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DonHopkins

One Halloween I logged into Ultima Online, and found I had been transformed into a deer.

I could walk around and do deer stuff, but no weapons or magic or talking.

Then some hippie bastard came along and tamed me! [1]

I had to follow him all around and do what he told me to from then on, on that terrible day.

[1] http://uo2.stratics.com/skill-guides/skills-and-professions/...

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I've heard from industry experts that Ultima Online developers gained an entire lifetime's experience in how to create an MMO, the positive and the negative. What subsequent games would divide into different categories for safety's sake (players vs. objects vs. enemies vs. items), UO lumped together in a very general way.

This simultaneously allowed for some amazing emergent behavior (such as this deer experience) and some really regrettable incidents where an admin would be, for example, manually deleting trash someone had left lying around on a path and accidentally clicked delete on a player's avatar, removing that player "permanently" from the game (I think they were able to solve it via a full state rollback, but at the cost of other players' progress to resurrect one player).

This also created an awesome economy around "rares" where people had managed to pick up something from the backdrop, like a piece of a table or a statue. Since these were so rare they became extremely expensive with art collectors decorating their houses with them.

> I had to follow him all around and do what he told me to from then on, on that terrible day.

I'm curious, how did that mechanic work? What stopped you from just refusing to follow orders?

I remember I could click to walk around, but then he could click to override my commands and walk me over anywhere he wanted, and make me attack other animals. Most of my other commands were neutralized! At first, I was having some fun doing deer stuff before he tamed me, but after he tamed me I was just too domesticated to have fun.

Deer honor

Godzilla!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-wUdetAAlY

Sounds like fun, I don't have much to add - I just needed to say UO was the greatest game ever made.

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