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

91–100 of 195 posts

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

#91

Post by uo_throwaway »

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-…

FYI there has actually been several attempts to also rewrite the client from scratch. One is still active. See https://github.com/andreakarasho/classicuo. Pretty cool stuff.

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

#93

Post by dmix »

marak830 wrote: post #62
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-…

Surprisingly similar for me, I even released my first piece of software on the runuo forms (maraks script creator haha). Never translated to working in software (couldn't afford college lol), but it did leave me with a hobbie I still do today, and love.

College isn't a requirement for a career in software... at least not in North America. Although I'm sure you know that by now.

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

#94

Post by manfredo »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #70
JamilD wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the extinction of the California grizzly within 75 years of gold being discovered. It’s a common pattern — maybe the issue isn’t with the game…

That was the point I was trying to make. I'd like to add, there's a current advert for an Xbox game, the backing track is the Beach Boys "Wouldn't it Be Nice." In any case shooting galore...as a Xmas gift? We're on the cusp of legit virtual reality and our goto is still kill kill kill? This is why we can't have nice things.

I'm not sure why relegating destructive tendencies to virtual worlds is a bad thing. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that humans have innate proclivity to violence. The percentage of men who die violently (as in, at the hands of other humans) is around 25%. This is compared to ~2% in the 20th century, and even less today. Many mammals' forms of play function as preparation for violence (either capturing play, or evading from it). There's strong reason to suggest that humans innately find violence entertaining and compelling - at least some forms of violence.

The fact that we've managed to relegate this behavior to the virtual world, rather than the real one, seems to be a good thing to me.

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

#95

Post by tedunangst »

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.

If a game offers a play mode but nobody does it, does it really exist?

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

#96

Post by omg_ketchup »

swozey wrote: post #16
jghn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding was that part of the problem was that they expected more of the RPing MUD crowd to show up, not the typical gamer crowd. Whether or not their calculations would have been similarly incorrect even if their userbase predictions were spot on is another question altogether

The Catskills server was the roleplay server and it had actual die-hard roleplayers, the Origin storytellers (counselors? I forget) did a lot of work to help them with events, etc. For instance an entire clan (Shadowclan Orcs) took over the NPC owned Yew Orc Fort. There were big Pirate groups too in Buc's Den. I remember the Paladins of Trinsic, Yew Militia and the Undead (they may have been called something else? Th…

That was Abyss, not Siege, right?

They were so ahead of their time with pretty much everything. Abyss was cool and all, but do you remember Santa's Slay?

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

#97

Post by andrepd »

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 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-killer out to strip the dungeon crawlers of all their loot and gear; or, spending your days baking bread or running your own player shopping mall, your only limitation was your effort and imagination. The idea that you could stake out your own small part of this vibrant world, right down to building a house in the limited land space available; or making your name as an accomplished crafter who people sought out for their superior crafted equipment, it was so fascinating to me.

This is absolute magic to me. Wow. It sounds like an absolute dream. It is my opinion that the possibilities of a shared, persistent, virtual world were never fully realised. The description you make: of a fantasy world, persistent, vast, "real" (as in, internally consistent and fair), a world you can live in... modern MMOs offer absolutely none of that. It's a shame.

It speaks volumes that probably the best realisations of the MMO were... Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, maybe Everquest? Maybe even some primitive MUDs and, oddly enough, a couple Minecraft servers. Instead we're stuck with WoW (and its clones), which was an excellent game in its own right, but it wasn't a true MMO in the sense above described.

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

#98

Post by ineedasername »

etxm wrote: post #85
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apropos of nothing, I've always found the behavior of the players of MMOs and online games one of the clearest telltales that sociopathy is a lot more prevalent that most people think it is.

Says the person using a throwaway account to offer a medical diagnosis from their armchair office to someone they’ve never met, solely based on a comment about a video game they played 20 years ago.

It's not really a throwaway, take a look at the account profile-- it's been around a few years, and has a decent bit of karma. It's about as much of a throwaway as yours, or mine for that matter-- not throwaway, but no reference to our real world identity either

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

#99

Post by andrepd »

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…

>players preferred "a CRPG where other people happen to be playing" than "a virtual world"

I'm absolutely stealing this. It summarises how I feel about modern MMOs vs the endless possibilities of a shared, persistent, virtual world that I think were never truly realised. (see my other post)

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

#100

Post by ineedasername »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #78
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…

Apropos of nothing, I've always found the behavior of the players of MMOs and online games one of the clearest telltales that sociopathy is a lot more prevalent that most people think it is.

In fairness (though I agree sociopathy is probably more prevalent than we know) this could also just be the same dynamic as seen in the Stanford prison experiments.[0] Let someone take on a role, such as villain, and they live up (or down as the case may be) to that label.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

Post reply on HN