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).
Dragnon - Guildmaster - Albion Central Bank in Albion Online
www.albioncentralbank.enjin.com
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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.
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.
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.
Most games change in undesirable ways unless you can find a freeshard which supports an earlier time.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
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.
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.
Not true, DAOC was mine, yet I'd still say SWG was better.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Easy answer, Everquest killed UO. They added in overpowering weapons that made pvp very unfun for those that did not have them.
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.
~~ postlarval ~~
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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
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.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
Running medial task for hours in almost the same manner for every MMORPG is not memorable.