Ultima Online was the best.....

ZigZags · April 2017

When it comes to freedom and customizability when building a character, Ultima Online did it best with a wide selection of skills that would CAP at 100 each, your character would have 700 total skill points and you could distribute them literally, any way you wanted. You could be a 7x 100 GM or have 100 in 5 skills and 50 in 4 others.....any combo you wanted.

Why has no other game been able to successfully copy this system? Darkfall was close but it was a Greek game and uh....ya..... (I'm Greek so I can make fun of my own culture, its allowed in the SJW handbook).

mcrippins · April 2017

Agreed.. best game I've ever played. My friends and I still talk about some of the crazy stuff we did almost 20 years later.

Loke666 · April 2017

Other tries have been made, like Mortal online (I can make fun of it since I am Swede I guess). The problem is that not all of UOs mechanics were as popular. The whole full loot FFA PvP thing is really hard to pull off.

You are certainly right that UO offered freedom like few other games and it's progression mechanics were certainly good but a pure UO clone would fail today.

Even if you focus on PvP you still need to use faction based PvP to make a successful game today and most PvEers just play to get stuff today and they hate losing things.

I do agree, UO did some things really good (I preferred Meridian 59 at the time though). It's mechanics were widely based on a few pen and paper RPGs (like Runequest) and I certainly wouldn't mind something similar.

One game to watch out for in development is Shards, it uses some ideas from UO mixed together with some ideas from Biowares Neverwinter nights (you can basically set up your own server with the settings you prefer and can even customize the base mechanics if you are good and make your own content. The only guy I read about from UO on it didn't start work on UO until 2005 so don't expect it to be some kind of sequel and I havn't tried the alpha but the vids I seen at least look promising.

metalsm · April 2017

Keep hearing lots of good comments with all those stuffs you can do on Ultima Online. Will try this

Fritzpower · April 2017

I don't know, I just don't get this ultima online thing. I tried to get into it several times.
I even payed sub, I had to. But that was so hard to get into, I gave up all the time.
It was also ugly looking. I know its an old game but if it was at least wow leve graphics or close, that may
would be much better.

Fritzpower · April 2017

And by the way if UO is the best why don't you play it still? You must like the gameplay and graphics etc.

Jakobmiller · April 2017

ZigZags said:

When it comes to freedom and customizability when building a character, Ultima Online did it best with a wide selection of skills that would CAP at 100 each, your character would have 700 total skill points and you could distribute them literally, any way you wanted. You could be a 7x 100 GM or have 100 in 5 skills and 50 in 4 others.....any combo you wanted.

Why has no other game been able to successfully copy this system? Darkfall was close but it was a Greek game and uh....ya..... (I'm Greek so I can make fun of my own culture, its allowed in the SJW handbook).

Feels like I am going to spam a lot of Darkfall these upcoming days, but hey it's worth it.

Check out Darkfall: Rise of Agon. It's releasing 5th of May.
They bought the last update of Darkfall Online and are now working on changing the stuff Aventurine could not. They are so far doing a fenomenal job. More content is coming. Balancing are being made.

Try it on launch. I even think the beta is free right now(?) If not, keep an eye on it and check what happens. Same with Darkfall: New Dawn, although I feel RoA is the better of the two. At least currently.

See you in Agon.

Kyleran · April 2017

Fritzpower said:

And by the way if UO is the best why don't you play it still? You must like the gameplay and graphics etc.

Most games change in undesirable ways unless you can find a freeshard which supports an earlier time.

hatefulpeace · April 2017

ZigZags said:

When it comes to freedom and customizability when building a character, Ultima Online did it best with a wide selection of skills that would CAP at 100 each, your character would have 700 total skill points and you could distribute them literally, any way you wanted. You could be a 7x 100 GM or have 100 in 5 skills and 50 in 4 others.....any combo you wanted.

Why has no other game been able to successfully copy this system? Darkfall was close but it was a Greek game and uh....ya..... (I'm Greek so I can make fun of my own culture, its allowed in the SJW handbook).

Your leaving out the fact that 90 percent of the skills and combos were totally usesless, and people ended up picking cookie cutter 7 x gms the rest were garbage. So no that is a garbage system needlessly over complicated with so many in useable builds it was bad.

hatefulpeace · April 2017

Kyleran said:

Fritzpower said:

And by the way if UO is the best why don't you play it still? You must like the gameplay and graphics etc.

Most games change in undesirable ways unless you can find a freeshard which supports an earlier time.

Because it wasn't a very good game when it first came out. It had those skills but all but a few were useful. Add in that the majority of game play equaled walking outside and getting killed by 10 people who that's all they did, was sit there and kill new people and take thier stuff, equals a garbage game. Which is why it failed, and changed to trammel.

Dauzqul · April 2017

Everyone's "virgin moment" is the best. For me, SWG can't be beat.

Distopia · April 2017

Dauzqul said:

Everyone's "virgin moment" is the best. For me, SWG can't be beat.

Not true, DAOC was mine, yet I'd still say SWG was better.

Ozmodan · April 2017

Fritzpower said:

And by the way if UO is the best why don't you play it still? You must like the gameplay and graphics etc.

Easy answer, Everquest killed UO. They added in overpowering weapons that made pvp very unfun for those that did not have them.

postlarval · April 2017

Well, I still play UO. Same account since December 5, 1997, although the account has changed pubs several times. Even with all the changes - good and bad - it's still a better game than most of the garbage in the top five here. ESO is the only tolerable exception.

Having said that, I wasn't a fan of gargoyles or the enhanced client, but I'm not forced to play gargoyles or use the enhanced client.

Loke666 · April 2017

chambordin said:

it doesn't matter. just like countless other things throughout history, just because something did well in its time doesn't mean it will do well now.
candlesticks were hugely popular in the middle ages, nowadays we have electricity, would you like to go back to using candles to illuminate your living spaces? most people wouldn't be able to bear the thought
it's like renewable energy sources, civilization used to get power from coal, nowadays we can use wind mills and solar energy, which are improvements in a lot of ways, they're gaining terrain too, they of course require huge investments in infrastructure.

we now have immensely better hardware and software methods to produce hugely superior high fidelity games, instead of focusing on doing it how they did it in the old times, when it was a lot more difficult to do games. why don't we focus on what we could achieve with what we have now? it'd yield a lot better results.

it's like if lockheed martin or some plane building company was trying to design a new better type of aircraft but decided it'd be best to base this around old soviet schematics from the 60s. Ridiculous. Nostalgia, it's nonsensical.
but trust me, the large majority of gamers wouldn't go back to playing anything anywhere close to UO

That doesn't mean that UOs ideas and mechanics were bad.

This is the Horton flying wing, nazi plane from 1944. Lockheed Martin would never rip off its design long after right (it actually had a bit of stealth):

Image: http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/1280_640/images/live/p0/3h/bq/p03hbqcv.jpg

Scorchien · April 2017

Not .. was.. Still is the best in offering class build system and also it still offers more in game activities for a player than any other MMMORPG availble ..

I still jump in and out after 20 years , and its still a great experience ..

ChicagoCub · April 2017

If by "Ultima Online" you mean Everquest then yes, it was the best.

rojoArcueid · April 2017

I never played UO, but the Ultima games on Super Nintendo were pretty cool (ported from DOS iirc)

Tsiya · April 2017

Scorchien said:

Not .. was.. Still is the best in offering class build system and also it still offers more in game activities for a player than any other MMMORPG availble ..

I still jump in and out after 20 years , and its still a great experience ..

I think UO and SWG are the 2 games I'll never completely quit. Even now I go back.

Loke666 · April 2017

Torval said:
Maybe expansions and new content are the bane of mmos. Most of the nostalgic vet posts I read seem to want a very static image of the game in a certain state and they want it never to change. Maybe new content, classes, and expansions ruin mmos for players.

Then if no new content is ever added and the game changes then other people get bored and move on.

I've thought about playing it but all the people that left speak so poorly of it. I'm not sure it's worth throwing money at to try out.

I fear that once you pass 3 or so expansions the quality of the MMOs tend to drop, when the devs design a MMO that have a specific max level/power in mind and when you constantly raise it you get loads of problems. Add in that they tend to make the new parts more rewarding which means old zones will be empty and the worst MMO killer of all: time.

Computer games don't age well besides Tetris, MMOs might last longer then most but time stops for no one.

In UOs case the ideas behind UO are not bad and the same could be said about some mechanics but you can't just remake it. You could be inspired by it for certain but a remake would fail miserably, pre-trammel or not. If you on the other hand consider why Garriot made it and what he wanted to create you could start fresh with that and probably turn out something good.

UO was a world simulator as much as a game and I think something like that still have a huge potential.

RedFin · April 2017

UO was my first MMO I played. I do prefer the option of having many different skills to choose from and only being able to select a certain amount over what MMOs are allowing nowadays. I disagree that there were only a handful of "useful" skills and the rest were worthless. I think trying out unusual skill combinations contributed to the fun of the game for me. The worst part of UO for me was the inventory management. Selecting the precise pixel in order to pick up your weapon and equip it became too frustrating. I also like the idea of a game where you start off at some small town and the whole idea of the game is to get more powerful in order to go farther from town and explorer undiscovered caves, dungeons, and new areas, but yet still find reasons to go back to the original towns. The modern MMO leads you on a track all the way through the game until you get to the end game dungeons. Where is the exploration in that?

Flyte27 · April 2017

I think it's more the attitude of the time. I hated PKing personally, but at the same time it ignited a great deal of passion in me. People will say go play a modern survival game, but it's not the same. The world was inhabited by much more cutthroat and competitive individuals. It also had a different style of humor that is lost in this generation due to attitudes changing and people trying to not offend. Ths same could be said of Everquest even though it was a PvE game. I don't think the skill system was what made many of these games special so much as the players and their attitudes at that time period. I don't seem to remember as many nice people as some like to paint it, but that is exactly what made it great. The people who were what is termed toxic in this day and age were much more entertaining and made the world feel dangerous. Now people will just erect their safety bubbles and exclude such individuals because they can. In those days you couldn't if you wanted to play an MMO and it made for a more flavorful game world instead made of people who loved games instead of a bunch of people trying to psychoanalyze people.

Yukmarc · April 2017

Dauzqul said:

Everyone's "virgin moment" is the best. For me, SWG can't be beat.

My virgin moment was Becky, she sure wasn't the best, could have been my fault though.. oh, we're talking about games? My first was UO, stuck with it until DAoC came out and DAoC became my favorite.

Aethaeryn · April 2017

The game will never be the same be cause people were using ICQ to communicate and you had to get people to go places with you. . show you around. . groups were needed. It was just so much more social. Also the players were a smaller group and more "techie" and Ultima fans at the time. The game moved away from the core sandbox / freedom that it started with. . gear mattered more etc.. They were looking to catch back up to what other successful games were offering.

It was the right time and the right place. They had everyone's attention (who cared) and there was no competition. Those will always be the greatest gaming years of my life. I moved there from meridian and The Realm . . but even I moved on to DAoC after a bit.

If someone could make a game like that again where no one could look up dungeons or maps easily and there was that same element of danger I would jump on it in a heartbeat . . If i had the time to put into that I did then.

Aethaeryn · April 2017

Loke666 said:

Torval said:
Maybe expansions and new content are the bane of mmos. Most of the nostalgic vet posts I read seem to want a very static image of the game in a certain state and they want it never to change. Maybe new content, classes, and expansions ruin mmos for players.

Then if no new content is ever added and the game changes then other people get bored and move on.

I've thought about playing it but all the people that left speak so poorly of it. I'm not sure it's worth throwing money at to try out.

I fear that once you pass 3 or so expansions the quality of the MMOs tend to drop, when the devs design a MMO that have a specific max level/power in mind and when you constantly raise it you get loads of problems. Add in that they tend to make the new parts more rewarding which means old zones will be empty and the worst MMO killer of all: time.

Computer games don't age well besides Tetris, MMOs might last longer then most but time stops for no one.

In UOs case the ideas behind UO are not bad and the same could be said about some mechanics but you can't just remake it. You could be inspired by it for certain but a remake would fail miserably, pre-trammel or not. If you on the other hand consider why Garriot made it and what he wanted to create you could start fresh with that and probably turn out something good.

UO was a world simulator as much as a game and I think something like that still have a huge potential.

That is what I have been looking for. I don't want an online RPG as much as a virtual world. Some of the ideas they had but could not manage would be great now. Animals, dragons having hunger / stomach sizes, and eating each other or traveling to find food for example. This might be able to happen today with the computing power. Those things died because there were soooo many players on that little map that it didn't work out and they just had to keep spawning them before it mattered. You would need an immense world.

I would love to see someone try it. MOBs rarely even move any more let alone in random directions. UO managed that at least.

Vermillion_Raventhal · April 2017

I think one thing can say is UO and many of the earlier MMORPG gave me some awesome experiences. Gave you those player experiences that are memorable.

Running medial task for hours in almost the same manner for every MMORPG is not memorable.

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Ultima Online was the best.....

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV