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What made the pvp in UO so good?
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Member UncommonPosts: 602
I've constantly read the WoW forums mainly the pvp section in hope that something will come along but it seems that there are a lot of players who mention UO and just how great the pvp was in that game and I was wondering if I could get some detailed answers for a few questions..
1: What was the pvp like? (people refer to the pvp as classic UO which i'm sure refers to the time before EA got their mitts on the game.)
2: What is the pvp like now?
3: Is the game still worth getting? (I don't mind the graphics but is there still enough people playing it to make the pvp worthwhile?)
4: What the heck are shards? (At first I thought it was what they called servers but i'm not sure.)
Thanks for your time!
Comments
I'm going to try and be as accurate as possible. I beta'd UO and played up until about a year ago. Let me first say that to ME, the game isn't worth playing anymore since it's not the same game I used to play. EA did ruin it for ME. That being said...lots of new players who never played the old UO love it, so you should give it a shot.
The PvP was so amazing with all of the other systems that supported it. The other systems being crafting, housing, and the skill system. Crafting because you could be on an even par with everyone in terms of equipment since crafters made the best equipment in game and if you died, you could go back home, throw on another suit, go get some more reagents (used to cast spells), stock up on some potions, and head back out. Don't get me wrong, there were vanquishing weapons and power weapons that were HARDLY used in PvP since they were to precious to lose.
Housing was great because you could literally raid someones house. People had guild castles/towers, etc. You'd gate to them and find a couple people inside if it wasn't locked. Heck, if you planned it just right you could go through there chests, etc, and really do a raid. So when you recalled back to your house you had to be very cautious.
The skill system was great with the different options for PvP, back then it was pretty much the mage dominated. There were various ways to heal yourself, etc.
PvP'ing was really massive. Sometimes you could have a 25 vs 25 guild war, there was no ventrillo/teamspeak, etc. When you had a guild war in this game, it was truly awesome, you'd declare war on the other guild, they'd accept or decline and the battles would be amazing. UO PvP took alot of skill, alot of tactics, alot of hand to eye movement with the mouse. Now it's hardly any skill and almost all equipment, unfortunately. Also, when you killed someone...you could take ALL of ther equipment. You felt like you really gained something when defeating someone. People could make names for themselves. Even just going out into the woods and chopping trees you had an adrenaline rush because you knew at any moment someone could come onto that screen ready to kill you, and you'd better be ready to haul ass.
The PvP now in UO is 90 percent equipment and 10 percent skill, very unfortunate. It is now split into felucca and trammel. Felucca being what the old UO used to be and trammel being where you can't die in PvP at all unless you participate in factions. You can insure your items so you never lose them now, you only lose some regs, which is nothing nowadays. EA has also stated they will never put up a classic server, very dumb of them, look at what a classic server did for DAoC and what it will do for EQI. I hope this helps. There are some free shards out there with the old classic style play but not nearly the same amount of people, or support, etc. I'd suggest giving the game a try, you might really enjoy it, you might not. But, for me and others it'll never be the same.
Edit: BTW, shards are what there servers are so you were correct.
Ok
1. The PvP, pretty much, was open ended. Meaning, you didn't have to accept to battle someone. . .you didn't have to go to an arena. As long as you were out of the guards protections (in towns) then you could be killed. You could be a a dungeon or graveyard and someone could come and battle you. And PvP was exciting compared to the rest, mainly because you had the chance to loot what you teammate had/be looted. The biggest reason why PvP was amazing in UO though, was because it took skills! In WoW people are usually scared of a class, like Pallys. People know they can heal and what not. In UO it wasn't a class or proffession you were scared of, but of the player himself. It was someone's name that scared people. But the fact that it was so open and free, is what made it so great.
2. The PvP now? Well, it's different. It's not skilled required anymore, it's totally item based like WoW and every other PvP game now. It sucks, but at least it's still open battles.
3. Yes and No. Yes because I personally think it's the best and most in depth MMORPG that has ever hit the market. You can still build a house, have player vendors, craft anything and do anything. You tell me one other MMORPG (beside SWG) that can do that? WoW sure can't. The game still has it's freedom compared to most other MMO's out there. And I would say No, mainly because it's not the same UO. But more Yes than no.
4. Shards are servers. In UO, their called shards because it's part of a story. It's about a Gem or immortality where the world of Sosaria (where you live in the game) was held in. The avatar went and killed Mondain the Wizard, the one holding the gem of immortality and upun his death the gem shattered, created many different lands of Britainnia. So when someone says "what shard do you play on" that means what server. I like how Origin did this, the only gam really that has a story behind it's servers! You'll notice when you have someone that played UO before any other MMO, they will always call servers, shards. I always do..lol
Ok, if your still interested in checking out Ultima Online, let me know dude. Mainly because if you want to get the old UO feeling, you can play on free shards! They are no where empty either. E-mail me and I'll let you know about them (it's illegal to talk about them here)
my e-mail is
bmae1211@yahoo.com
Hope this helps you
Total time played: 9125 Days, 21 Hours, 29 Minutes, 27 Seconds
Time played this level: 39 Days, 1 Hour, 24 Minutes, 5 Seconds
Not really. It's not at all like WoW gear base. From the last time I played it's more of a treasure hunt gear. But you can also buy it off of player vendors. I'm sure there are some dungeon ones, like from Dragons and the harder monster that require a couple of players to defeat.
They are currently running a 14 day free trial (http://www.uo.com/demo.html). Why don't you check that out first to see how you like the game? You talking about it is tempting me to get back into it! lol
Total time played: 9125 Days, 21 Hours, 29 Minutes, 27 Seconds
Time played this level: 39 Days, 1 Hour, 24 Minutes, 5 Seconds
Oh yea...that's right, it's broken. I remember I tried it a couple weeks ago and it never worked. Well, crap. What you can do is download the UO client (it's not illegal, EA lets you DL it) and try one of the free servers. . .so maybe you can get a taste of the game? OR you can just go buy it and play the official shards. Up to you...
If you wan to contact me..my aim is Hazelambience916 OR my Xfire...MaeEye
Keep me up to date.
Total time played: 9125 Days, 21 Hours, 29 Minutes, 27 Seconds
Time played this level: 39 Days, 1 Hour, 24 Minutes, 5 Seconds
Please go to www.warcraftmovies.com
Look for video's of Otherguy and Jamaz.
Then come back here and still try to say WoW's pvp is fully based on equipment.
WoW is still for a big part based on equipment if both have no skill, but those who have skill will beat the shit out of someone who doesn't, even if that person has much better armor then they have.
the point is. . .Gameloading. . .is that this guy is a wow player. He has 2000 hours into the game and he doesn't care. He's here to know about UO. . .not WoW. To a old time UO player, WoW is very item based. . .because UO didn't matter about items at all. Not one bit. So yes...WoW is very item based, to me. And still is even compared to the new breed of UO, which still requires some skill.
Total time played: 9125 Days, 21 Hours, 29 Minutes, 27 Seconds
Time played this level: 39 Days, 1 Hour, 24 Minutes, 5 Seconds
i miss the fact that UO was all about skill. i could take a relativly new char, with say 65 magery (or enough to cast 6th cirlce spells) and take on a 7xGM ( you have a total of 700 points to put in skills, most people felt that spending them all in only 7 skills made the best char) and whipe the floor with him. i had the old school tank mage (mace fighting and magery) back between 97-2000, and would easily walk away from 2 on 1 fights. granted there were exceptions to every rule, if a moongate opens up and a guy walks through with 2 dragons i was prety well dead hehe.
and you were right about the equipment, i had sets of armor stashed away, thati hardly used hehe. most of the time i wore a death cloack (one of the only items to stay with you after death) a GM leather gorget, and leather gloves. my weapon of choice was a quaterstaff. any time i died it was a quick trip back to the bank, restock and go!
i dont think any game will beat the rush of seeing a red name (a murderer) run onto the screen. that game made you paranoid hehe.
on a side note, i got the post deleted pic from talking about a free server. i thought it was funny so i decided to use it as my avatar.
the missing link in a chain of destruction.
All spelling and typographical errors are based soely on the fact that i just dont care. If you must point out my lack of atention to detail, please do it with a smile.
Here is my take on UO. I played from 1997 until I put down the sword for the last time in December of 2004. UO was a love hate game. When it first started out it was free-for-all and many people HATED this. I did not hate it. If you were in a town you were safe if you were not in a town you were game. The only problem was, it had exploits and bugs that PK's used and could get better than you and kill you. If you were fast and could hide then you could escape...it was a rush
yeah, they had some prety bad exploits, my favorite one i heard of was a mushroom that you could step on, and put you up high enough to walk over tables. in the early days people generaly locked down a few tables so you coudlnt get to all their nice loot.
i kinda miss finding some ones unlocked house...one of my good friends used to run around checking houses all day, and because of him i didnt need to buy regs are equipment for almost 4 months.. for those who played the game can understand how awesome that would be hehe.
the missing link in a chain of destruction.
All spelling and typographical errors are based soely on the fact that i just dont care. If you must point out my lack of atention to detail, please do it with a smile.
Original UO PvP was fun because it was risky.
You kill somone and you never know if they have freinds who will hunt you down. You attack someone and if you lose you lost time you put into your character. Also as someone mentioned this was before voice chat was so common and it was more difficult to co-ordinate you actions with others, so groups fought differently than they do now.
No current game really has any risk, partially because people just don't like the idea of things you earned, not that anyone liked losing stuff in UO either it was just part of the excitement. I think companies now a days are afraid that someone will get PK'd lose a nice item or skill points and unsubscribe taking their entire guild with them or some silly thing.
i was fun being red. i wasnt a full out pk, but enough people made me mad to turn me red. you know the situtation. your hunting liches, or air elementals and some idiot ninja loots your kill while your fighting something else. well that means he has to die! or some little punk is talking about how l33t his skilz are, so you kill him loot his body, and take his head to remind you of the great times you've had.
one time my little brother was working on snooping to build dex, and work up a theif. while i can see how this is anoying to the other guy he decided to insult my little brother in a way i didnt think was very fit. he was 10 at the time. so soon i logged in my main and started snooping the guy, then eventualy started making my way out of town. once outside he attacked me, and i killed him in 2 spells. the clasic explosion ebolt combo sitll makes me smile hehe. i looted every thing from his body and told him to be more careful when he insults some one. i waited for him to come back, then killed him again hehe.
damn this thread is making me sad
the missing link in a chain of destruction.
All spelling and typographical errors are based soely on the fact that i just dont care. If you must point out my lack of atention to detail, please do it with a smile.
1) Completely open PVP (except in town). This made the game a challenge. When you went out into the wilderness you were ALWAYS very alert and paying attention to what was going on. There was always the fear that a PK would jump out and kill you.
2) Compounding that fear was the fact that when you died ANYONE could loot your corpse. People didn't take on risks they weren't fairly certain they could handle. Because death had meaning. If you died you would have to either find a player to rez you or hoof it, in ghost form, to an NPC Healer who would rez you. Then you'd have to hoof it back to your corpse and PRAY nobody had found and looted it.
3) Spellcasting wasn't "Watch the mana bar" while you did have a power bar to be cognizant of you also couldn't cast a spell if you didn't have the proper reagents for the spell. This made spell casters actually think about what they needed to take into combat.
4) Completely open skill system. UO didn't have levels. This is part of what made 100% open PVP work. Whether you were a noob or a 2 year vet it didn't matter. You COULD be killed because the only difference between you and that new player is a slightly better chance to hit. Given the right equipment (which a player crafter could make) a new player could stand up to a PK for enough time for a friend to rescue. 3 or 4 newbies working together could take out a lone pk as well. There wasn't a "10 levels above is invincible" issue with UO because there were no levels.
5) Everyone had the same ammount of health potential. Based upon their stats. If you maxed strength you would have a lot of hp but you'd be weak on the casting or evasion side. If you had a high intelligence you'd have a ton of power to use for casting but you'd be low in health because of it. You had X stat pool. You could move it around based on how you wanted to play but everyone had the same X value, what was different was how they chose to spread it around.
6) Player crafted items. Yes there were 'dropped' items in the game that were "better" than what crafters could make but generally people didn't bother with them unless they were very confident in their abilities. Most people just used player crafted gear as it was very inexpensive. This levelled the playing field and made PVP affordable. You didn't have to go sink 10,000 plat on 1 item. You just find a vendor that had items at a decent price and bought what you needed.
7) Mounts: Something I have always found hillarious is that other MMOs took FOREVER to come up with ridable mounts. UO had them from day 1.
8) Ability to get around. You didn't have to run 40,000 miles to get where you were going if you'd been there before because if you took casting to level 6 you could mark runes and teleport anywhere you had marked a rune for. This made it VERY easy to get around. It forced you to explore so you'd gotten there that "first" time. But once you'd been to a place, if you marked a rune for it, getting back was as simple as selecting the rune and using a level 3 spell "recall" to go there. (Spells maxed at level 9). If you chose NOT to take casting to level 6 because you were more concerned about other areas you could always buy marked runes from other players.
9) The first TRUELY player driven economy. If you wanted a spell you could buy it from a player who would scribe it to a scroll for you. If you wanted armor, weapons, jewelry players made and sold those. If you needed services like teleportation or runes for such, players made sold and provided those services. If you wanted a horse you could pay an NPC a bunch of gold for one or you could pay a player a lower price to tame one for you.
10) A crafting system that was 100% player supplied. If you need ore, wood, vegetables/whatever you could, of course, buy basics from NPC's... but typically you would just go out and gather the materials. (Everyone touts horizons as the groundbreaking "crafting" game but UO did it first.) Need wood? Go cut down a tree. ANY tree... not just certain ones. Need iron? Go wack on the side of a mountain with a pickaxe to get ore...which you would take back to town and smelt into iron, tin, and other needed items.
11) Guild Wars were available. One guild could declare war on another and thus allow players in those guilds to fight each other *anywhere* at any time without having to worry about turning "red" (pk flag).
12) Player housing... This got a little out of hand and is why you now see housing zones, or areas specifically for housing, in modern MMO's. only SWG did the UO model of housing: Slap a house down anywhere there's room to slap one. In SWG they never had a big enough population for this to become a problem because the world was so HUGE. In UO, on the other hand, the world was kind of slow and a few thousand players on 1 shard was enough to make urban sprawl a really serious issue. Having the ability to completely build your own home and decorate it with furniture and such may sound silly but a LOT of people really loved that about UO.
So you see... what made UO great wasn't just it's PvP. Or Just it's Crafting.... it was the fact that all the little pieces to the game worked TOGETHER to create a game in which PVP was fair. Exploring was fun but not tedious. Players had immense impact upon th eir world around them and it truely was a living breathing world.
SWG was the next game to come even remotely close. Unfortunately LucasArts and SOE have ruined that game.
Is it worth playing today? Yes, but not on EA's servers. I play to this day but I can't say where because we're not allowed to talk about those places
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Sig image Pending
Still in: A couple Betas
the pvp was simple, and it gave such an adrenaline rush because everything was at stake
sure that yew bow or gold plate was giving u good advantage 1on1, but whats the point if its a close fight and u are about to loose it all
The good old days in PvP History...
Either you ran or you died... well mostly died....
Plate armor and bows sure gave an advantage in 1-on-1 as they say but hey, PK was never realy fair.
Magic and groups was the best there was if I dont remember wrong...
Sure I dont have any recorded time in any of the programs thats out there but hey I did not know about them and at that time my english was realy limited.... but enough about me....
6 years of Ultima Online (or was it 7? I dont know) has taken its poll and shaped my Playstyle.
Me and a few friends used to be hated PK´s due to our "We gank you policy".
Crafter, Gatherer...as if we cared...
You were either red or dead.
But it got booring after a while, and finaly with EA in control I left Ultima Online for other games.
Totaly changed my way to play too, guess I became soft hearted...
Todays PvP is usualy the same... just some more ganking I guess...
Many claim Trammel took out the fun of being a PK and that the carebears won...
Sure it got harder to find targets but it was fun at same time...
"Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys.
Look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death!"
- Sun Tzu, the Art of War
I remember the old style "Boom Box Killers" and quick look in a chest and BOOM, dead....
Poison was the most fun tool one could have... but expensive unless you had your own Alchemist.
"Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys.
Look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death!"
- Sun Tzu, the Art of War
Sounds like early runescape classic... no banks, loose everything, armour meant nothing (or affordable to everyone), pk anywhere, best items were made by players... Except RSC you could only attack people 4 levels +- of you.
I think games like that are so fun when they first come out because you can have fun at any level, you dont have to grind to lvl 60 to have fun... if your lvl 10 you can go fight other lvl 10's... and when your lvl 20 you can go fight other level 20's...
and because you could have fun at any level you could do crafting stuff and not grind combat cause you didn't have to worry about falling behind.
yes and no. its not like camping and killing the same moster over and over, but you increase your skill by using them. so to increase a melee skill me and friends would deul using the weakest weapon of the class. for maces you would use wands, fecning a dagger, and sward a skining knife i think. to gain magic resistance we could cast firewall and walk through it while friends healed to keep you alive. to increase in magery you had to cast spells. me and my friends would once again work this out into duels, or just random hunting.
some people did grind though, just sitting in one place casting the same spell over and over to gain skill, and they even had programs so you could set up a macro to repeat the process for you. yeah they sooon started banning people for it, but it took out some of the pain. for the most part you only had to grind to get your last few points, other then that they came fairly quickly.
the missing link in a chain of destruction.
All spelling and typographical errors are based soely on the fact that i just dont care. If you must point out my lack of atention to detail, please do it with a smile.