Bloody Ethics: It's not a game, it's a world

[the bazookas]

I liked EVeee's post; very accurate, and a great summary of my personal experience with UO as well. To those who say "tl;dr", you missed out.

[EVeee]

I liked EVeee's post; very accurate, and a great summary of my personal experience with UO as well. To those who say "tl;dr", you missed out.

Thanks I'd assumed that anyone who could focus long enough to read that article and a three pages of replies wouldn't be daunted.... not the first time I've been wrong though. I just figured out what "tl;dr" meant five minutes ago, haha. I assumed it was just gibberish but then it clicked after I read your post. Even though I've been online almost since there was a line to be on, I've never bothered with much internet slang or 1337-speak.

[LKP]

I don't know about all that, Eveee. The fact that we're still playing (or even discussing) this game 15 years later is proof enough that it's not a normal game, but more of a world. It's so immersive, it's easy to become your character and build a whole virtual life around it. For the right people, that does include morality. But for most of us, this is still a game, albeit a legendary one. And for a game, in the era this shard is based on, the penalty for murder was extremely harsh. Sure, you could circumvent it by using throw-away PK characters. But at the time, I was 13 or 14, and I was lucky to have one account. With AOL dial-up, staying connected overnight to macro would have been unlikely even had it been permissible. And there was always the fear of getting banned for doing it, too. So I pretty much limited myself to one character as well. I only wanted to play one class (tank mage), I didn't want to spend the time building another character when I'd already accomplished so much with that one, and I had emotional ties to that character, for whatever reason. It was my virtual self.

So, as you suggested, one character, one account. That wasn't enough to stop me from PKing miners though, lol. Granted, I didn't even fully understand the consequences and was by no means prepared to go red. I just thought it was fun. I GM'ed swords and tactics on my bone knight wall, but that was about the only powergaming I did until years later. After that, as soon as I had enough magery to ebolt, I was PKing. I didn't even know what stat loss was, and I took it a couple of times. It took me a year and a half to make 7x GM through normal play (resist being the one skill that took that long). Think about that - the miners I killed lost the two minutes it took to run to the healer and back, and maybe the cost of a shovel if they didn't have a spare in the bank and I looted it. I lost skills that would take months to build back up through normal play, or cost a small fortune in regs and some serious powergaming. And then I was a red noob. I didn't have a house, I just wandered the world learning about the game and meeting some interesting people as I went. I think I got the full outlaw experience. I was wary of every person I saw, especially when I decided to go blue and stopped killing people on sight. Some people (mostly other reds) helped me out. Others formed posses to hunt me down. It's an experience I don't expect I'll ever get out of another game.

They've taken stat loss out now, and now I tend to agree with you. Everyone and their mother has a red on the production shards, because there are no serious penalties for it. Stat loss separated the men from the boys and really made for some interesting dynamics between players - death mattered. But the punishment was really harsh for a petty virtual crime.

[Gafron]

That is actually an amusing article. It manages to miss the point on so many things. I especially love the prediction of the virtual world we should be living in by now. UO, in its original concept of designing a world that would be run by the inhabitants while living fantasy lives, was a failure. There is a reason the vast majority of game players don't play games like the original UO or T2A, they don't like to be fucked over, with virtually no recourse, every time they turn around. Game designers are unable to produce the complexity of a real society that keeps psychopathic behavior on a low enough level that most people can live with, so the designers were constantly making changes to make the world "safer". That is why compared to the mmos released after, UO was such a limited commercial success.

[Gafron]

I don't know about all that, Eveee. The fact that we're still playing (or even discussing) this game 15 years later is proof enough that it's not a normal game, but more of a world.

There are people playing games that are thousands of years old. There is even an mmorpg that predates UO people are still paying to play. UO is special in its own ways but the fact it is still being played, whether on free or pay shards, in no way makes it special or even better than any of the other mmos out there.

[Gafron]

Because MMORPGs are primarily businesses and because this method of game-making has proven to be successful, we will continue to see it. No company wants to be the one that makes the best game - they want to be the one that makes the best-selling game. Which, like any other company on-or-offline, means they will pattern themselves after the current model for success. And that company currently is Blizzard. So the future of online RPGs for the next few years looks pretty bleak, IMO. But there will be cool prizes

EVeee, I know of no game where the npcs provide much of a challenge to most players. AI is so far from being able to challenge human intelligence and creativity it is not even close. WoW and most other mmos post UO are more about commercial success than about trying to create a world but they can still be fun to play and are actually far improved in AI over what UO was, even though real challenges lay with conflict between players still. In the end these are all games not real life and death.

[eniave]

Everquest made a dent in subscriptions, but not massively from what I could tell.

EQ didn't appeal to the PvP population. UO lost a number of rp'ers and PvM'ers to EQ - at least the ones who couldn't deal with the grief factor.

The other factor when looking at population is to consider churn. The population may have continued to grow for quite a while, but that still doesn't speak to how many players quit during the time and what the cost was to existing and established communities that were often the backbone of the game.

For instance, there was a period of time on Siege where if a new guild came to the shard trash talking and acting like complete jerks, almost everyone would gang up against them and drive them away. In fact it was necessary as blues couldn't take the murder counts necessary to shut down their new members in training. Heck, there was even one time in Siege where the shard recognized there were too many pks and not enough antis and a number of formerly pk guilds joined the anti side. But they didn't turn blue - they turned good. For quite a while after that noto-Pk'ing was monitored and discouraged and a red neutral guild like mine could easily co-operate with the blue guilds, but over time as the community broke down we were just as likely to get attacked by the side we thought we were helping and we had to just stop.

So yeah, there was new population coming in, but the backbone of the shard was dissolving and in this case running off to games like ShadowBane, DAoC, Counterstrike, etc.

ShadowBane and DAoC were my choices , my guild was anti and it was fun but the EA changes got to be too much.

[Jakar]

The guy who wrote this article is a prophet.
Because that is exactly what ended up happening.

Thanks for posting this.. was an awesome read, and really brought me back.

[aXuS]

Awesome article.

I hope more games based on the "action to consequence" formula (Such as Ultima, Elder Scrolls, Fallout) make there way to the mainstream, they are invaluable pieces of "art" in the gaming world, I think.

[Greywolf]

Totally agree!

[Francois424]

Just commenting on the part where "ppl have 1-2 hours to do something, and need to be in the action quickly" or words to that effect...

Mark / Recall.

Really, that's it. My last year of UO I was literraly swamped at work, had maybe 1h per night and only 1 day of week-end for a couple months in a row. I would recall to my spot, do whatetever I wanted, then Recall again (if not PKed, but my spot wasnt popular then) back to town to log.

Compare to Wow (11min griphon ride) or FF11 (man it was awfully long to get anything done), UO wins everytime, when experienced players are involved.

- - - - - -

I think UO99 was the best balanced without needing Carebear-lands... If a PK kills 5 newbs for 50 sheep-wool total (because ppl would farm almost naked) then he turned red and was screwed for a while. That mecanism really put the shards in good shape, I dont even remember getting PKed once that patch (and the rubber-band effect patch) came into action... Unless I was actively seeking fights.

So grieving wasn't all that bad. PPL nowadays scream hell at literaly nothing.
Man what I woudn't give for a AAA title sandboxy-UO-style !

Nice article btw.

[DingoTM]

You guys really don't post enough new material, I swear all of my posts could be considered "Necroposts".

Just wanted to add that everyone should be watching The Elder Scrolls Online to see how it turns out. I am a hardcore UO fan (obviously, since I'm here 15 years later still), and TES is the ONLY other game that managed to grab me like UO did simply because of the similarities in skill progress and dynamic gameplay. Hopefully they make it as "hardcore" as it needs to be, and not some other cookie-cutter bs that 'lil anti-PvP babies love so much.

[Laflare]

You guys really don't post enough new material, I swear all of my posts could be considered "Necroposts".

Just wanted to add that everyone should be watching The Elder Scrolls Online to see how it turns out. I am a hardcore UO fan (obviously, since I'm here 15 years later still), and TES is the ONLY other game that managed to grab me like UO did simply because of the similarities in skill progress and dynamic gameplay. Hopefully they make it as "hardcore" as it needs to be, and not some other cookie-cutter bs that 'lil anti-PvP babies love so much.

wtf, go read about Shroud of the Avatar, Lord British is creating a new mmo, how come you dont know? jesus christ.

[crappled]

You guys really don't post enough new material, I swear all of my posts could be considered "Necroposts".

Just wanted to add that everyone should be watching The Elder Scrolls Online to see how it turns out. I am a hardcore UO fan (obviously, since I'm here 15 years later still), and TES is the ONLY other game that managed to grab me like UO did simply because of the similarities in skill progress and dynamic gameplay. Hopefully they make it as "hardcore" as it needs to be, and not some other cookie-cutter bs that 'lil anti-PvP babies love so much.

Honestly if you say TES Online is the only game that grabbed you like UO (beside the fact it's not even out yet) then you probably haven't been following many games. There have been plenty of other good MMOs with good ideals that just failed or fell short of what they should have been. Two that come to mind immediately would be Shadowbane and Darkfall.

Bethesda has yet to release a game that isn't good, but they are also delving into a completely new territory by going from exclusively singleplayer games to, not just multiplayer, but MASSIVELY multiplayer. To be perfectly honest, I'm afraid it will turn into another cookie cutter quest grind and gear farming MMO and ruins the reputation they have spent years building.. That's what sells, apparently, and that's what they will most likely deliver.

I just don't think any game is ever going to have what UO did because when publishers started catering to large numbers of players over quality of players, they ruined an entire genre and nobody has the balls to take it back to it's roots. If only one company could stop being money grubbing drekheads and take pride in a great, quality product, rather than trying to top their income from the previous year, then we might actually see a game like UO. I say this because I don't think Richard Garriott was making his Ultima games because he wanted to be rich, I think he truly was (and is) passionate about gaming and wants to set a level of quality with his games. It's a shame EA ended up taking over UO and demeaning something with his name behind it.

That got long, but I have played a lot of MMOs since 1999 and have been disappointed by most of them, and I take them very seriously as no other genre could ever satiate my need for fun as a good MMO can. With all that being said, definitely look into Shroud of the Avatar as it isn't being published by EA but funded through donations that began with a kickstarter.

[Halbu]

Mortal Online could always become the next UO, just needs more content, bug fixes and such.