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Do you remember Ultima Online?

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Re: Do you remember Ultima Online?

#71

Post by shrimp_emoji »

0xAFFFF wrote: post #66
elif wrote: post #40

Be extremely careful with UO nostalgia. The author hit the nail on the head perfectly describing "UO golden age" players yearning to fill the void. I will offer 2 major hazards: 1) what made UO special back then was not the ultra-harsh pvp death mechanics, as mortal online has shown. It was the players that were interacting with the harsh mechanics. We were all MMO-naive, and our mentality affected how we interacted…

> You can never again get an un-jaded MMO population. Players have since been transformed into minmax ultragreedy automatons. No game can simulate the old players. World of Warcraft Classic is an excellent illustration of this. Players trained by playing on retail or private servers for years and an unlimited supply of information, strategies and minmaxing guides have radically changed the experience. For most guilds…

Society evolved, but the theme park ride didn't evolve along with it (which was kind of the point of Classic).

MMOs as we know them make no sense as a genre today, but trying to farm theme park ride MMOs for nostalgia must be the epitome of Doing It Wrong. You already know the ride; it can never be like your first time.

Re: Do you remember Ultima Online?

#72

Post by andrepd »

hooby wrote: post #67
elif wrote: post #40

Be extremely careful with UO nostalgia. The author hit the nail on the head perfectly describing "UO golden age" players yearning to fill the void. I will offer 2 major hazards: 1) what made UO special back then was not the ultra-harsh pvp death mechanics, as mortal online has shown. It was the players that were interacting with the harsh mechanics. We were all MMO-naive, and our mentality affected how we interacted…

The irony about this is, that Richard Garriott was barely involved in the creation of UO. He was busy creating a new single-player Ultima title, while a separate team, lead by Raph Koster created UO.

Raph Koster also was the lead on Star Wars Galaxies, imo the only other MMORPG besides Ultima that really deserves that name.

Re: Do you remember Ultima Online?

#74

Post by kethinov »

idiotsecant wrote: post #61
kethinov wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And every single one talks about UO like it's dead when it's not. The original still exists and there are tons of excellent free servers now too. In addition to the ones mentioned by others elsewhere in the thread one of the best and most popular ones is UOForever.

Servers still exist, but the original UO experience is well and truly dead. You can never go back again, as they say.

Servers that preserve that exact experience with those same game settings exist.

Re: Do you remember Ultima Online?

#75

Post by elif »

idiotsecant wrote: post #64
elif wrote: post #40

Be extremely careful with UO nostalgia. The author hit the nail on the head perfectly describing "UO golden age" players yearning to fill the void. I will offer 2 major hazards: 1) what made UO special back then was not the ultra-harsh pvp death mechanics, as mortal online has shown. It was the players that were interacting with the harsh mechanics. We were all MMO-naive, and our mentality affected how we interacted…

I would argue minmaxing was a thing from day one in uo, the thing that made it magical was that all types of players were forced to play together because it was pretty much the only game in town. Players who wanted pvp, pve, rp, craft grinding, exploring, hoarding, trading, mentoring, scamming, etc all lived in the same vibrant world. MMOs now are hyper specialized for individual tastes, and are all the more bland fo…

grinding out a 7x was like a 1-3 day task, and while yea, it was technically maximizing the skill advancement system, it bears little resemblance to where MMOs find themselves today, running daily tasks for months to eek out a 0.5% advantage.

Re: Do you remember Ultima Online?

#76

Post by phendrenad2 »

elif wrote: post #40

Be extremely careful with UO nostalgia. The author hit the nail on the head perfectly describing "UO golden age" players yearning to fill the void. I will offer 2 major hazards: 1) what made UO special back then was not the ultra-harsh pvp death mechanics, as mortal online has shown. It was the players that were interacting with the harsh mechanics. We were all MMO-naive, and our mentality affected how we interacted…

> We were all MMO-naive

Not just that, we were in the dark too. The information out there about the game wasn't very good. Want a map of a dungeon? You'll have to find some crowdsourced hacked-together jpeg. Now, you can watch a full dungeon walkthrough in 4k 120fps on youtube.

> minmax ultragreedy automatons

This has spilled out into the metagame too. People actively complain about anything that moves the game away from a "1-click win button", and will laud any change that moves closet to it. Automatons indeed.

Re: Do you remember Ultima Online?

#77

Post by idiotsecant »

elif wrote: post #75
idiotsecant wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue minmaxing was a thing from day one in uo, the thing that made it magical was that all types of players were forced to play together because it was pretty much the only game in town. Players who wanted pvp, pve, rp, craft grinding, exploring, hoarding, trading, mentoring, scamming, etc all lived in the same vibrant world. MMOs now are hyper specialized for individual tastes, and are all the more bland fo…

grinding out a 7x was like a 1-3 day task, and while yea, it was technically maximizing the skill advancement system, it bears little resemblance to where MMOs find themselves today, running daily tasks for months to eek out a 0.5% advantage.

Minmaxing is not synonymous with grinding. Minmaxing is theorycrafting a game to find the best combinations to make you win the game. People developed combat styles and skills to maximumize pvp effectiveness very quickly in the history of UO, to the point that there were whole forum groups about the best pvp builds.

Re: Do you remember Ultima Online?

#78

Post by ecshafer »

0xAFFFF wrote: post #66
elif wrote: post #40

Be extremely careful with UO nostalgia. The author hit the nail on the head perfectly describing "UO golden age" players yearning to fill the void. I will offer 2 major hazards: 1) what made UO special back then was not the ultra-harsh pvp death mechanics, as mortal online has shown. It was the players that were interacting with the harsh mechanics. We were all MMO-naive, and our mentality affected how we interacted…

> You can never again get an un-jaded MMO population. Players have since been transformed into minmax ultragreedy automatons. No game can simulate the old players. World of Warcraft Classic is an excellent illustration of this. Players trained by playing on retail or private servers for years and an unlimited supply of information, strategies and minmaxing guides have radically changed the experience. For most guilds…

Something I would like to see is an MMO built around the randomizer. There are for example Pokemon hacks that have randomizers so all items, pokemon, etc are in random locations with some guarantee that things are available for the story mode. It helps break up that "follow the guide" mentality. What if you made it so every dungeon was randomized within some degree, so paths are not set, some monsters are harder or weaker. Make it so that "follow the meta" just isn't a thing. Maybe it wouldn't be financially successful in the current market, but it would help replicate that old school experience. But this new mindset of players as seen in WoW classic is what really kills the experience for me. The minmax everything I find boring and doesn't create the felling that games should.

Re: Do you remember Ultima Online?

#79

Post by beernutz »

lewispollard wrote: post #29
tibbydudeza wrote: post #27

I would love to know how it was developed - what languages, technology stack they used before Unity and other things came about to make coding a MMPORG easier.

Do you know of any successful MMO made with Unity? I have a hard time believing that it's responsible for any ease of MMO development, but I haven't played MMOs much since WoW/FFXIV so maybe I'm behind.

I think maybe Genshin Impact is made with Unity.

Re: Do you remember Ultima Online?

#80

Post by lewispollard »

beernutz wrote: post #79
lewispollard wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of any successful MMO made with Unity? I have a hard time believing that it's responsible for any ease of MMO development, but I haven't played MMOs much since WoW/FFXIV so maybe I'm behind.

I think maybe Genshin Impact is made with Unity.

It is, but it's also not really an mmo, it has a 4 player online co-op mode iirc.
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