UO Second Age

I stumbled upon this interview with Gordon Walton And Rich Vogel (Gordon was running the the UO show after '99, and Rich was a developer (and I think Origin's "Dupre").

Definitely some interesting perspective on the game's history & how it influenced future MMO's.

Gordon Walton appears to be the main man ultimately responsible for Trammel ... "The business is about making money... the way you make money is you satisfy the most people who stay." But he also admits that the undirected & open nature of the game was one of the best interesting parts about it. He admits that these days nobody wants to allow players to "touch the stove" and make something fun--"Nobody wants to make a virtual world, they want to make a virtual ride."

Rich Vogel had a pretty good point in that Ultima Online is more of an "online simulation" while other MMO's are "online games"... I appreciated pretty much everything he said, but must admit that he lost me with his view on Eve and the new Star Wars game (I think he had to talk the Bioware game up since he's an employee ).

Anyway, thought it was interesting enough to share.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOTVcrb- ... creen&NR=1

Nice, just too bad it's hosted by Markee Dragon.

In this vid Rich is so nice; Markee is an utter douchebag and deserves to be punched in the face.

rouss wrote:In this vid Rich is so nice; Markee is an utter douchebag and deserves to be punched in the face.

lol i was going to say the same. it's horrible every time he starts talking

the bazookas wrote:
Gordon Walton appears to be the main man ultimately responsible for Trammel

I can't believe this guy hasn't been assassinated.

It is sad that this guy goes around presenting himself as some sort of representative for the UO community.

He acts little more then a leech; and proudly admits he made lots of money off of UO; which is what helped destroy it. He is eagerly awaiting Garriots next "UO" so that he can suck the life out of it like he did before.

HE DOES NOT REPRESENT US AT ALL!

Gordon's handle was "Tyrant" for a reason. Complete a-hole #1.

Though he had to eat crow once when one of his GM's deleted Nighthawk's (of wtfman.com fame) tower out of spite. Nighthawk got a personal call from Gordon over the matter and a free Keep in the swamp that was GM placed lol.....Rich (NH) even said the guy was an a-hole through the whole thing and the only reason he got the call/free keep was they did not want the story up on WTFMan/JoV lol.

Man those were the days.......

faber wrote:

the bazookas wrote:
Gordon Walton appears to be the main man ultimately responsible for Trammel

I can't believe this guy hasn't been assassinated.

They would, but so far they've been unable to get his consent.

I saw this video. I did not like that gordon guy at all. Looked for immediate profit. UO isnt pulling the big numbers today.

I feel that if there is an error in the programming that unless it crashes the server it should by and large not be punishable. The devs are responsible to fix it. UO is more a like simulation than a game. hence people doing things that turn out to be a bug is not on them but the devs. the devs did not define the boundaries correctly.

Maybe we all be in jail for refreshing our mounts with all follow me with this guy.

Kriav wrote:I saw this video. I did not like that gordon guy at all. Looked for immediate profit. UO isnt pulling the big numbers today.

Do you think UO made more money with Trammel, or would they have made more money if they hadn't ever implemented it? I realize UOSA and this board is full of people who preferred pre-Trammel UO, but we have to realize that we were VASTLY outnumbered in this respect in 2000.

I think they would have made more money and stayed the leader without trammel. Trammel was the easy solution to the problem. This problem was the locus of why the many original ideas failed as well. The basic reason is the world is too small.


"The WORLD is TOO SMALL" period.

To satisfy the paying public the towns were too small. The towns in general needed to be 4 to 5x times bigger. The moongates placed with the town itself. The graveyards as well (not all graveyards need be just the ones by town. Have inns where u can pay a weekly or month fee to rent. just like the stables. Part of the forest surrounding each town as well. The sewer systems would substitute for trammel dungeons.
So I would have double the landmass too. But by enlarging the existing world. The towns being bigger allow for new and unusual features for trammies with money, like a coliseum where PVM would be all the rage. a bay or harbor where PVM -sea serpents would work.


Remember when that guy said the ecosystem was abandoned because players would kill the last 2 rabbits and therefore no more rabbits. How did that happen? the world is too small. I would have operated under the premise that the world is bigger than any one player can know. I would have an ecosystem larger than the visible world. I would use some yet to be determined algorithm to say there x rabbits in the world , and there are another y rabbits in the ecosystem but *Not visible* in the *visible world* all rabbits whether in the visible world or not reproduce at a determined rate. The rabbits that are unseen will migrate to the visible or known world at a rate determined by the number of rabbits in the known world for example. Pretty damn hard to kill all the rabbits now. but this system set up correctly would allow for dips in the population and for over population.

And the same would apply to the economy as well

I dunno. I thought it was plenty large. Remember most of us were without horses at this time, and many could barely Recall. Dungeon spawns in 1999 were grossly overpopulated with monsters, so that was never an issue. I started in 1999 and it took me until 2004 or so to actually feel like I fully explored the world.

If the world was too small, and Trammel would have hurt their cash flow, the simple solution would have been to simply double the number of shards. Much simpler than developing an additional ruleset.

I can't imagine that Trammel made them *less* money, even in the long term. 95% of people immediately jumped to Trammel once it was available - and not just because of the housing situation. I don't think those folks would have hung around as long as they did, as PKs got more and more sophisticated (like here).