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"There has yet to be a virtual world that even comes close to the number of things you can do in Ultima Online."
Is this statement true or false? Could you provide examples of MMORPGs and "things you can do" in these games that "come close" to Ultima Online?
Comments
True.
I have yet to find a game that comes any where near as close to the amount of freedom and things you could do in UO.
True
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
I used to play UO [mod edit], but I'd say that Eve Online comes pretty close
"EVE is likely the best MMORPG that you've never really understood or played" - Kyleran
Star Wars Galaxies perhaps.
Just SWG but it's gone
Example of things you can/could do in EVE and Star Wars Galaxies that come close to Ultima Online?
From what I learned about UO, no other MMO since encorporated as many aspects of simulating a virtual world, so ... true, i guess.
EVE should indeed come close purely from a mechanics point of view, but is almost impossible to compare due to the completely opposite setting.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high
And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll
Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde
And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
Oh absolutely true. Eve comes kind closeish.
But UO was something special. If anyone ever tries to clone it with an actual budget they'll have a runaway hit on their hands.
Back in alpha they even had an entire simulated food chain and migrating creatures, only discover there were too many people. People just wiped out entire species because they hunted faster than the animals could breed.
just curious, what could you do in UO that couldn't be done since then? ^^
"believe me, mike.. i calculated the odds of this working against the odds that i was doing something incredibly stupid and i did it anyway!"
Though I have an inkling, I was waiting for someone to list all the things one can do.
And yet no one has done so.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
My corp used to play football in Eve Online with a can and cruisers with tractor beams and ewar. We would setup containers as goal lines on both sides.
Could you do that in UO?
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
To answer the quesiton as it is written, "There has yet to be a virtual world that even comes close to the number of things you can do in Ulitma Online. True or Fales?"
FALSE: ...Second Life.
Notice the green text there, virtual world. Doesn't necessarliy suggest an MMO where you go about and kill things, quest and pvp. HOWEVER, given the right tools you can do these things in Second Life.
Second Life you can :
Create anything, ANYTHING.. from your cloths, skin, hair, weapons, homes, shops, even your own "world".
Not to mention with the right tools (meaning scripted items) you can "kill" each other the same as in an MMO. If the land your on allows it, you can do that and be rewarded.
Not to mention also the sheer availablity of RP withiin Second Life, you can be anything from yourself to a tiny kitten cat to just, well.... anything.
I know what most will say "Its just a cyber cafe for sex and blah blah I'm a loser who only immedialty thinks that snot snot".. To that I shall say obviously there is that within it , but name a Virtual World / MMO no one has ever done a thing like that in. You can't , just Second Life gives users the tools to do it in a more visual way then just taking off your armor and /sit ontop of each other behind some tree in Lakeshire.
So.. hope that answers it
As much as I do NOT want to say it, I must say False.
Wurm online
Eve online
Perpetuum online
All come to mind as games with at least as much, if not more, content, skills and sand-boxyness.
seriously, are we just naming games here?
what's that feature list to compete against? anyone?
"believe me, mike.. i calculated the odds of this working against the odds that i was doing something incredibly stupid and i did it anyway!"
Three games come to mind, and two of those are dead.
Roma Victor, was the closest to a true sandbox like UO was, but it had more than its fair share of bugs, glitchs and exploits which ultimately killed it with its TINY population.
Star Wars Galaxies Pre CU. (Removing Mod Edit) because we cant discuss other servers even though Sony Online Entertainment gave them their blessing to do it. http://www.google.com/#hl=en&gs_nf=1&cp=8&gs_id=ab&xhr=t&q=Communism&pf=p&safe=off&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&oq=Communis&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=783677770c4845cf&biw=1280&bih=906
Last but not least...
Star Quest Online, which is the closest to UO in space I have ever seen. But its got a development issue where the devs have pretty much given up, but the server operators want the game development rights. So there is a legal matter that is being worked out over it. This in turn has murdered the population where at best you see 100-150 players per day log in. I doubt there are more than 100 players that play the game total, which hurts.
There are a few other games that claim to be like UO. But fail horribly. There is Mortal Online which is at best a online first person slasher. Xsyon, which is a great game but is way short on development, perhaps in 2 or 3 years it could be really good.
Trueth is there is no other game like UO, and it wasnt that game that made it great. It was the players. The game itself wasnt that spectacular, it was a fantasy world with magic and swords. It had a (then) deep crafting system, with no real classes. The players didnt min/max their characters to be the best PvPer, or greatest Dragon hunter. They Role Played their characters. They enjoyed being someone else for a while instead of ub3r1337z0rk!113r ganker who is only claim to fame is "PK TK GLD?!" or "LOL U MAD BRO?".
So much crap, so little quality.
False. FFXI says hi!
QFT
I will add tho for consitency after reading all the posts that my opinion still stands for a Fantasy MMO that you are not set inside a spaceship. SWG is the only thing that comes close to it.
I had forgotten about Roma Victor... yeah that came close to UO levels of virtual simulation, but still didn't have nearly as many features.
For those asking for a feature list... it'd be pages and pages long. Kind of difficult.
But by the very nature of the game, the way it was built, gave you a great amount of freedom to make your own stuff. The ability to place anything on the ground, or pick up anything from a shelf, and write in books and place them around the world is something I've yet to see return.
And since it was FFA PvP that gave people a HUGE amount of things possible.
So you had... pick pocketing, sailing/treasure maps, in game minigames at bars like chess and checkers and cards, placing houses anywhere, decorating your house, setting up traps like exploding chests in the woods, being able to breed sheep to start a wool business, breaking into someone else's house if you manage to find their key, monsters looting your body, and using your weapons against you, building elaborate structures and bases using in game items and houses... it's really hard, there's very little you COULDN'T do. Not all was good, there were entire clans dedicated to scamming people (giving them fake Runes to trap them on islands in the middle of nowhere and robbing them blind, or leading them to a house where they're murdered and robbed..then again there were entire clans dedicated to hunting and killing those clans) but the freedom was amazing. No one "enjoys" being a victim, I suppose, but I was grateful for those villains because it gave me someone real to fight against, watch out for, and protect people from. There was a clan of people that wore masks and armor that made them look like Orcs, and they spoke in broken English and raided player cities. God.. that game...
The only way it functioned was because there was plenty for non PvPers to do. So you had everyone under one roof, the griefers making PvE more exciting, the sheep making PvP more exciting... but that wouldn't happen nowadays. Unless a game had the best PvE on the market, sheep wouldn't play the game. Everyone nowadays who plays a game like UO has a slight PvP leaning. That's why the emulated servers never capture the original community.
I'd say the closest is Eve, you have a lot of PvE type players in that game.
i dont get the eve comparisons......you fought, you mined, you crafted, you traded. yea it was a huge open universe to play in but i really dont see too much in variation of what can be done.
Amen!
Not sure why the list still hasnt been provided. Then again if it had, a lot of people who say "Eve, Perpetuum, this, that" would probably realized they're wrong. I had an active account from 98 to 2008, didnt play much after AoS but still did, so I have no idea what they put in since 2008. More stuff no doubt:
I'm putting this UO list so that people can compare against it and soon find out how short they come on options offered by those other games since UO.
In UO, besides killing stuff you could:
- Stealth around picking locked chests in dungeons.
- Herd, Tame, train and sell pets
- Go fishing, fish up rares and lost treasure (the bigger stuff involved fighting)
- Grow plants
- Build, decorate and sell houses. That includes creating new decoration elements through optical illusion, which was a UO art in itself.
- Snoop people's backpacks and steal their stuff if you felt so inclined
- Hunt for rares, trade them
- Harvest all kinds of resources (obviously)
- Cook, tinker, make potions, furniture, clothes you name it, whether it was for use, trade or vanity. Crafting is unrivaled at this point.
- Get on your boat, sail around and explore
- Do a lot of social stuff that was in some way or other supported by game mechanics and not just total "let's pretend"
- Move heavy objects around so to create improvised structures
- Craft and enchant and otherwise modify (color, name) magical items with various properties to your liking
- Salvage and scavenge stuff from anywhere. Pick magical reagents from the wild, smelt or otherwise unmake items, etc.
- Build libraries and rune libraries (allows players to travel around the world from a central location)
- Run a shop
- Scam people in a hundred ways
- Trap and lock boxes and untrap and unlock them, which gave a lot of opportunities for stunts and antics
- Make monsters fight for you so you wouldnt have to do it yourself (I know, technically it's fighting)
I'm forgetting a lot of stuff, not to mention the creative things people would always end up doing with the game mechanics that were clearly not intended in the first place and gave the game that sense of freedom.
Good luck matching that to any game released since.
The same for Perpetuum Online.
Most games crafting are just a single feature. Mostly a gimmick. An after thought.
In Ultima Online, all professions, if not all, each profession was its own feature, if one were to compare with a "feature" from other games.
And most of those professions/features were very well bridged/connected. As if people were playing different games within the same world.
I remember some people being "insert profession" their whole life while playing Ultima Online.
Now in most games everyone is everything.
The difference was in the time and effort involved.
Most games now are designed for a scripted linear vertical progression. These games now have specific content, with specific average time frame to consume them. Specific notions of "end game". Everyone doing the same thing, experiencing the game the same way, no different than automatons.
In UO, you kind of just enjoyed the journey. Learned the tricks of the trade of your profession, became good at it, eventually made a name for yourself, things take different routes.
The whole point was the design for people to live the game, the virtual society.
Its like somewhere along the MMORPG lines there was an embargo. A rule for every developer company. You can make the game any way you like, except design the game for people to live in. It feels like a conspiracy, or some New World Order agenda. Its hard to understand how come we didnt got 1% of the MMORPGs as virtual worlds to live in anymore.
Its hard to believe that "its because its hard to do so", or "its technically impossible", or that "there is no demand for it".
In todays games you have this abstract socialization through auction house, abstract traveling, abstract exploration, abstract freedom... Everything became so simplified, so abstracted.
im curious - what did UO offer in crafting that EQ2 does not have?
you cannot name gear in EQ2 but otherwise it supports most if not all of this
EQ2 fan sites
You could bake bread then poisen it then sell it to players, epic fun
If it's not broken, you are not innovating.