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UO should have been our future
Knightcry
Member Posts: 168
I recall in '01 playing Ultima Onlne thinking this is great and I can't imagine what great games this will spawn. Back then I thought we would see games developed that would offer complex house building, farming lands and herding wild animals into pens to sheer and slaughter. Games with balance in pve and pvp where both aren't game makers or breakers but both are fun. Content that is player created and supported by the company and vice versa.
Imagine what gaming would be like if gaming went with the UO style rather than the EQ style. I for one think it sounds better than hitting level 9000 and raiding to gain super sayain gear with flames.
Comments
Nostalgi is fooling you.
I think there's future for such games. Indie developers are creating UO type of games now and in the near future. The problem is, not so surprisingly, money. Gaming used to be for basement geeks, but now any housewife can fire up WoW, play for an hour and feel like actually accomplishing something. For a game to sell well today, it has to be casual friendly, relatively easy and straight forward. These qualities don't go well wih the type game you're wanting. Indies have wild ideas and will to create something actually good. Big names have the resources, man power and experience. This is the curse of MMORPG's and gaming as a whole. Once in a while a game gets released, of which creators have the balance of those qualities. Everyone think it's a heavenly game, that is if it was marketed well and release was executed smoothly. Then due to time everyone thinks it's being watered down and then comes a patch that is supposed improve and take the game play to whole new level, but it ends up crippling the game, killing what was left of it. I personally think we are not getting out of this cycle ever, when it comes top names in MMORPG's. Only cure to this is to focus on what is now and settle to it. It's not like there isn't good games to play.
If enough people will stop supporting empty-shell MMOs and start supporting the sandbox-type games out there now then we would start to see changes. The problem is the industry is getting watered down with garbage games.
"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
You mean hardcore gaming style? i am sorry but since MMOs became mainstream its casual players who earn these companies there bread and butter. UO was never mean to be played casually. If i had no life and 12 hours a day to burn i would play games like UO.
You mean hardcore gaming style? i am sorry but since MMOs became mainstream its casual players who earn these companies there bread and butter. UO was never mean to be played casually. If i had no life and 12 hours a day to burn i would play games like UO.
You've obviously never played UO then. The whole point in UO was you could do whatever you wanted, some things took longer, some not so much. It's ironic that the raids in a lot of these "casual" games consume more time than any one thing in most sandbox games.
Nah .. i was in UO beta and thought that it was a horrible game. Clicking nonstop to level mining. Everyone a tank mage. Pk is rampant. You can't move 10 feet without being killed. Any place with any resources is camped to the hilt.
I jumped ship once EQ came out. Never look back. Despite with all the problems (down-time, camping ..), EQ is 10x the game UO is. And i am glad that the industry moved AWAY from the UO model. And by the maximum subscription rate of this two games, a lot more people like the EQ model than the UO model.
You mean hardcore gaming style? i am sorry but since MMOs became mainstream its casual players who earn these companies there bread and butter. UO was never mean to be played casually. If i had no life and 12 hours a day to burn i would play games like UO.
You've obviously never played UO then. The whole point in UO was you could do whatever you wanted, some things took longer, some not so much. It's ironic that the raids in a lot of these "casual" games consume more time than any one thing in most sandbox games.
I did play UO and it had its time sinks. As far as time consuming raiding, those days are gone. Few games go that route anymore and even raiding in games like LOTR and WOW is very easy now thanks to smaller group requirements and new cross servers team tools introduced by WOW recently.
You can still try it for yourself. There is an open source UO emulator with lots of neat ideas. There you can invent and test systems and be a developer yourself.
You mean hardcore gaming style? i am sorry but since MMOs became mainstream its casual players who earn these companies there bread and butter. UO was never mean to be played casually. If i had no life and 12 hours a day to burn i would play games like UO.
You've obviously never played UO then. The whole point in UO was you could do whatever you wanted, some things took longer, some not so much. It's ironic that the raids in a lot of these "casual" games consume more time than any one thing in most sandbox games.
Until some jerk who thinks he's the Terminator with a keyboard comes and takes all that stuff you worked for, and you are back to square one feeling like you just wasted the last few days.
I doubt you were in beta just by a few key points of what you said. I then take the fact you say "any place with resources is camped..." and think you either didn't play at all and love to tell a tale or you were horribly dumb and mined in Brit pass thinking it was the only place to mine.
This give me things easy mentality is what caused EQ to take off. The thing is UO wasn't that hardcore, it just required you to think once in a while..."omg there is a red maybe I should walk by him"...Wrong son, hit hide, cast invis or run if you don't want to fight him. If you see a guy snooping your bags don't lawl, move away or kill him hes gonna steal from you.
I must thank you for jumping ship if you did play UO at any given time. Without you EQ players we wouldn't have WoW and all the quest/level clones we have today.
I doubt you were in beta just by a few key points of what you said. I then take the fact you say "any place with resources is camped..." and think you either didn't play at all and love to tell a tale or you were horribly dumb and mined in Brit pass thinking it was the only place to mine.
This give me things easy mentality is what caused EQ to take off. The thing is UO wasn't that hardcore, it just required you to think once in a while..."omg there is a red maybe I should walk by him"...Wrong son, hit hide, cast invis or run if you don't want to fight him. If you see a guy snooping your bags don't lawl, move away or kill him hes gonna steal from you.
I must thank you for jumping ship if you did play UO at any given time. Without you EQ players we wouldn't have WoW and all the quest/level clones we have today.
And MMO would have never become mainstream and just a full time activity for no life nerds. Don't feel bad if companies want to target casual gamers with less time sinks and more FUN. because as shocking as it may sound one has to have a full time job to be able to pay a monthly sub.
OP, I think you meant to say, "I wanted UO to be my future."
Our future was determined by which games players enjoyed (and thus subscribed to) more.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
We understand you completely. I think you are the one who is not understanding why companies don't want to make MMO like UO anymore.
I think that the "sandbox" or more open-ended games are making a comeback. The success of EVE, if nothing else, gives us hope. Sure, we've lost some fun ones like SWG (and Ryzom, though I didn't like that one due to its stylistic graphics which somehow made me uncomfortable). I believe UO is still around, and got something of a facelift with Kingdom Reborn. And Horizons still goes on, one of the greatest PvE-crafting MMOs ever to be cursed by horrible corporate ownership(s).
But I think we'll see more of a blend than the completely free-form UO style. Fallen Earth is a good example of a game where you don't HAVE to do anything but scavenge, harvest, mine, craft, PvP, yet also has very full and rich questing for those of us who also like a story and some text to go with our rock hunting.
I also think by now that developers and investors have finally realized that WoW is the exception. THey're not going to reach those kinds of numbers ever again. I think that niche MMOs will become the future, and those are ripe for sandbox style play.
-- Xix
"I know what you're thinking: 'Why, oh WHY, didn't I take the BLUE pill?'"
There is truth in this statement. If UO was so great, why aren't the bulk of the player base still playing? Oh wait, it must have been Trammel, right? Oh wait, no ... it couldn't have been that since they had a shard specifically set aside without the Trammel/Felucca split (Siege Perilous). So, again, why did people leave? Why aren't you playing it anymore?
As far as the market is concerned, Sandbox games are will remain a minority within the MMO industry. Most people don't care about freedom or a virtual world. They simply want a good game for their monthly fee. Now, I'm not saying that there isn't room for sandbox MMOs. However, if you really think they will ever become the future of the MMO market, you are deluding yourself. The only reason why UO was so big in the past was simply because there was no where else to go. Not everyone liked or had the ability to run a 3D game such as EQ. So, UO was pretty much it. As hardware got cheaper, new MMOs came out and UO started to dwindle away.
Now, personally, I played UO since 96 and I stayed until the second expansion after Trammel. I left simply because I was bored. Not enough new "tools" were given to the players to continue the sandbox game play and not do the same thing over and over. I came back (twice) over the past couple of years. I chose not to stay, because the game became heavily itemized, moved away from the crafters and also included item insurance. It seemed to have become nothing more than a dungeon crawl and collect the items with the highest stats.
Amen to that. These days time is money so less time sinks the better. Most of the people (grown ups) who have full time jobs don't have that luxury of time anymore. I don't want to spend hours upon hours collecting resources only to be ganked by some jerk and lose everything to start from zero.
I had been a huge fan of MUDs leading up to UO, thinking the addition of graphics would make the entire experience better. It didn't. I hated UO for all of the reasons others have described, most notably the open world PvP where new players would be camped outside the gates for sport.
What UO had, as well as the original SWG, was the ability to enjoy a game outside of the leveling wheel. Yes, we all know this as the "sandbox", but people often downplay the incredible amount of fun that could be achieved by increasing skills through social and non-combat methods. As far as advancement went, it was slow, but it was also meaningful and rarely felt like a grind.
Now we get crap like Darkfall, which has all the worst of UO and none of the benefits.
Amen to that. These days time is money so less time sinks the better. Most of the people (grown ups) who have full time jobs don't have that luxury of time anymore. I don't want to spend hours upon hours collecting resources only to be ganked by some jerk and lose everything to start from zero.
It may have been smarter to grab some resources, recall to the bank, and then recall back out to the exact spot and grab some more, than stand there with hours and hours worth of resources in yout pack...
Not to mention, with hours and hours worth of resources in your pack, it would have been very difficult to move, even if you dropped it on the ground and dragged it... But then you'd just be asking for it... right?
Amen to that. These days time is money so less time sinks the better. Most of the people (grown ups) who have full time jobs don't have that luxury of time anymore. I don't want to spend hours upon hours collecting resources only to be ganked by some jerk and lose everything to start from zero.
It may have been smarter to grab some resources, recall to the bank, and then recall back out to the exact spot and grab some more, than stand there with hours and hours worth of resources in yout pack...
Not to mention, with hours and hours worth of resources in your pack, it would have been very difficult to move, even if you dropped it on the ground and dragged it... But then you'd just be asking for it...
You must be one of the PKers? you just proved the point why people don't want open world pvp games. Just to avoid players like yourself.
Amen to that. These days time is money so less time sinks the better. Most of the people (grown ups) who have full time jobs don't have that luxury of time anymore. I don't want to spend hours upon hours collecting resources only to be ganked by some jerk and lose everything to start from zero.
It may have been smarter to grab some resources, recall to the bank, and then recall back out to the exact spot and grab some more, than stand there with hours and hours worth of resources in yout pack...
Not to mention, with hours and hours worth of resources in your pack, it would have been very difficult to move, even if you dropped it on the ground and dragged it... But then you'd just be asking for it...
You must be one of the PKers? you just proved the point why people don't want open world pvp games. Just to avoid players like yourself.
Why, because i played the game smart and didn't leave myself open to foolish setbacks?
I played from the day it was released until Age of Shadows.. In that span of time, i never killed anyone that wasn't red, or a known PK... I played as what we called an anti-pk, protecting players from pks..
I'm curious though, what it is about me that you want to avoid in game..?
edit: I killed people in duels and RPd events also, but i dont think that was your point.
Not everyone likes the idea of playing a video game and losing hours of progress just because someone who is bored decided to kill you and loot your stuff while you were busy doing something else.
Some people don't want to be interrupted while playing, can you fault them for that? No. How would you like it if while you were trying to gank someone a friend walked in your room and turned off your computer? Not fun, is it?
Amen to that. These days time is money so less time sinks the better. Most of the people (grown ups) who have full time jobs don't have that luxury of time anymore. I don't want to spend hours upon hours collecting resources only to be ganked by some jerk and lose everything to start from zero.
It may have been smarter to grab some resources, recall to the bank, and then recall back out to the exact spot and grab some more, than stand there with hours and hours worth of resources in yout pack...
Not to mention, with hours and hours worth of resources in your pack, it would have been very difficult to move, even if you dropped it on the ground and dragged it... But then you'd just be asking for it...
You must be one of the PKers? you just proved the point why people don't want open world pvp games. Just to avoid players like yourself.
Why, because i played the game smart and didn't leave myself open to foolish setbacks?
I played from the day it was released until Age of Shadows.. In that span of time, i never killed anyone that wasn't red, or a known PK... I played as what we called an anti-pk, protecting players from pks..
I'm curious though, what it is about me that you want to avoid in game..?
You think anyone is foolish because they want to do their own thing in their own free time without some jerk bothering them? really? smarter people are those who play games for fun and grind in real life.
UO is godtier.
MMOs don't have "things" for it's players to do anymore. At least, they don't give enough freedom nor the tools for players to make their own fun.
Amen to that. These days time is money so less time sinks the better. Most of the people (grown ups) who have full time jobs don't have that luxury of time anymore. I don't want to spend hours upon hours collecting resources only to be ganked by some jerk and lose everything to start from zero.
It may have been smarter to grab some resources, recall to the bank, and then recall back out to the exact spot and grab some more, than stand there with hours and hours worth of resources in yout pack...
Not to mention, with hours and hours worth of resources in your pack, it would have been very difficult to move, even if you dropped it on the ground and dragged it... But then you'd just be asking for it...
You must be one of the PKers? you just proved the point why people don't want open world pvp games. Just to avoid players like yourself.
Why, because i played the game smart and didn't leave myself open to foolish setbacks?
I played from the day it was released until Age of Shadows.. In that span of time, i never killed anyone that wasn't red, or a known PK... I played as what we called an anti-pk, protecting players from pks..
I'm curious though, what it is about me that you want to avoid in game..?
You think anyone is foolish because they want to do their own thing in their own free time without some jerk bothering them? really? smarter people are those who play games for fun and grind in real life.
Do i think standing in one area in an open world PvP game for hours, mining, clearly after that length of time being completely overloaded, foolish? Why, yes I do..
When you could just recall to a bank, and drop off your goods after you fill your pack in about 10 minutes... Ya, your right... i don't know what i am thinking..
Amen to that. These days time is money so less time sinks the better. Most of the people (grown ups) who have full time jobs don't have that luxury of time anymore. I don't want to spend hours upon hours collecting resources only to be ganked by some jerk and lose everything to start from zero.
It may have been smarter to grab some resources, recall to the bank, and then recall back out to the exact spot and grab some more, than stand there with hours and hours worth of resources in yout pack...
Not to mention, with hours and hours worth of resources in your pack, it would have been very difficult to move, even if you dropped it on the ground and dragged it... But then you'd just be asking for it...
You must be one of the PKers? you just proved the point why people don't want open world pvp games. Just to avoid players like yourself.
Err.. huh?
Actually... he was just giving an example of how to avoid losing all that time and effort to said "PK'ers" ... by being smart and not making yourself an easy target. Someone knowing how not to become a sitting duck makes them a PK'er to you? Good grief.
And, no.. I wasn't "one of those PK'ers", nor have I ever been.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops