UO Postmortem

I am sure this video has been shared before:


There are three main things I would like to highlight from the video:

• When UO first came out, there was a lawsuit over the condition of the game. This forced the devs to remain quiet. As player subscriptions dropped, the devs decided to start talking to the community anyway. The subscription numbers started to go back up. The devs learned that communication with the community is key.
• A group of players in Trinsic blocked the main gate with furniture. This forced players to enter the city through the side entrance. Because the side entrance was small, it was easy to kill players as they entered. The devs solved this by making axes capable of chopping up furniture. The devs use the game systems to resolve problems, instead of nerfing game systems such as making furniture not placeable next to a gate.
• The devs realized that the player population was as large as the city of San Antonio. The devs started researching city management and how to build the systems needed to manage such a large group.

I really do feel like these are great lessons and lessons that RG and the other original developers didn't learn from. They didn't communicate, they didn't use the systems in the game to help facilitate communication, and they didn't properly manage all the different groups.

 

There wasn't much right or wrong in those days and certainly no normal anything to have followed in example. All those events were firsts. Trinsic was well placed as well as well populated with people who could play allot, all day, all night, all weekend long... the addictive quality of first thrills. Years later it's next place of first was UO's Siege Perilouse. With each stage online social questions were answered through the refinement of what we all saught there, the fix to our mmo addictions.

The WIRED story I think best captured the spirit of early UO.
~Time Lord~

 

Ah, Ultima Online. The reason why I am here. I missed you UO so I am playing both UO and SOTA now together again!

 

I was under the impression that Carly's role, the UO Live team meetings with Community and PR, and the community focus were all part of the original plan. IIRC, most of the industry though the idea of the "Community Manager" and that level of transparency was insane. Origin took it another step forward in 1999 by adding an entire section to the site devoted to disseminating game and development information to the community. This was all well before the first subscription drop ever occurred (mid-2001).

Can you share your source for where you got your info?

 

So true. It's no exaggeration to say that if a feature is in one of today's MMOs, it was probably in UO first. A truly amazing game and an incredible, crazy persistent state world.

 

Good points, OP, good points.

One thing you're missing though: in the current situation we can't expect UO kind of decision making. We should expect Tabula Rasa type of stuff.

 

I was expecting more Tabula Rasa influence here too. But I don't feel it here, I mean it still feels like Earth instead of another planet. It is a bit "Cowboys & Aliens" yet I was expecting slightly more "Buck Rogers". It's the High Tech and even the Low Tech that seems missing and should be here.

Windmills don't serve any purpose, both wind and steam power are empty science. Farms and farming should be a thing here but are not represented unless it's just for show (or only cotton).
Empty Science, it's as if everything here is a fake of something that should be here but isn't. If some of those blanks were filled in...
(This rant continues behind the keyboard from a sota grumpy old man)...

UO, the game that made me buy multiple computers for my household....
and the beginning of my vast mortuarium of early modems ~Time Lord~

 

Watch the SoTA concept videos on Youtube from 9 years ago where RG demonstrates the “raw” game design of SoTA that is reminiscent of the first Ultima games in 1980+.

The game we play now is great, but drastically skewed from that conceptual design that lured me to play the originals; we have a “hand holding” game.

(I’m not referring to Ultima Online in this comparison, that’s a different animal)

 

I won my first modem (1400 baud) in a giveaaway from a local newspaper when I still was in school and being online had to be paid just like using the telephone by the minute and blocked your phoneline for incoming calls...

 

Mine was 300 baud for my Atari 400 PC.

 

The only pvp I ever played was Siege Perilous and Air Warriors. My first step up was from an old grey monitor to orange. Then Radio Shack started selling the color computer. Shortly after that I started UO on my phone @300 baud. My computer had 64K memory, with a huge floppy disk table top drive. Learned machine programming on my Altair computer. Those were the days....put lots of quarters in the Zelda game at the local pinball place. I better stop. My eyes are misting up.

 

So, has this devolved into a trip down memory lane, or what ??
Does this thread have an actual "point" ?
If so, could somebody condense it - pls ?

 

The point is that the answer to griefing is to always have an axe.

 

For those younger players, perhaps establishing the environment for the development of the classic groundbreaking game so many are still fond of will better help understanding of our devotion to that game. Sharing that environment on this thread is IMO very on topic. In the early days, just having a computer was new and exciting. In fact the internet was so new it seemed a miracle when we could interact with other people "online".

So describing the lessons being learned at that time, in that environment gives a good perspective at how groundbreaking all this was. Another interesting angle OT is the way UO dealt with rampant macroing. When younger players long for ships that travel the seas, mining that requires prospecting for hot spots, treasure hunting from treasure maps found as loot (and so much more) that existed early on it changes perspective.

The wishlist thread is rampant with wishes and dreams for game mechanics. Mechanics that are not new imagined things, but things that already existed in the past. So prospecting, treasure hunting, riding and fighting ship to ship was a reality long ago. These things were sacrificed in favor of new game engines where these things became difficult if not impossible to duplicate. Our new game engines have become so restrictive that somewhere along the way, developers have got to wonder if all the fun has also been sacrificed in gaining performance. I have to wonder, in today's world, the internet speeds and infinite storage capacity might make it reasonable to finally build game engines capable of so "simple" a thing as finding a coconut in game and placing same wherever you want it in any town or between towns for that matter.

 

It ain't performance they are after. Where it takes a dozen devs a dozen months to make a good game from scratch, a single dev can make a crappy game in a month with modern engines. That's 144 questionable games vs. 1 well-constructed one. That's 144 chances to pull a Goat Simulator or other meme game out of the hat while that one well-made game is no guarantee of a hit.

 

We need to clarify the separation of game engine and game logic. The ability of players to place objects in a virtual world is not the responsibility of the game engine. While the game engine may include the tools necessary to make such a thing possible, it's up to the game developer to implement that logic. A game engine is just a set of tools to make game development easier and faster.

BTW, if Unity had not existed in 2013 then Shroud of the Avatar might never have come to be.

 

And UO made 15 or more years of history and fun. Modern games disappear before 5 years, and the new games replacing them are just more of the same. (IMO)

 

In the early days of SOTA, Richard Garriot said he wanted a game where you could place objects anywhere. They would stay and anyone could walk by and "kick" them. Place a table, sell your goods etc. He could not make this work with the SOTA engine design. I hope one day we can "discover" how to do this...

 

they question is why not? Unity has Physics, it has X/Y/Z placement ability of objects, only missing thing is logic and what that looks like to handle both. So by engine limitations perhaps its more data handling ability for number of unquie items that it can't handle ie the number of transactions maybe?