UO was great because it wasn't about loot and it wasn't really about stats.. you could GM skills quickly and get your stats situated and locked even faster.
Only MMORPG I have ever played where nothing felt like a grind.
Even the "grindy" parts you could generally just macro (wasn't frowned upon too much) while you were out/sleeping.
Only MMO where the game really started from day 1 and there wasn't an "end game" that was completely different from the rest of the game.
My first love.....ahh UO back in the late 90's with dial up trying to get back to my corpse at 5am, 3 hours before work..
I LOVE YOU UO!!!!!
Haha, yeah. And the "rubberbanding" you did cause of server lag. Still didnt bother us. We didnt care if we would be walking around and lag out and have to log off and back on, only to have your screen turn black and white because you were killed by a wandering Mongbat. Man, I think i might install this after work....
UO's still amazing, you just have to know where to look to find the experience that caters to your preferences. When EA came along with their vision of Ultima Online, I had to bail: it's really nothing like the years surrounding T2A.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
UO's still amazing, you just have to know where to look to find the experience that caters to your preferences. When EA came along with their vision of Ultima Online, I had to bail: it's really nothing like the years surrounding T2A.
Yeah, I'll agree with you there, Lawlmonster. I bailed around the same time. I wonder what Serers are most popular now. I guess Atlantic(the shard I was on) is still pretty popular.
UO's still amazing, you just have to know where to look to find the experience that caters to your preferences. When EA came along with their vision of Ultima Online, I had to bail: it's really nothing like the years surrounding T2A.
Yeah, I'll agree with you there, Lawlmonster. I bailed around the same time. I wonder what Serers are most popular now. I guess Atlantic(the shard I was on) is still pretty popular.
Last I played on official servers, which was around five years ago, Atlantic was THE PvP server, which was odd to me because I came from Great Lakes (probably one of the most comptetitive shards at the time, we always thought Atlantic was for the RP).
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
UO's still amazing, you just have to know where to look to find the experience that caters to your preferences. When EA came along with their vision of Ultima Online, I had to bail: it's really nothing like the years surrounding T2A.
Yeah, I'll agree with you there, Lawlmonster. I bailed around the same time. I wonder what Serers are most popular now. I guess Atlantic(the shard I was on) is still pretty popular.
Last I played on official servers, which was around five years ago, Atlantic was THE PvP server, which was odd to me because I came from Great Lakes (probably one of the most comptetitive shards at the time, we always thought Atlantic was for the RP).
Yeah, that is kind of strange. I was on Atlantic and it was pretty big with the RP(reason I was on it) I always thought Catskills was a big PvP shard as well.
I'm just throwing this out there... but who WOULDN'T want a new Ultima? Online or Off? I mean, seriously.
Depends really on what kind of game "they" would make Ultima out to be.
If EA continues with the status quo and gives us another themepark / linear progression / gear based MMO with the UO IP tacked on top....it will be a swing & miss on most of the folks that look back on UO nostogically, or for those folks that are yearning for a virtual world experience that the original UO brought.
Being a staff member of MMORPG, I'm sure you're aware of Richard Garriot's new MMO project. Richard mentioned that he's been in some preliminary talks with EA about the possibility of leveraging the existing UO IP on his new sandbox MMO. While EA denys any such talks have occured, Richard says that a "spiritual successor" to UO will happen, whether or not it will officially include UO IP, or not.
With that said, Isometric games are making more apperances these days (Battle of Immortals, Diablo III, Torch Lite 2, and Lineage Eternal), and presents the right scope (from a money & time resource standpoint) to take a chance on a sandbox game that plays to a more niche audience in the overall MMO market.
So long as MMOs require 100s of millions of dollars to develop a complete polished game, the niche sandbox audience will never see a new MMO. The economics just don't add up. Besides, the sandbox audience will take a feature rich sandbox game in an cheaper isometric solution over a linear gear based game that has a bunch of pretty models any day.
Never played this game. But do hear a lot of positive things about it.
Same. I know a lot of people that rave about Ultima. I got a lot of the same experience MUDding at the time this game was in its heyday so I'm not sure how much I missed out, but I'd definitely love to see a couple of more games created in Ultima's spirit.
I wonder if bank sitting at Brit and conversing with everyone about your recent adventures is still being done to this day.
Saddly, this part of UO wasn't there last time I decided to kick the old tires earlier last year.
Granted, I have been out of the game for over 5 years, and they've added a lot more cities & hotspots.....but when I logged in, the typical areas of West Brit Bank, Moonglow Bank were completely dead. I even traveled to all the new cities and couldn't find the same "Farmers Market" scene where people stood around advertising their wares or showing off their "phat lewt"
I wonder if bank sitting at Brit and conversing with everyone about your recent adventures is still being done to this day.
Saddly, this part of UO wasn't there last time I decided to kick the old tires earlier last year.
Granted, I have been out of the game for over 5 years, and they've added a lot more cities & hotspots.....but when I logged in, the typical areas of West Brit Bank, Moonglow Bank were completely dead. I even traveled to all the new cities and couldn't find the same "Farmers Market" scene where people stood around advertising their wares or showing off their "phat lewt"
That is sad, indeed. I wonder how they would handle a server cluster to make the shards more populated. Not sure how that would work with all the housing and want not. Probably the reason they haven't done it yet.
UO is still a very feature rich game. It's a shame that there are a lot of players who still refuse to believe anything good came from the game after Age of Shadows.
There is almost a generation gap now, too, where an entire generation will not know what Ultima is; that just sets the game up to be "reinvisioned" for a new audience if EA even decides to bless us with that.
I can't think of a studio at EA that I'd like to create a new Ultima title, online or not. It definitely isn't Bioware or the current skeleton crew running the game, though.
edit: Also, what's with this website's formatting? My post is separated here on the forums but in the comments section they look like a garbled mess?
There were some nice things added with AoS....but the itemized loot wasn't one of them. It essentially made the one thing about UO unique (player's ability to play their character > Gear) into something more similar to itemized games like WOW.
People don't understand that the fact the items in UO were common is what allowed many of the sub-systems of UO to work so well.
One being the Full Loot system. If the outcome of a battle is determined primarily by the gear you are wearing, then the stronger the gear is...the more rare it must be.
If the gear is rare, then it becomes unfair to loose it all when dieing. Hence....the birth of Item Insurance.
If a player no longer has to worry about loosing items, then the cost of dieing is diminished.
If the cost of dieing is diminished, then the experience becomes cheap....and people are less likely to critically evaluate what they did wrong in an encounter and don't progress in the skill department.
As evidence...I give you exhibit A....."Any given World of Warcraft Battleground".
It also forced people that enjoyed PvPing (and not PvEing) to PvE....ALOT...to get the best set of gear available to keep up with the Jones'. Otherwise, the damage modifiers (or lack of damage mitigators in your armor) would allow the better equiped player to put you down faster than you could reasonably respond or counter.
The new skills they introduced with AoS also contributed to this problem as well.....not to mention things like Jujitsu and Bushido that quickly followed.
So those simple changes (having nothing to do with sandbox play by the way) completely underminded some very core mechanics of UO that made it special among the other MMOs on the market.
P.S. Forgot to add....the itemized change to loot also killed the player economy for crafters. Aside from some weak bonus stats applied to crafted gear through getting rediciously hard to get smiths hammers or sewing kits....all the best loot to be had came from dungeons.
I'm just throwing this out there... but who WOULDN'T want a new Ultima? Online or Off? I mean, seriously.
Should have happened many years ago. Sadly, I doubt we'll ever see anything like it again because the industry has been watered down themepark-style.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
I wonder if bank sitting at Brit and conversing with everyone about your recent adventures is still being done to this day.
Saddly, this part of UO wasn't there last time I decided to kick the old tires earlier last year.
Granted, I have been out of the game for over 5 years, and they've added a lot more cities & hotspots.....but when I logged in, the typical areas of West Brit Bank, Moonglow Bank were completely dead. I even traveled to all the new cities and couldn't find the same "Farmers Market" scene where people stood around advertising their wares or showing off their "phat lewt"
This was moved to Luna. It's the new player appointed Capital or at least was 2-3 years ago which was when I left.
Maybe everyone here should sign in again and play this game. Of all the current know mmo's this one is still imo the best
I would never go back to the official servers, they are such a mess. WHy would you want to give money to someone that backstab you again, and again, and yet again? Not only it is ridiculous to do that by principle, but experience proof now how wrong those guys were. I mean imagine a single second those guy kept on the sandbox aspect alive, at least "mostly" let's say. I mean you could understand for example they listened the agony from the themeparks gamers just before EQ hit, but after, i mean years later, like AoS. And even now, i mean they put "slot" on bags some time ago, can you believe that? Do you really think the game got anything from that crap, wouldn't it would be today like a great game if it had kept some of it's original sandbox flavor? Some players manage better Uo than Ea ever did, that's sad to say but the fucking true, and old true tbh, way before Age of shadow came player was already managing this game better. EA should be ashamed tbh, that's so dump what they made its not even funny, even for them. Who would be so stupid to threat one of their cash cow and best IP so badly for more than a decade and not realize it's just not right for their own good?
Ultima is like a monument in gaming history, and Uo was the spear head of it. Thats just so damn sad.
UO is nothing like it used to be. It's full of gear grind now, and everything else is affected.
It's killed the fantastic craft/trade system UO once had, and all the social interactions that players used to enjoy.
Even dungeons are "zoned by level" now. The MOBs are for certain skill ranges, you don't get skill gain outside of your range. If you want to build your skills, you have to go to the right dungeon or you won't get any skill gains (or hardly any). So the old original dungeons are mostly training grounds for newer players, which means they aren't meeting many vets, which hurts the social aspects too. And there aren't many new players. The old dungeons are pretty much dead, when they used to be teaming with players who were meeting others, forming friendships, joining guilds, and learning the game's finer aspects.
Basically, now, players log in for special events (Event Master run events, world events which are just monster bashes) and that's about it. And the only reason they do is for any new loot to collect.
EA has not supported UO with very much funding. The result is a mish mash of new systems added on top of old. They added a quest system, then added 2 more quest systems over the years. That's right, they have 3 different quest systems, each with different functionality. They have different functionality in crafting systems for the same reason.
Similarly, they kept adding to items with new properties to the point that if you get even a mediocre magic item, if you aren't familiar with the terms, you don't know what the hell it is. I've heard of old timers going back, and looking at an item, seeing a list of about 25 different properties, and not understanding what any of them meant. And just walking away.
The reason for this is because various head honchos over the years tried to give the players something more than they had the funds available to clean up with, they wanted to change UO, and they all felt like they could do it better.
One thing a lot of people don't know about UO's subscription numbers. They had a lot of gamers try the game. Just as many, or nearly, as EQ and other games until WoW brought in that huge influx. It was the rampant PKing that drove most of them out right away. If not for the PKing, Sandbox would probably be looked at with much more hope for subscription numbers, at least on an equal basis with Themepark. And this kills me every time I think about it.
Comments
UO was great because it wasn't about loot and it wasn't really about stats.. you could GM skills quickly and get your stats situated and locked even faster.
Only MMORPG I have ever played where nothing felt like a grind.
Even the "grindy" parts you could generally just macro (wasn't frowned upon too much) while you were out/sleeping.
Only MMO where the game really started from day 1 and there wasn't an "end game" that was completely different from the rest of the game.
Truly a sandbox, no other MMO has come close.
I wonder if bank sitting at Brit and conversing with everyone about your recent adventures is still being done to this day.
My first love.....ahh UO back in the late 90's with dial up trying to get back to my corpse at 5am, 3 hours before work..
I LOVE YOU UO!!!!!
Haha, yeah. And the "rubberbanding" you did cause of server lag. Still didnt bother us. We didnt care if we would be walking around and lag out and have to log off and back on, only to have your screen turn black and white because you were killed by a wandering Mongbat. Man, I think i might install this after work....
UO's still amazing, you just have to know where to look to find the experience that caters to your preferences. When EA came along with their vision of Ultima Online, I had to bail: it's really nothing like the years surrounding T2A.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
UO: One of the games that kept me from playing MMOs for years.
Glad you all had fun though.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Yeah, I'll agree with you there, Lawlmonster. I bailed around the same time. I wonder what Serers are most popular now. I guess Atlantic(the shard I was on) is still pretty popular.
Last I played on official servers, which was around five years ago, Atlantic was THE PvP server, which was odd to me because I came from Great Lakes (probably one of the most comptetitive shards at the time, we always thought Atlantic was for the RP).
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
*Open bottle of pink champagne while shaking*
Yeah, that is kind of strange. I was on Atlantic and it was pretty big with the RP(reason I was on it) I always thought Catskills was a big PvP shard as well.
Depends really on what kind of game "they" would make Ultima out to be.
If EA continues with the status quo and gives us another themepark / linear progression / gear based MMO with the UO IP tacked on top....it will be a swing & miss on most of the folks that look back on UO nostogically, or for those folks that are yearning for a virtual world experience that the original UO brought.
Being a staff member of MMORPG, I'm sure you're aware of Richard Garriot's new MMO project. Richard mentioned that he's been in some preliminary talks with EA about the possibility of leveraging the existing UO IP on his new sandbox MMO. While EA denys any such talks have occured, Richard says that a "spiritual successor" to UO will happen, whether or not it will officially include UO IP, or not.
With that said, Isometric games are making more apperances these days (Battle of Immortals, Diablo III, Torch Lite 2, and Lineage Eternal), and presents the right scope (from a money & time resource standpoint) to take a chance on a sandbox game that plays to a more niche audience in the overall MMO market.
So long as MMOs require 100s of millions of dollars to develop a complete polished game, the niche sandbox audience will never see a new MMO. The economics just don't add up. Besides, the sandbox audience will take a feature rich sandbox game in an cheaper isometric solution over a linear gear based game that has a bunch of pretty models any day.
Same. I know a lot of people that rave about Ultima. I got a lot of the same experience MUDding at the time this game was in its heyday so I'm not sure how much I missed out, but I'd definitely love to see a couple of more games created in Ultima's spirit.
Saddly, this part of UO wasn't there last time I decided to kick the old tires earlier last year.
Granted, I have been out of the game for over 5 years, and they've added a lot more cities & hotspots.....but when I logged in, the typical areas of West Brit Bank, Moonglow Bank were completely dead. I even traveled to all the new cities and couldn't find the same "Farmers Market" scene where people stood around advertising their wares or showing off their "phat lewt"
That is sad, indeed. I wonder how they would handle a server cluster to make the shards more populated. Not sure how that would work with all the housing and want not. Probably the reason they haven't done it yet.
There were some nice things added with AoS....but the itemized loot wasn't one of them. It essentially made the one thing about UO unique (player's ability to play their character > Gear) into something more similar to itemized games like WOW.
People don't understand that the fact the items in UO were common is what allowed many of the sub-systems of UO to work so well.
One being the Full Loot system. If the outcome of a battle is determined primarily by the gear you are wearing, then the stronger the gear is...the more rare it must be.
If the gear is rare, then it becomes unfair to loose it all when dieing. Hence....the birth of Item Insurance.
If a player no longer has to worry about loosing items, then the cost of dieing is diminished.
If the cost of dieing is diminished, then the experience becomes cheap....and people are less likely to critically evaluate what they did wrong in an encounter and don't progress in the skill department.
As evidence...I give you exhibit A....."Any given World of Warcraft Battleground".
It also forced people that enjoyed PvPing (and not PvEing) to PvE....ALOT...to get the best set of gear available to keep up with the Jones'. Otherwise, the damage modifiers (or lack of damage mitigators in your armor) would allow the better equiped player to put you down faster than you could reasonably respond or counter.
The new skills they introduced with AoS also contributed to this problem as well.....not to mention things like Jujitsu and Bushido that quickly followed.
So those simple changes (having nothing to do with sandbox play by the way) completely underminded some very core mechanics of UO that made it special among the other MMOs on the market.
P.S. Forgot to add....the itemized change to loot also killed the player economy for crafters. Aside from some weak bonus stats applied to crafted gear through getting rediciously hard to get smiths hammers or sewing kits....all the best loot to be had came from dungeons.
Associate Producer on Ultima Online?
Does she even do anything?
Supervises the EA summer interns they higher to work on UO? LOL
Should have happened many years ago. Sadly, I doubt we'll ever see anything like it again because the industry has been watered down themepark-style.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
Would love to see a up to date state of the Art UO..
I retired retroactively..Haha
This was moved to Luna. It's the new player appointed Capital or at least was 2-3 years ago which was when I left.
I would never go back to the official servers, they are such a mess. WHy would you want to give money to someone that backstab you again, and again, and yet again? Not only it is ridiculous to do that by principle, but experience proof now how wrong those guys were. I mean imagine a single second those guy kept on the sandbox aspect alive, at least "mostly" let's say. I mean you could understand for example they listened the agony from the themeparks gamers just before EQ hit, but after, i mean years later, like AoS. And even now, i mean they put "slot" on bags some time ago, can you believe that? Do you really think the game got anything from that crap, wouldn't it would be today like a great game if it had kept some of it's original sandbox flavor? Some players manage better Uo than Ea ever did, that's sad to say but the fucking true, and old true tbh, way before Age of shadow came player was already managing this game better. EA should be ashamed tbh, that's so dump what they made its not even funny, even for them. Who would be so stupid to threat one of their cash cow and best IP so badly for more than a decade and not realize it's just not right for their own good?
Ultima is like a monument in gaming history, and Uo was the spear head of it. Thats just so damn sad.
Once a lord or lady of Sosaria, always a lord or lady of Sosaria.
Subscription or no subscription, the experience sticks with you.
Would easily become the most anticipated game this year (if it remained true to its sandbox nature)
UO is nothing like it used to be. It's full of gear grind now, and everything else is affected.
It's killed the fantastic craft/trade system UO once had, and all the social interactions that players used to enjoy.
Even dungeons are "zoned by level" now. The MOBs are for certain skill ranges, you don't get skill gain outside of your range. If you want to build your skills, you have to go to the right dungeon or you won't get any skill gains (or hardly any). So the old original dungeons are mostly training grounds for newer players, which means they aren't meeting many vets, which hurts the social aspects too. And there aren't many new players. The old dungeons are pretty much dead, when they used to be teaming with players who were meeting others, forming friendships, joining guilds, and learning the game's finer aspects.
Basically, now, players log in for special events (Event Master run events, world events which are just monster bashes) and that's about it. And the only reason they do is for any new loot to collect.
EA has not supported UO with very much funding. The result is a mish mash of new systems added on top of old. They added a quest system, then added 2 more quest systems over the years. That's right, they have 3 different quest systems, each with different functionality. They have different functionality in crafting systems for the same reason.
Similarly, they kept adding to items with new properties to the point that if you get even a mediocre magic item, if you aren't familiar with the terms, you don't know what the hell it is. I've heard of old timers going back, and looking at an item, seeing a list of about 25 different properties, and not understanding what any of them meant. And just walking away.
The reason for this is because various head honchos over the years tried to give the players something more than they had the funds available to clean up with, they wanted to change UO, and they all felt like they could do it better.
One thing a lot of people don't know about UO's subscription numbers. They had a lot of gamers try the game. Just as many, or nearly, as EQ and other games until WoW brought in that huge influx. It was the rampant PKing that drove most of them out right away. If not for the PKing, Sandbox would probably be looked at with much more hope for subscription numbers, at least on an equal basis with Themepark. And this kills me every time I think about it.
Once upon a time....