Ultima Online, Offline (if you want) The Return of the Real Lord British

[feelthedarkness]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/portalarium/shroud-of-the-avatar-forsaken-virtues-0?ref=live

 

Oh man. I'm conflicted. On one hand, I dearly love Ultima, on the other hand, Ultima got pretty bad. I never played UO, but I love the idea of it. 

[mikemariano]

The $1,500 donor tier is the "Lord" level.

Reward: In-game "Lord" title for avatar.

[youmeyou]

Won't someone think of the Virtues!

[feelthedarkness]

Quest For the Original IP Rights

[Dewar]

Hmm, tempting, but I dunno. Seems worth it to get in on the $25 one now, just for the hell of it. Not sure if I'd pay $40.

[feelthedarkness]

Player housing will live in the persistent shared world, so real estate will have location value. 

 

Once a house is purchased, players will need to pay regular taxes on it of course. But as a special thank you to select Kickstarter supporters, all housing obtained by making a Kickstarter pledge of Citizen, Lord, Baron, Duke or Lord of the Manor will be tax free for life!  

 

FINALLY, a system that rewards people with money first. I love the idea of permanent residence and finite real estate, but it also fills me with anxiety, even if I never encounter it. 

[Salacious Snake]

I was sold by the pitch video. I mean, his rat tail has gotten so long, how can you say no to that?

[Murdoc]

Space Garriot returns! 

 

Seriously, what sold me even further on Garriot was a discussion between him and Warren Spector during Spectors master class at Texas Tech. The game and design decisions they hoped to do one day sounded great, so I really hope this is his chance to make that game.

 

One slight against it is that they need to hire some artists, because yowzer, it is not pretty.

 

edit:

 

Here's an idea, let's pool some money together and get an Idle Thumbs named house... a kickstarter for a kickstarter? lol.

[TheLastBaron]

My uncle still plays Ultima Online.  Like all day every day.

[Dewar]

I dunno if I really wanted this or not, but I logged into Kickstarter and saw there was exactly 1 of the earlybird packages left, so I went for it.

[Bjorn]

Maybe not the perfect thread for this, but I don't see any other Ultima threads and not sure it needs its own.

 

So Ultima Online is coming to Steam...which is sooo weird to me.  UO is the game that introduced me to online gaming.  It always surprises me that it's still around.  It really brought out my inner asshole.  As soon as I discovered that pickpocketing people was a possible job, I made it my mission to make the most legendary thief that I could.  The hatemail I received in game was fucking intense, when I got caught.  Steal someone's entire bag of teleportation ruins they have spent days making and they get really pissy.  And I didn't need anything that I stole, I was just a kleptomaniac hoarder.  I didn't use it to support a guild, or make myself rich, or to adventure.  It was just about stealing whatever I thought I could get away with.  God forbid I found a character off by themselves afk.  I don't know that there has ever been an MMO that enabled griefing like UO.  Fuck I was an asshole. 

 

I'd actually think about picking it up, but it looks like there is still a decent buy-in ($30 for the most up to date version) and a $14/mo subscription. 

[Twig]

I wish modern MMOs were like Ultima Online, except, you know, modern. I missed out on it, and everything I hear about it is basically my dream MMO. EVE sorta gets there but it's boring to play so that sucks and it's also pretty different.

[Murdoc]

I tried to be a good little serf in the beginning. I mined my ore, I smelted it just north of Britian, a bustling city full of all sorts of travelers. I didn't have enough knowledge in black smithing to do much but I could hunt animals and make some pretty okay gloves. 

 

So I mined, I mined a lot, it took hours, with gloves and only underwear, mining ore and smelting it just about paid for the operation and allowed me to bank just a tiny bit.

 

Then some filthy naives kept killing me and taking all my ignots and ore. It kept happening, I had to get tricky, but nothing really worked. So I cried out "FUCK THIS" (and my parents thought it would be a good idea to take the game away from me, but didn't, they probably should have).

 

On that last straw, I threw down my pick axe and started to wander to the east, a place I never had dared to venture, in fact, I never really went anywhere outside the surrounding area of Britian. I heard the stories, bandits on the road, Orcs and dragons eating people, but the big city was too much, I needed to leave.

 

I didn't get far until I ran into a group of wandering monks, they were always so friendly to bring me back from the beyond, but these were no ordinary monks, they truly had a soul. I can't remember how it happened, but they took a liking to me and soon we scouted out for more monks, a lonely one, somewhere in the woods. We came across the cap and beat him to death. Was it for money? Did he cross in an unruly way? No, we just needed his robes for my person, so I too could be a wandering monk.

 

We set out on our journey offering people prayers and charms along the road, only to lull them into a sense of comfort, only then to spring the trap. "CORP POR" My comrade would say as we shot the travelers with a crossbow bolt. Dead were the travelers and their spoils ours. 
 

Eventually the law caught up to us as I was just a weakling but with a Dark Lord title on my name. Death caught up and with my alignment there was no way to travel to the shrine to resurrect, so I had to leave that life and start a new.

Only this time there was no use mining, it was clear that in Britannia, you have to join the other brigands and swindle and kill your way to glory.

 

I don't think that Ultima Online will ever exist again, it's a shame (?) because there are some good memories from that.

[Bjorn]

I wish modern MMOs were like Ultima Online, except, you know, modern. I missed out on it, and everything I hear about it is basically my dream MMO. EVE sorta gets there but it's boring to play so that sucks and it's also pretty different.

 

It was empowering and antagonistic to players in ways that I think any MMO now would be terrified to implement.  The closest we get is the Souls games, but they don't have the RPG depth, variety or social interactions of UO.  I honestly think a lot of the original systems only made it into the game because the devs had no frame of reference for what would or would not work.  Which resulted in gloriously mixed chaos.  I don't know how many of those systems have been paved over and smoothed out since then.  That process was already happening when I quit playing around '99.

 

 

I don't think that Ultima Online will ever exist again, it's a shame (?) because there are some good memories from that.

 

That's just a fabulous story.  I can still remember being terrified if I was by myself outside of town and ran into players with Red names. 

[Twig]

I know, I've talked and thought a lot about this exact thing with many, many different people. Everyone comes to the same conclusion. It was a game built on ignorance (not the bad kind of ignorance!) about what is and is not good design in a game structured to support a lot of people at once. It succeeded because everyone who wanted to play a "massively-multiplayer online role-playing game" had no other choice. People of all different flavors and desires were forced to exist in the same world. Griefers and anti-griefers alike. People who just wanted to mine, people who wanted to run a shop, roaming gangs of murderous monks, whatever. No one would ever make it today, and even if they did, only the minority of people, the griefers, would bother to play it, because everyone who isn't as big a fan of that kind of thing would just play WoW (or whatever else is the big game of the time). They know they don't have to deal with assholes elsewhere, so why would they willingly submit to it?

 

It's depressing to realize that what makes Ultima Online so fascinating is precisely why it will never happen again. I mentioned EVE earlier, because a lot of people suggest it. But I don't think it's the same. The interesting stories are more about corps fighting each other, and not about individual players. That's not strictly true, as often there are key players in these massive confrontations responsible for infiltrating this or that or stealing a lot of money or whatever, but the stories never have the same kind of attraction to me as those I hear about Ultima Online. (Plus, as I said, I find EVE's core gameplay mechanics utterly boring.)

[Bjorn]

Oh yeah, I absolutely agree, it's like design brilliance through ignorance.   Eve has interesting long form stories, but the original UO really empowered both short and long term stories.  Any given night could give you a great single encounter, but then there were longer playing arcs too.  For awhile, I was in an anti-griefing rapid response team.  We had a bunch of people who would report active gangs of PKers to us, and we'd roll out to try and stomp them. 

 

A few years after I quit playing, I was visiting a friend and watched him play for a bit.  I didn't even recognize the game anymore.  Not just the new areas and stuff, but the metagame had evolved to where you needed to run it windowed, with macro programs and helpers running, and other windows tracking things.  I remember thinking that it just looked gross and boring. 

[Murdoc]

. No one would ever make it today, and even if they did, only the minority of people, the griefers, would bother to play it, because everyone who isn't as big a fan of that kind of thing would just play WoW (or whatever else is the big game of the time). They know they don't have to deal with assholes elsewhere, so why would they willingly submit to it?

This is exactly what I think of DayZ. It seems to be this odd social experiment with a variety of options to play the game or screw with people, but it's boiled down to just be for griefers or serial killers in training.

[Twig]

Yeah! There are definitely outliers in DayZ, and I don't want to downplay their existence, but they're the minority. If you added the ability to set up shop and build a farm and stuff like that, how many people would actually embrace that? I don't think more than a few percent of the total players, if that.

 

Although, I hear a lot of good things about Rust, in that regard. So maybe I'm wrong, I dunno.

[Merus]

I think Twig has the right of it - UO will never exist again because you'll never convince a disparate group of players to join the same game. I note that even Murdoc's fantastic story starts off with him being dicked over by someone; you never hear the version of the story that goes 'I kept having my ingots and ore stolen, so I quit and unsubscribed' but it had to have happened.

[Murdoc]

That's actually a really good point, I'm sure there was a segment that wouldn't stand for that, which is why we probably don't see that group in Day Z or the like. 

I think my acceptance of that behavior because my introduction to UO wasn't other Ultima games, it was through Diablo. At the time the Diablo community was essentially recruiting people on battle.net to go over to UO because it was "like Diablo + a lot of other stuff" so getting Pked was just going to be a given. The fact it was more simulation than closed rule game was and still is hugely fascinating.

 

Gamers and developers "know better" now that open systems like that would only attract a certain type of player, but I wonder a system like that couldn't be balanced. At some point in UO, I remember it felt more balanced with a bounty system and such, at the time it felt like the developers were restricting us from playing the game, but compared to any modern game now, it was still the wild west but with rules.

 

Nostalgia might make me look back on the game more favorably, I remember getting angry and disappointing about it, but for the life of me I can't figure out why I didn't just stop playing it then, it just seemed like the "thing" to play on the PC back then and in the end I am glad I took part.

[Bjorn]

Nostalgia might make me look back on the game more favorably, I remember getting angry and disappointing about it, but for the life of me I can't figure out why I didn't just stop playing it then, it just seemed like the "thing" to play on the PC back then and in the end I am glad I took part.

 

I'm sure I have some seriously rose tinted glasses on when reflecting back on it.  I can remember the horrible lag, overloaded servers, and all sorts of other bad stuff.  But the good memories mostly outshine all that stuff.

 

I think the points about DayZ are interesting, and whatever Rust ends up becoming.  If those games fully supported a player economy (even just trading/bartering), and had lots of non-violent, but interesting, activities I'll bet you could have an interesting hybrid community going on. 

[BenLuke]

Yeah! There are definitely outliers in DayZ, and I don't want to downplay their existence, but they're the minority. If you added the ability to set up shop and build a farm and stuff like that, how many people would actually embrace that? I don't think more than a few percent of the total players, if that.

I'd think most would embrace it, but it would just evolve into building a community and murdering outsiders. Which could still be interesting, especially without a built in group system like Eve or other MMOs, but it probably wouldn't be what you have in mind.

 

I think the answer to this sort of thing is have as extensive and as interesting mechanics for helping people as for killing them, and to reward players for helping other instead of just punishing people for ganking or whatever. DayZ kind of was the former but not the later, and in Eve the only real options are to shoot someone or leave them alone, so people obliviously pick the more interesting of the two.

 

A lot of these kind of games have a karma or reputation system or whatever that exists to punish people for non-consensual PVP, but they're never enough to stop jerks like me from trying to kill people given half a chance, and if they were then the game might as well just be pure PVE.   If helping people/hunting outlaws or the like gave some kind of interesting advantage then maybe it would foster more varied encounters between players while still keeping the core of what's cool about that type of sandbox mutliplayer games.

[feelthedarkness]

I played a lot of Star Wars Galaxies, which was a clear heir to the UO throne, and was quickly crushed by WoW. The one thing that really appeals to me about these old games, that I don't think the newer variants (Day Z) attempt to replicate is letting players occupy, and to an extent shape the world.

 

Many planets in SWG had fairly open stretches and the game let you build towns, and had systems to bind the buildings together and offer actual town benefits that grew with size, and money raised through taxes/donations. I think Rust lets you occupy the world, but isn't that more in the sense of a hut that lasts until a different jerk kicks it down? 

[Bjorn]

SWG was the last MMO I played, and the one that made me swear off of ever playing another one.  Not because it was bad, I fucking loved SWG pre-alltheridiculouschangestheymade.  I just decided I could never sink that kind of time into another game. 

[feelthedarkness]

Yeah! God, my friends and I devoted an insane amount of time to that (pre-NGE).

One of the amazing things about SWG was the ability to manipulate any object placed within the interior space of your home. Crafting was also very robust, where every objects had multiple parts. Like a dresser might have drawer components that looked like drawers, but also struts and what not. This let enterprising people use all these shaped widgets to sculpt all kinds of unintentional things.

 

One of my pals made this really elaborate BioEngineer Museum, built inside a large guild hall, which was part horror movie tribute. He had specimens of everything, including creatures removed from the game, inside these bubbling "tanks" made out of fountains and glass windows. All objects could have descriptions and names, that other players could see read, so there was a fairly elaborate story as part of all the creatures display. The whole structure was hidden in a dark corner of Dathomir where few people ever went.