UO was the Best MMO i have played since i started playing MMOs..And I was playing MMO's Since the Bullatin Board System.No Grapghics only words....I will always remember Brining my stats up in Shame and going to fight Lich Lords In deicet dungeon...And remember the See Saw method to gain Tactics and anatomy..LOL....Good Ole days...Before Tammel that is..lol...X-ROADS BABY!!! I am very interested in subscribing again...I played on Lake Superior and Europia...Anyone else play on them shards??
You know, time after time I see all theses threads on here about how we want a sandbox and the graphics don't have to be top end.
Yet hardly any of us are playing Ultima Online.
At least the OP is actually playing it.
You are half correct and half wrong. Of course we would love to play old memorable games again, but just not the same game at its current state. Give me UO when it was back in '99 and believe me, I'd be one of the first subscribers. All the junk that UO is right now isnt the game that I played back then. You tell me another game that will enable you to put a forge, training dummies, chest containers (that holds an almost unlimited amount of items), and NPC vendors you can place outside your home to sell your stuff for you, or most importantly a game that lets you put your house almost anywhere you wanted in the world whether it be right outside a dungeon or out in a secluded forest, or on an island big enough to fit just your house, and believe me, if you ever find another game like that let me know I'll definitely subscribe.
Well Istaria comes close. You can have a forge, a vendor, a vault, and a zillion other things right in your home. Your home has to be on a plot but the plot can be by a forest, mountain, city, desert, island...
Venge
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
It saddens me that I'll probably never play an MMO that I enjoy as much as UO. I just recently packed up my house to take another hiatus but I'm sure I'll be back. I've been returning ever since 1997.
UO gives a world to live in and interact with and the game(play) naturally formed around that. Most games are built around the latter.
Well, OP, I'm glad you tried your hand at something uncoventional and found it rewarding! UO, in my opinion, was the pinnacle of MMO design. In a lot of ways, it still leads the pack.
However, the UO you are playing now, as was stated before, is a shadow (Some people will get that pun) of it's former self. It tried to compete with modern MMO's by going heavily itemized (Thanks, Tom Chilton.. That's right, current WoW lead Dev was once a lowly UO developer..), splitting the world into Tram/Fel (Safe vs. Free for all), and item insurance. These things have detracted a great deal from what made UO what it used to be for a lot of players, so you can only imagine how different and interesting it once was. It wasn't about itemization, it was about expermientation and socalization. Everything could be lost, but everything could be gainned. It was an EXPERIENCE, not game.
It's a shame we can't talk about player-run free shards on these forums. There is one, in particular, that took the core of UO and made it UNBELIEVABLE. Average number of players on this shard exceeds 2.4k - More than most OSI shards I'd wager. It has territorial control with Kings, citizenship, voting, city capture, a player justice system, ship battles, and oh so much more. It ditched the direction of UO to become a game, and made it a real WORLD again that people, not NPC's or devs, control the fate of. There is only one landmass, so it's not a case where people are spread out over multiple empty zones where you can go days without ever seeing another soul. Housing is standardized so you don't have homes that look out of place from the world becuase of how the owners designed it. No neon colors, no elves.. Not even mounts! I'd give a name, but I don't want this thread locked because of it.
To those who answer answer the OP with Darkfall/MO, you have to understand, that's not what UO players want. There is a big difference between UO, and twitch-based, first-person view sandboxes. Sure they have skill systems rather than levels, and at least MO puts a cap on the number of skills you can master to make choices matter, but they are a far, far cry from what UO was, and in some ways, still is.
I also do not think it needs to be 3D to be successful. If someone were to take the UO model, give it better graphics, a modern UI, and create it with early UO in mind, I think it would do wonderfully. I think Richard Garriott may even take a stab at it with his new company. At least I hope so.
I feel you OP. I have never loved an MMO the way I loved UO back in the day. I played the game for nearly 5 years, but I eventually just couldn't get over the massive changes that were made to the game (to its detriment IMO) or the extremely dated graphics. Ever since then, I have been looking for another game that would be a worthy successor, but none of them come close. The only one that was even remotely worthy was Darkfall, but it has far too many glaring design flaws to make it worthy of the title in my opinion...
Im playing Mortal Online again. Despite a bad launch they seem to have their crap together now. The dev's goal is to make a first person sandbox similiar to UO. Surprised I dont see MO mentioned at all yet in this thread.
Because at alunch it was so bad, the worse launch of all tiem i guess adn plsu it was silyl expensive as well. The game felt more like a job than a game. Paying to beta test somthing that was suppose to be a fully worknig MMO was not good.
Ill probally check it out again at some ponit because it had good ideas adn a godo graphics engine behind it, tho it was a big shame the devs managed to make it look like a game from 10 years ago.. sure some parts looks amazing parts they had actually spent time on but then there where parts of the world just had jsut left over from their auto terrain genrator.. miles of exactly the same texture.. could go on forever about how bad it was but i wont hehe
I tried to play UO back a few years ago but I liek 3d games too much now so could not get into it.
As for alternatives..
Darkfall - Very good MMORPG with fps style combat, so caleld grind has been reduced to next to nothing now and the hacks mentioned earlier no longer work as far as i know.
Xsyon - having a few launch issues at the moment due to the sheer numbers of peopel who actually pre-ordered the game ni the last week before launch, i dont think the dev team where expecting it. Tho its getting better every day.
MO - Above poster mentinoed this, on launch it was bad just bad, as for what its like now i could not tell you but i know there was a post boasting how the servers had been up for 2 days earlier in the week LOL. Also this was silyl expensive at launch.
Earthrise - Like MO silyl expensive and has had tons of issues.
I just tried the Trial of UO for a few days, just to have a look. Last time I logged in was in 2002.
It is horrible now. It is heavily itemized, and they took out every single thing, that smells of effort. Today you can get armor that gives you bonuses, that allows you to cast spells without using regs. No item will actually break. It will go to 0 endurance and still sit on your body (and I believe that it will still give you the bonuses). Items can be insured, so there is no risk, not even when dying in PvE. The armor I got from some advanced player, that wanted to help me out, even made sure, that I never had to cast light or use torches.
In Trammel I could run through all monsters, whereas in the early days I would have to "shove through", which was only possible with full stamina, and thus alot of monsters could box you in, forcing you to react fast with stamina potions or a well placed teleport.
All tension is gone from the game. It is not dangerous to go to dungeons. The monsters can not really surprise you, as you can just run as you like (you cannot be boxed in). Even if you unfortunately die, you are insured, meaning you will have a small trip back, and thats it. No regs, means that you can level up your casting abilities for free. Since the casting was free, you spent no money on reagents, which was quite a big sink early on - so big, that it was very hard to start out your first character as a caster.
Earlier UO was so rough, that it was a battle to wring out skill points from it. You had to be careful when gearing up, you would have to be careful how many regs you brought - too little and you would run out, often in a critical situation, too many and you would be at risk if you died to monsters or to PKs. All the time in a dungeon would be nervously watching the edge of the screen, so you could react fast in case of incoming PK's. You had to at all times have your pouches trapped, to avoid PK Paralyze spell (and also some monsters used Paralyze), if they got in one, before you could recall. If you were well prepared, you were as good as un-PK-able.
Old UO was so damn exciting, that I could not log out, and only did so begrudgingly if duties called, and I would be eager to get back home to get back in. That feeling is completely gone now. Everything is safe, and there is no pressure anywhere, not even financially. I had tens of thousands of gold on a two day old character with 55 in Provoking and little else.
When my armor finally got worn down (that means endurance go to 0, it will not break), I went looking for other players or shops to get it repaired. I managed to run around half of the mainland Trammel world (Britain and north) without encountering a single player. Around half of the houses were empty, unbuilt lots (you see the foundation only). The few vendors on houses I encountered, were empty. I never met another player, and this was in late afternoon (4-6 PM), which would have been a very active time back in the days, after the kids came back from school. Britain bank I met two guys ever. The first was the one who gave me the armor, the other was AFK, and I never got in contact with him. I then went to Fellucca, because that used to be my home before I quit (I dispised Trammel), and also here it was completely empty. I had to go to a moongate to some new shard (I don't remember the name), that seems to exist only to hold player housing. It was a giant shopping mall, and here I saw some players, although not many.
UO has not failed because of aging graphics. The graphics are quite nice, and 2D has something that 3D doesn't.
UO has failed because it has no tension anymore. And with a very meager population, there is no interactions with other people. Add to that an enormous landmass (Trammel, Fellucca, 2nd age (or what it was called) and 3 other shards), and you have effectively a singleplayer game, when you enter as a new player.
IMO the biggest mistake they made, was to put in Trammel. With the harsh death penalties to reds (statloss), they had already curbed the worst PK'ing. By taking out the last risk, they took out alot of the tension, that is needed to make games exciting. Other mistakes were to one by one remove all cumbersomeness/negativities, such as blocking players/monsters, regs to cast spells, need for lights, loss of items (with insurance) and probably others, that I would have discovered, had I played longer than 2 days.
I don't know what lessons EA has taken from the failure of UO, but I am certain they are taking the wrong ones. If this game was good, it would still be able to compete to this day. The technology behind it is as good as other MMO's. Aging is not the problem.
Publish 16 removed any sort of decent penalties for murderers. UO would not had survived on Felucca alone.
At publish 16 the disaster had already happened.
And yes, UO could have survived. The only word you have on it dying, is from the devs, and IMO they were lying. There were no other indicators, and I never experienced lesser activity while I was playing in the old days.
EQ is also a very harsh game, so it was not because of the harshness, that they left. EQ was new and had 3D, they HAD to expect some competition. But instead of just taking it, they began changing their game into unrecognition.
UO could have existed today with a very decent population (100-150k), if they hadn't ripped the heart out of it.
Of course, they would be looking through rose colored glasses when speaking of such tales, but even then, does anybody talk about WAR, WoW, CoH (sorry to repeat the same MMOs but you get the idea) in the same way, despite the age difference?
I would much rather hear about an epic, improptu adventure in UO than a story about a few angry players in a raid and how one of them got kicked for no reason (which seems to be a popular story among the newer games).
Yes, people still do actually. I have some hilarious pranks in WoW and some hilarious adventures in CoH, but DEFINITELY in WAR.
When WAR first released, it was a BLAST! I have some amazing stories to tell.
No other game have I ever played where I could charge completely alone over a bridge/hill screaming to my inevitable suicide, only for me to invoke so much fear in the enemy that their entire army runs away, leaving me to stumble to a stop at the end of the bridge, roaring taunts at them as I pride in the fact I singlehandedly stopped an entire army from taking the objective, even though I should have been slaughtered in mere seconds.
My CHOSEN alone invoked so much fear, when the enemy thought "OH @#$@, it's Alecto!!! We can't beat him AND the army behind him! RUN BACK TO BASE!!!!!!" LOL... not a single person behind me.
Then there was the time where, as a Chosen again, it was a tie among points with only a few seconds left, and I was 10% life protecting an objective alone against a group of players, with only 30..20...10 seconds left on the clock...and at the 1 second mark, I had 1 single hit point, and at 0 they killed me, but it was too late and our team won the game by a SINGLE point 1 to 0.
In CoH, I played with my best friend and sister as we each dressed up as "beach" humans. My friend a huge buff black guy with a fro, me a 'radical' surfer "dude", and my sister a stereotypical beach bunny. We'd sit around together and anytime someone went by, I'd tell a ridiculous story such as, "One time this guy littered a hamburger wrapper on the beach, so we took his head and scraped it against the curb." Then we would all line up together, and /emote at the exact same time,
And that's what we call..
Surfer Dude: BEACH JUSTICE!!
Buff Guy: BEACH JUSTICE!!
Beach Babe: BEACH JUSTICE!!
We created a following and people gathered around us as we improved ridiculous punishments for tiny offenses (littering, complimenting a girl, etc.)
In WoW, we did the same thing, but we were trolls and we danced naked to jamaican rap we would improv.
In Tibia, I singlehandedly created a 50 player train of Hobo's colored Poop Brown, and we walked as a snake into a dungeon. 50 players were following me in a singlefile line, and they all looked IDENTICAL to me, a brown homeless hobo.
If being a developer means being quiet, mature, well-spoken, and disconnected from the community, then by all means do me a favor and believe I'm not one.
Comeback when you have played it for months and then see if you still have same opinion, and Asherons Call was alot better then games you mentioned.
I come from old days and i honestly dont wanne go back to 2D games like UO noway.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Its quite simple. Those types of game exist. They are underplayed for a reason.
Very few people want a game where it takes 20 minutes to kill a mob, you can't solo, and you lose hours worth of work upon death. =
...I don't know where to begin with you. I shouldn't even bother responding cause you clearly didn't read my last post, despite the fact that you quoted it. (mind boggled)
Those games DON'T exist right now. And I can't remember any game where it took people 20 minutes to kill a mob, or a game where you couldn't solo, and EQ was pretty much the only game where you lost hours of work upon death. This is the problem with you WoW kiddies, you read some "war stories" from the EQ days and assume that every single one of the dozens and dozens of MMOs that existed before WoW was the same as EQ, because you can't imagine an MMO genre without clones. All MMOs back then were very VERY different from one another. And no I dont meant "this one is EQ with Rifts, this one is EQ with cut scenes!" I mean radically different, so you WoW players need to stop pretending they were all 1998 EverQuest.
I agree with the OP in that there is no longer any sort of adventure in modern day MMO's . They've made them so handfed i'm suprised they don't have a quest auto-pilot so you don't even have to play the game to level. In the beginning of MMO's games that were produced were not only fun , difficult and adventurous, they were game that drove us to play. There was reason to play , reason to log in and do what you do. Blizzard appeals to a market that wants easy , brainless and non thinking gaming but they haven't a clue about the social element or community of a MMO.
I love games that require me to stay on top of the game and if i don't it comes with a cost. If Guild Wars 2 wants to be a show stopper then it better have many of the PVP elements that games like Dark Age of Camelot have. Most of us long time veterans want challenge, adventure and most of all not to be freaking hand fed everything. I actually remember getting lost many times in old school MMO's which yeah were frustrating but made me pay more attention to what i was doing and where i was going since i would have to be able to find my way back home without a GPS radar/map. In fact many veteran players served as guides that were in great need.
I think thats the selling feature of old vs new MMO's. In old school MMO's you needed friends, allies and the likes to succeed. Group make up and ability was a game breaker. Players were ok as a single but could be a monsterous machine in a well oiled group. UO didn't have fancy graphics but it had the thing todays MMO"s lack. I want to see niche games come to market. I would love to see adult only games where you have to be 21 years or older to play and have age verification. Dark Age of Camelot and its design prior to being made easy mode was the best combined PVP/PVE game ever made. They need to reinvent it with the same core principles and there is no question not even to date that it had the best combat mechanics ever created in a game.
Yes, people still do actually. I have some hilarious pranks in WoW and some hilarious adventures in CoH, but DEFINITELY in WAR.
When WAR first released, it was a BLAST! I have some amazing stories to tell.
No other game have I ever played where I could charge completely alone over a bridge/hill screaming to my inevitable suicide, only for me to invoke so much fear in the enemy that their entire army runs away, leaving me to stumble to a stop at the end of the bridge, roaring taunts at them as I pride in the fact I singlehandedly stopped an entire army from taking the objective, even though I should have been slaughtered in mere seconds.
My CHOSEN alone invoked so much fear, when the enemy thought "OH @#$@, it's Alecto!!! We can't beat him AND the army behind him! RUN BACK TO BASE!!!!!!" LOL... not a single person behind me.
Then there was the time where, as a Chosen again, it was a tie among points with only a few seconds left, and I was 10% life protecting an objective alone against a group of players, with only 30..20...10 seconds left on the clock...and at the 1 second mark, I had 1 single hit point, and at 0 they killed me, but it was too late and our team won the game by a SINGLE point 1 to 0.
In CoH, I played with my best friend and sister as we each dressed up as "beach" humans. My friend a huge buff black guy with a fro, me a 'radical' surfer "dude", and my sister a stereotypical beach bunny. We'd sit around together and anytime someone went by, I'd tell a ridiculous story such as, "One time this guy littered a hamburger wrapper on the beach, so we took his head and scraped it against the curb." Then we would all line up together, and /emote at the exact same time,
And that's what we call..
Surfer Dude: BEACH JUSTICE!!
Buff Guy: BEACH JUSTICE!!
Beach Babe: BEACH JUSTICE!!
We created a following and people gathered around us as we improved ridiculous punishments for tiny offenses (littering, complimenting a girl, etc.)
In WoW, we did the same thing, but we were trolls and we danced naked to jamaican rap we would improv.
In Tibia, I singlehandedly created a 50 player train of Hobo's colored Poop Brown, and we walked as a snake into a dungeon. 50 players were following me in a singlefile line, and they all looked IDENTICAL to me, a brown homeless hobo.
So you won a scenario by a point and you had noobs run from a tank class... Yeah i'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no, people really do not talk about the likes of WAR in the same way as they do UO, DAoC, pre CU SWG and EVE.
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
i really enjoyed the OP and wonder if the OP has ever tried eve.
the only game to have come out in the past 7 years or so to really feel like a "sequel" to UO.
RIP Ribbitribbitt you are missed, kid.
Currently Playing EVE, ESO
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
Blame it on the mainstreaming of the video gaming hobby... It's not that it won't sell, it's that it won't sell 12,000,000 copies. I do not think that I look back on my fond times playing UO, E&B or AO back in the 1997-2004 era with rose tinted glasses at all. Games in my opinion were better back then. I obviously don't mean graphically or technically... you know what I mean. The problem came when people realized that large profits could be made from games. So started the pandering to the lowest common denominator in that persuit of Blizzard-like profitability. It destroyed Ultima Online, which led to me ultimately quitting UO after 9 years, and led to EA shutting down E&B. There just wasn't room for any niches or smaller communities in gaming anymore. It became about nothing but selling boxes... and that's why we're where we're at today. Think about this, that UO that has you so engrossed today was 110% better back in 1997 before EA ruined it.
Mad props on making it through that. Most would have given up and just said why were were were at today
I played the UO trial last summer and had a great time, though like in all oldschool MMORPGs, I get discouraged thinking I'll never catch up to the veterans as well as the fact that I get that sinking feeling in my stomach that I'm playing a game whose best days are far behind.
Shame, perhaps if I had been older during my EQ days, I would have been more of a UO or Anarchy Online fan as opposed to a 13-year old Everquest fanboy.
Comments
UO was the Best MMO i have played since i started playing MMOs..And I was playing MMO's Since the Bullatin Board System.No Grapghics only words....I will always remember Brining my stats up in Shame and going to fight Lich Lords In deicet dungeon...And remember the See Saw method to gain Tactics and anatomy..LOL....Good Ole days...Before Tammel that is..lol...X-ROADS BABY!!! I am very interested in subscribing again...I played on Lake Superior and Europia...Anyone else play on them shards??
Well Istaria comes close. You can have a forge, a vendor, a vault, and a zillion other things right in your home. Your home has to be on a plot but the plot can be by a forest, mountain, city, desert, island...
Venge
It saddens me that I'll probably never play an MMO that I enjoy as much as UO. I just recently packed up my house to take another hiatus but I'm sure I'll be back. I've been returning ever since 1997.
UO gives a world to live in and interact with and the game(play) naturally formed around that. Most games are built around the latter.
UO2 = the original release version of SWG (UO2 got canned and Koster just ported his design over to Star Wars... a horribly bad idea.)
Well, OP, I'm glad you tried your hand at something uncoventional and found it rewarding! UO, in my opinion, was the pinnacle of MMO design. In a lot of ways, it still leads the pack.
However, the UO you are playing now, as was stated before, is a shadow (Some people will get that pun) of it's former self. It tried to compete with modern MMO's by going heavily itemized (Thanks, Tom Chilton.. That's right, current WoW lead Dev was once a lowly UO developer..), splitting the world into Tram/Fel (Safe vs. Free for all), and item insurance. These things have detracted a great deal from what made UO what it used to be for a lot of players, so you can only imagine how different and interesting it once was. It wasn't about itemization, it was about expermientation and socalization. Everything could be lost, but everything could be gainned. It was an EXPERIENCE, not game.
It's a shame we can't talk about player-run free shards on these forums. There is one, in particular, that took the core of UO and made it UNBELIEVABLE. Average number of players on this shard exceeds 2.4k - More than most OSI shards I'd wager. It has territorial control with Kings, citizenship, voting, city capture, a player justice system, ship battles, and oh so much more. It ditched the direction of UO to become a game, and made it a real WORLD again that people, not NPC's or devs, control the fate of. There is only one landmass, so it's not a case where people are spread out over multiple empty zones where you can go days without ever seeing another soul. Housing is standardized so you don't have homes that look out of place from the world becuase of how the owners designed it. No neon colors, no elves.. Not even mounts! I'd give a name, but I don't want this thread locked because of it.
To those who answer answer the OP with Darkfall/MO, you have to understand, that's not what UO players want. There is a big difference between UO, and twitch-based, first-person view sandboxes. Sure they have skill systems rather than levels, and at least MO puts a cap on the number of skills you can master to make choices matter, but they are a far, far cry from what UO was, and in some ways, still is.
I also do not think it needs to be 3D to be successful. If someone were to take the UO model, give it better graphics, a modern UI, and create it with early UO in mind, I think it would do wonderfully. I think Richard Garriott may even take a stab at it with his new company. At least I hope so.
Anyway, enjoy your journey!
I feel you OP. I have never loved an MMO the way I loved UO back in the day. I played the game for nearly 5 years, but I eventually just couldn't get over the massive changes that were made to the game (to its detriment IMO) or the extremely dated graphics. Ever since then, I have been looking for another game that would be a worthy successor, but none of them come close. The only one that was even remotely worthy was Darkfall, but it has far too many glaring design flaws to make it worthy of the title in my opinion...
Actually, there were 3 attempts at a UO sequel that got canned.
One was the real UO2, where Todd McFarlane was brought on for creature designs.
The second was UOX, a bastardized hybrid between MMO and Single Player.
The third was a lesser known one, that actually tried to make UO with real 3D graphics. That didn't get far.
So don't look to EA for a sequel. They just won't do it. Gotta spend 300 million on a Star Wars themed clone of WoW.....
Some of us are... We just know where the good versions of UO are, and it's not the EA/OSI servers.. And we can't talk about them here.
Because at alunch it was so bad, the worse launch of all tiem i guess adn plsu it was silyl expensive as well. The game felt more like a job than a game. Paying to beta test somthing that was suppose to be a fully worknig MMO was not good.
Ill probally check it out again at some ponit because it had good ideas adn a godo graphics engine behind it, tho it was a big shame the devs managed to make it look like a game from 10 years ago.. sure some parts looks amazing parts they had actually spent time on but then there where parts of the world just had jsut left over from their auto terrain genrator.. miles of exactly the same texture.. could go on forever about how bad it was but i wont hehe
I tried to play UO back a few years ago but I liek 3d games too much now so could not get into it.
As for alternatives..
Darkfall - Very good MMORPG with fps style combat, so caleld grind has been reduced to next to nothing now and the hacks mentioned earlier no longer work as far as i know.
Xsyon - having a few launch issues at the moment due to the sheer numbers of peopel who actually pre-ordered the game ni the last week before launch, i dont think the dev team where expecting it. Tho its getting better every day.
MO - Above poster mentinoed this, on launch it was bad just bad, as for what its like now i could not tell you but i know there was a post boasting how the servers had been up for 2 days earlier in the week LOL. Also this was silyl expensive at launch.
Earthrise - Like MO silyl expensive and has had tons of issues.
I just tried the Trial of UO for a few days, just to have a look. Last time I logged in was in 2002.
It is horrible now. It is heavily itemized, and they took out every single thing, that smells of effort. Today you can get armor that gives you bonuses, that allows you to cast spells without using regs. No item will actually break. It will go to 0 endurance and still sit on your body (and I believe that it will still give you the bonuses). Items can be insured, so there is no risk, not even when dying in PvE. The armor I got from some advanced player, that wanted to help me out, even made sure, that I never had to cast light or use torches.
In Trammel I could run through all monsters, whereas in the early days I would have to "shove through", which was only possible with full stamina, and thus alot of monsters could box you in, forcing you to react fast with stamina potions or a well placed teleport.
All tension is gone from the game. It is not dangerous to go to dungeons. The monsters can not really surprise you, as you can just run as you like (you cannot be boxed in). Even if you unfortunately die, you are insured, meaning you will have a small trip back, and thats it. No regs, means that you can level up your casting abilities for free. Since the casting was free, you spent no money on reagents, which was quite a big sink early on - so big, that it was very hard to start out your first character as a caster.
Earlier UO was so rough, that it was a battle to wring out skill points from it. You had to be careful when gearing up, you would have to be careful how many regs you brought - too little and you would run out, often in a critical situation, too many and you would be at risk if you died to monsters or to PKs. All the time in a dungeon would be nervously watching the edge of the screen, so you could react fast in case of incoming PK's. You had to at all times have your pouches trapped, to avoid PK Paralyze spell (and also some monsters used Paralyze), if they got in one, before you could recall. If you were well prepared, you were as good as un-PK-able.
Old UO was so damn exciting, that I could not log out, and only did so begrudgingly if duties called, and I would be eager to get back home to get back in. That feeling is completely gone now. Everything is safe, and there is no pressure anywhere, not even financially. I had tens of thousands of gold on a two day old character with 55 in Provoking and little else.
When my armor finally got worn down (that means endurance go to 0, it will not break), I went looking for other players or shops to get it repaired. I managed to run around half of the mainland Trammel world (Britain and north) without encountering a single player. Around half of the houses were empty, unbuilt lots (you see the foundation only). The few vendors on houses I encountered, were empty. I never met another player, and this was in late afternoon (4-6 PM), which would have been a very active time back in the days, after the kids came back from school. Britain bank I met two guys ever. The first was the one who gave me the armor, the other was AFK, and I never got in contact with him. I then went to Fellucca, because that used to be my home before I quit (I dispised Trammel), and also here it was completely empty. I had to go to a moongate to some new shard (I don't remember the name), that seems to exist only to hold player housing. It was a giant shopping mall, and here I saw some players, although not many.
UO has not failed because of aging graphics. The graphics are quite nice, and 2D has something that 3D doesn't.
UO has failed because it has no tension anymore. And with a very meager population, there is no interactions with other people. Add to that an enormous landmass (Trammel, Fellucca, 2nd age (or what it was called) and 3 other shards), and you have effectively a singleplayer game, when you enter as a new player.
IMO the biggest mistake they made, was to put in Trammel. With the harsh death penalties to reds (statloss), they had already curbed the worst PK'ing. By taking out the last risk, they took out alot of the tension, that is needed to make games exciting. Other mistakes were to one by one remove all cumbersomeness/negativities, such as blocking players/monsters, regs to cast spells, need for lights, loss of items (with insurance) and probably others, that I would have discovered, had I played longer than 2 days.
I don't know what lessons EA has taken from the failure of UO, but I am certain they are taking the wrong ones. If this game was good, it would still be able to compete to this day. The technology behind it is as good as other MMO's. Aging is not the problem.
Publish 16 removed any sort of decent penalties for murderers. UO would not had survived on Felucca alone.
At publish 16 the disaster had already happened.
And yes, UO could have survived. The only word you have on it dying, is from the devs, and IMO they were lying. There were no other indicators, and I never experienced lesser activity while I was playing in the old days.
EQ is also a very harsh game, so it was not because of the harshness, that they left. EQ was new and had 3D, they HAD to expect some competition. But instead of just taking it, they began changing their game into unrecognition.
UO could have existed today with a very decent population (100-150k), if they hadn't ripped the heart out of it.
Yes, people still do actually. I have some hilarious pranks in WoW and some hilarious adventures in CoH, but DEFINITELY in WAR.
When WAR first released, it was a BLAST! I have some amazing stories to tell.
No other game have I ever played where I could charge completely alone over a bridge/hill screaming to my inevitable suicide, only for me to invoke so much fear in the enemy that their entire army runs away, leaving me to stumble to a stop at the end of the bridge, roaring taunts at them as I pride in the fact I singlehandedly stopped an entire army from taking the objective, even though I should have been slaughtered in mere seconds.
My CHOSEN alone invoked so much fear, when the enemy thought "OH @#$@, it's Alecto!!! We can't beat him AND the army behind him! RUN BACK TO BASE!!!!!!" LOL... not a single person behind me.
Then there was the time where, as a Chosen again, it was a tie among points with only a few seconds left, and I was 10% life protecting an objective alone against a group of players, with only 30..20...10 seconds left on the clock...and at the 1 second mark, I had 1 single hit point, and at 0 they killed me, but it was too late and our team won the game by a SINGLE point 1 to 0.
In CoH, I played with my best friend and sister as we each dressed up as "beach" humans. My friend a huge buff black guy with a fro, me a 'radical' surfer "dude", and my sister a stereotypical beach bunny. We'd sit around together and anytime someone went by, I'd tell a ridiculous story such as, "One time this guy littered a hamburger wrapper on the beach, so we took his head and scraped it against the curb." Then we would all line up together, and /emote at the exact same time,
And that's what we call..
Surfer Dude: BEACH JUSTICE!!
Buff Guy: BEACH JUSTICE!!
Beach Babe: BEACH JUSTICE!!
We created a following and people gathered around us as we improved ridiculous punishments for tiny offenses (littering, complimenting a girl, etc.)
In WoW, we did the same thing, but we were trolls and we danced naked to jamaican rap we would improv.
In Tibia, I singlehandedly created a 50 player train of Hobo's colored Poop Brown, and we walked as a snake into a dungeon. 50 players were following me in a singlefile line, and they all looked IDENTICAL to me, a brown homeless hobo.
If being a developer means being quiet, mature, well-spoken, and disconnected from the community, then by all means do me a favor and believe I'm not one.
Comeback when you have played it for months and then see if you still have same opinion, and Asherons Call was alot better then games you mentioned.
I come from old days and i honestly dont wanne go back to 2D games like UO noway.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
...I don't know where to begin with you. I shouldn't even bother responding cause you clearly didn't read my last post, despite the fact that you quoted it. (mind boggled)
Those games DON'T exist right now. And I can't remember any game where it took people 20 minutes to kill a mob, or a game where you couldn't solo, and EQ was pretty much the only game where you lost hours of work upon death. This is the problem with you WoW kiddies, you read some "war stories" from the EQ days and assume that every single one of the dozens and dozens of MMOs that existed before WoW was the same as EQ, because you can't imagine an MMO genre without clones. All MMOs back then were very VERY different from one another. And no I dont meant "this one is EQ with Rifts, this one is EQ with cut scenes!" I mean radically different, so you WoW players need to stop pretending they were all 1998 EverQuest.
EQ came out on 3/16/99, not 1998, just FYI
I agree with the OP in that there is no longer any sort of adventure in modern day MMO's . They've made them so handfed i'm suprised they don't have a quest auto-pilot so you don't even have to play the game to level. In the beginning of MMO's games that were produced were not only fun , difficult and adventurous, they were game that drove us to play. There was reason to play , reason to log in and do what you do. Blizzard appeals to a market that wants easy , brainless and non thinking gaming but they haven't a clue about the social element or community of a MMO.
I love games that require me to stay on top of the game and if i don't it comes with a cost. If Guild Wars 2 wants to be a show stopper then it better have many of the PVP elements that games like Dark Age of Camelot have. Most of us long time veterans want challenge, adventure and most of all not to be freaking hand fed everything. I actually remember getting lost many times in old school MMO's which yeah were frustrating but made me pay more attention to what i was doing and where i was going since i would have to be able to find my way back home without a GPS radar/map. In fact many veteran players served as guides that were in great need.
I think thats the selling feature of old vs new MMO's. In old school MMO's you needed friends, allies and the likes to succeed. Group make up and ability was a game breaker. Players were ok as a single but could be a monsterous machine in a well oiled group. UO didn't have fancy graphics but it had the thing todays MMO"s lack. I want to see niche games come to market. I would love to see adult only games where you have to be 21 years or older to play and have age verification. Dark Age of Camelot and its design prior to being made easy mode was the best combined PVP/PVE game ever made. They need to reinvent it with the same core principles and there is no question not even to date that it had the best combat mechanics ever created in a game.
So you won a scenario by a point and you had noobs run from a tank class... Yeah i'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no, people really do not talk about the likes of WAR in the same way as they do UO, DAoC, pre CU SWG and EVE.
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
i really enjoyed the OP and wonder if the OP has ever tried eve.
the only game to have come out in the past 7 years or so to really feel like a "sequel" to UO.
RIP Ribbitribbitt you are missed, kid.
Currently Playing EVE, ESO
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
Dwight D Eisenhower
My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.
Henry Rollins
I have wanted to play Eve but actually never gotten around to it, though I probably should check it out.
Probably wouldn't want to pay a sub for it unless I really enjoyed it, I'm not too into the whole SciFi space-ship scene.
I will look into it though, thank you for reminding me to.
Mad props on making it through that. Most would have given up and just said why were were were at today
I played the UO trial last summer and had a great time, though like in all oldschool MMORPGs, I get discouraged thinking I'll never catch up to the veterans as well as the fact that I get that sinking feeling in my stomach that I'm playing a game whose best days are far behind.
Shame, perhaps if I had been older during my EQ days, I would have been more of a UO or Anarchy Online fan as opposed to a 13-year old Everquest fanboy.