emulator they were running. I was 12-13 at the time (late 90s/early 2000s), I can't remember the emulator anymore, very likely it was POL, and the concept behind the shard was to be as close as possible to the official servers before UO:Renaissance so we worked qu…
It was a great experience when I was 14. Also caused my high school career to plummet, all I wanted to do was to keep coding for my UO server.
On the upside, I have a great job now and it's all because I followed that passion.
The UO emulator scene got me into network programming. I've never seen an online game capture so many ancillary/emergent/accidental gameplay mechanics as well as this, somehow all the 3d MMOs seemed to downgrade a lot of the interesting economics, building, exploring that UO delivered. PvP and quest type stuff is probably a lot better in other games but it was still compelling and you could realistically play solo or…
> somehow all the 3d MMOs seemed to downgrade a lot of the interesting Unfortunately two things turned out to be true: 1) Most people don't want any of this and prefer to be on rails 2) The two groups of people most attracted to a game like this wind up in a dynamic where one group will leave the game if the other is present. Whereas the 2nd group requires the 1st to want to play.
Wow, I wonder if my favorite portal hole is unpatched? Before they finally patched the hole, I used to enjoy running through crowds of high level monsters in dungeons to get a whole parade of them chasing me, then quickly casting a portal into the middle of town, usually next to the bank, then ducking behind the portal without going through, as the whole line of monsters walked towards me and popped through the porta…
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> somehow all the 3d MMOs seemed to downgrade a lot of the interesting Unfortunately two things turned out to be true: 1) Most people don't want any of this and prefer to be on rails 2) The two groups of people most attracted to a game like this wind up in a dynamic where one group will leave the game if the other is present. Whereas the 2nd group requires the 1st to want to play.
Who are these two groups of people? Sounds like a predator/prey situation.
Both groups self-identify as wanting a "real" experience in a sandbox that lets them "do anything". However one means this allows them to slaughter people with impunity whereas the other means it enables them to explore the world, choose their own occupation, define their own goals, etc. It's not even a PVP vs PVE divide, as there are plenty of PVPers in the 2nd group. Instead it's closer to "Griefers" vs "Sandbox game enthusiasts", where the griefer crowed requires prey to feed their urges.
So what happens is the griefer oriented crowd chases away the other crowd, then has no one to grief and then they leave too. You'll see it in comments here as many posters were, shall we say, not super mature 25+ years ago :) they'll be pining for the days about how they could kill everyone, steal their stuff, loot their houses, and otherwise cause problems.
One of the issues with the game was that while those behaviors were intentionally allowed, the designers didn't account for the kind of player who *only* wanted to do that and generally were obnoxious about it to boot instead of trying to massage it into the lore/RP of the game. So the scale was all off.
For anyone wanting to try UO out, it's still a game with an active player base. There are 3rd party servers like UO Outlands, which gets closer to the original gameplay. Meaning very harsh in comparison to what most people are used to in today's MMOs. Players can just come to gank you and you'll lose your stuff, etc. The server has 2500+ players logged in right now, so still very much active.