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Life without Ultima Online
SkullyWoods
Member Posts: 183
I often see UO referenced as the glory days of many gamers. When it was released I was only 7 years old and didn't see my own computer till much later. Needless to say I missed it and many other titles that are often referred to as the golden age of the genre. But to keep things simple, by missing out on UO specifically, what things did I miss? By the way I know the game is still around but obviously the experience would have been different during it's time. Has my online gaming life been permanently marred by starting during the WoW era?
#TeamVainlash
Why did Marceline's dad eat her fries? I mean...cause she bought them and they were hers...
Comments
My top 3 are:
UO's non-combat features really sets it apart. Sure most games have craftng but in UO you could define yourself with your non-combat skills.
Create my own character, not what and how some developer decided I should play my class.
The Crafting/economy of UO were great. UO could be just played. You didn't have to farm X boss to get Y gear so you could continue on.
Ultima Online puts RPG in its place.
They've got clothing that would match any type of person you wanted to be.
The skill lists was amazing, you can always mix and match your playstyle.
ALMOST everything you see in the game, you can pick up and interact with it. It also gives you countless decoration ideas you can do in your house.
One of the favortie things I liked about UO was being able to set NPC's by your house and you can sell whatever you wanted. It made adventuring and exploring that much more fun. Out in the middle of no where you've run out of reagents or bandages or died and lost some gear. You could always run around houses in the wilderness to get what you needed.
Another thing I liked was hanging around areas where you can hide and when you see some passerby's I would run at them and steal something from their bags, cast the Incognito spell (spell that changes your appearance and name), hide again and pretend that they're looking for the wrong person.
I was only 12 years old at the time. It was the best game my brother introduced me to play. My first ogre encounter was the most scary experience ever! But when I killed him it made it that much more rewarding. The stat gear did help give you an edge in pvp, but that doesnt mean you cant beat someone just wearing full sets of crafted GM gear, you just had to know how to engage the battle.
Truly amazing game!
Sounds like freedom was paramount in UO and was the key highlight of your experiences. Glad you guys had a blast playing and I wish I could have been a part of that time. Are there any games nowadays that you feel give you that same sense of freedom you experienced while playing UO? ArchAge seems like it will be very successful in that regard and I'm looking forward to it's release over here.
#TeamVainlash
Why did Marceline's dad eat her fries? I mean...cause she bought them and they were hers...
I never played UO either as I was quite the active youngin. I tried playing it a year ago and just couldn't help but feel like I missed the gravy train.
I wouldn't worry too much about it, but it's definitely safe to say that we missed out on something special in MMO history.
There were alot of games that tried to "copycat" UO for instance Darkfall and Mortal Online comes to mind. WHat they do wrong is the game focuses heavily on PvP.
I would say ArcheAge would come close, but we really cant tell until we can play it. IMO UO is just still on a whole different level. UO has its share of ups and downs, but what really set it apart is how people make their own quests set up their own rewards, or how if you feel like being an author you could write books and distribute them, or being a bard wasn't just grouping up to play songs to benefit in PvE. You'll actually see and hear bards in towns playing their instrument singing their poems. Or how you can pick up a treasure map and find its location and dig up the treasure chest. Or if you are an animal lover you could tame animals and even dragons and evil horses. Its Role Playing at its greatest.
There will be games out there that will take bits and pieces of Ultima Online, but it will never be as good as Ultima Online. I don't know about how the older gamers feel about UO. The 2D version still is and always will be better to me, I feel that many gamers would still play it, if they would go back to a certain time and keep that ruleset. There were griefers out there, but griefers now days take it to a whole new level thats for sure.
Ooo oOooOo ooO oO OOoOO OoOO
You may be better off. Those that started with early MMOs witnessed MMOs getting less social, less diverse, less well made, smaller, simpler, soulless... whereas you, to you all MMOs must seem about average/on par with ones you've already played.
Ignorance is bliss.
As for the amazing things possible in UO, I recommend.
http://www.aschulze.net/ultima/stories1.htm
and
http://uothief.com/nonchad/main.html
And words from the creator himself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4xfrVUj_c0&feature=relmfu#t=18m12s
The closest I've come to that original UO feeling of being dropped into a world and left to set my own goals is playing minecraft.
In terms of MMOs, the only ones that come close are Darkfall and Vanguard (though VG is much more like a themepark/WoW style game).
Salem, an MMO in beta, is quite similar though.
There "was" an MMO called Linkrealms thats supposedly similar to Ultima, it was 2D based too, but I haven't heard much about it for a while.
Edit: http://linkrealms.com/
But I was a Trammie (I briefly tried early UO then left until Trammel was added).
I liked how you could take things out of your bags and just throw it on the ground for someone else to pick up.
I really loathe dragging and dropping to DESTROY an item now liek in all "MODERN" mmos.
Me and my Little bro started on uo when it came out i must say there has yet to be a game with the comunity that uo made you felt part of something i made lifelong friends form a game and i never played 1 game for so many years as i did uo i enjoyed building my houses and finding the coolest places in the game like the star cave how many women i met in game and took them to the star game and we would just chat all night long , crazy i know but it was a difrent time i rember when wow came out wa sfresh new and i was trying to get all my friends to join up and they wouldnt leave the comunity of uo i played all the games out darkfall and mortal had a glimps of uo in them but it was not the same the luster in my eyes quickley faided i do miss uo i wish they would have upgraded there grfxand kept it uptodate it would still have millions and milliuons opf players i new hole familys that would play uo now im searchering for that comunity but yet to find it again
By far one of the best features of UO.
No joke, I absolutely LOVED being a ghost and basically haunting people when I tried to talk to them. It was a nifty little feature that actually made death feel like it was part of the game, rather than a speedbump on the road to max level.
To me, though, what truly set UO apart was that your character was really living in the world. You could live as a crafter or a beggar. Each playstyle was completely valid and supported. You could be an adventurer and slay dragons, something most MMOs do now. But with them, that's pretty much the defining aspect of the game, slaying dragons. In UO it was something you could do or completely ignore with no detriment whatsoever for choosing either path. You could decide on a backstory for your character, and instead of just playing out that story in RP text, there were actual mechanics built into the game itself to support almost anything you could think of.
Now it's true that not everything worked as expected. And a lot of UO is clunky, and became dated even within a few years of its launch. But there's still so much to UO that has never been replicated because everyone keeps trying to take one aspect of the game and claim that's what made it great. But it was all of the major things, and all of the tiny little things together that made it great.
There are sort of two answers to this.
One is covered pretty well by everyone above me. Basically in UO everything was possible. You could be any profession, there was a real economy, leaving the town was risky, dungeons were explored instead of cleared for loot, and it felt like a living breathing world. A game with all of the features that UO had just doesn't happen in 3D anymore (yet at least).
The second answer is that this was the first huge MMORPG. It catered to everyone: adventurers, PvPers, crafters, etc. If anyone wanted to engage in these activities with an online persona they had to play UO. This helped create the vibrant world that many of us are so fond of. Now, if you want PvP you play a PvP MMO. If you want crafting you play MMORPGs with crafting components that don't give you as much risk of dying and losing your items. This part of UO can't be recreated because players that don't want to interact with other players don't have to anymore.
Freedom was paramount in old school MMORPGs. I'd say that idea persisted until about 2004-2005. UO was the first to literally let players do as much as was possible with their imagination. It was a matter of mechanics to allow it. Freedom in building your character, freedom to do what you you wanted, and the game wasn't shoehorning you into a specific path.
Modern MMORPGs feel like I'm trying to enjoy playing basketball, but I'm tethered down with a ball and chain that limits what I can do.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Still $13 a month for a crap game that they never updated. I was expecting old 2D graphics, that was not a problem. But the crappy UI, the crappy resolution of the screen, and the drop down boxes on top of other drop down boxes fill the screen made it impossible to get into...........So the game basically sucks all for $13 a month.
Old school, and a game that was never updated to make things nicer are two different things.
Very much this. And yes OP, it was about the freedom, but it was that the freedom was done well. Most importantly though, the community in those days suited such games, these days such a community simply does not exist anymore.
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
Books could be written about the attempts to update the UO client. When people have been playing a game for years, getting people to buy into a change is hard.
Changing the graphics of a game that people have been playing daily for years is a jarring experience. It's especially bad when people have invested a lot of time and effort into crafting a home - having it suddenly look different cracks the illusion of ownership.
When you have two clients for a game, people at the competitive edge are going to fixate on performance over graphics - and that leads to a cascade of rationalizations down through the community as to why anything new is bad.
Once the community digs its heels in and rejects your new client, it is going to be very hard to get people to try it again - first impressions are enormously important.
Short answer, yes.
I doubt you could understand the draw of a completely open-ended game such as UO or SWG without asking yourself "what am I supposed to be doing right now?", and being turned away by the lack of a concrete answer.
In those games, you do whatever you wanted to. Strange concept? Yep, because modern games spoiled ya.
I was a samurai/beggar (bad combo) on my return to UO, and a pistol-wielding martial-artist in SWG that did so many other things that it was pretty hard to label myself.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
My first character wound up being a Poisoner/Assasin type. I set up the assasin pages on stratics so very long ago and actually had a spot where people could drop by the board and say they wanted X person assasinated for X amount of money. I would spend sometimes DAYS hunting people/waiting for them to log in, then kill them (poison was very OP in the beginning, and I was the first GM poisoner on my shard), then I would chop the body up, take a screenshot, and take the head of the slain player which I would exchange for the promised fee.
Later I moved to a busy intersection near the main town and became a very succesful merchant. My neighbor, and later very good friend, just so happened to be a smithy, so I had him make GM weapons by the gross which I would poison and resell on my vendor.
tl;dr: The depth in that game was just fucking unreal
The above is my personal opinion. Anyone displaying a view contrary to my opinion is obviously WRONG and should STHU. (neener neener)
-The MMO Forum Community
Thanks for those!
Well it's clear I missed out on an amazing experience. I won't worry too much about it as was suggested earlier because I know the days are gone. But simply reading about all your experiences was exciting. It's almost as if I was reading about entirely different games from each person!
@GTwander I believe you're right about my mmo life suffering from missing out on this game and perhaps I am spoiled in the sense that I couldn't honestly enjoy UO's graphics today because lets face it, my generation is 3D. But I disagree that I'd be turned off by a game that doesn't spoon feed me. In fact I relish any little amount of freedom that is given to me in the games I play, though the unlimited possibilites I'm reading about here seem utopian in comparison to anything I've ever experienced in a 3D game. I can only hope and pray that one day I'll get to play something as untethered and free as UO in 3D.
Maybe when virtual reality comes into our homes, UO will be the first game to get adapted! Imagine that...
#TeamVainlash
Why did Marceline's dad eat her fries? I mean...cause she bought them and they were hers...
you win the thread.
I love the housing in UO and I loved Idoc'ing to keep my store's inventory stocked up. I still have a keep with UO and probably will be paying my sub fee until the game closes, just to have my keep to visit from time to time. The crafting in UO was one of the best I've played too.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
What is this world of bliss you speak of where communistic control does not exist??? *mind boggle*