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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

UO was the bet game ever made, invented the MMO - but the original 1997-ish release was so much fun and also (I think) invented the idea of PVP (aside from quake, that that was FPS rather than ISO, etc.. so a philosophical argument I guess)

The entire reason I am in computers and tech is because of Ultima 2 which I found on a floppy in the Apple lab at my school.... I then ran a BBS, setup a network and converted the drafting lab from actual pencil drawing to CAD.

Bards tale was a good franchise as well - where we competed to complete them and me and my best friend got into fisticuffs over the fucking cheat book he bought.

He is now a Senior Producer at EA.

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UO was great back in the day as was Shadowbane. The whole safe places that MMO's became - and with good reason as more people liked that - disappointed me about the genre.

The player motivated politics and maneuvering and real threat to lose what you've worked hard for and the general scarcity of things in these types of games was unbelievable. Stealing, fighting for meaningful resources and guilds that existed to actually protect resources and players is just not possible in a game like WoW (was very good for different reasons though such as dungeon raiding) and derivatives where getting attacked and killed is meaningless.

Shadowbane, that's a word I haven't heard in a while. I think these days EVE is the only one carrying on the torch of that sub-genre.

Yeah seriously going back a bit there on a rather obscure, buggy game. For all its flaws, which were many, the experience overall was exhilarating.

Never played EVE but yeah it's the only game I'm aware of that has these types of dynamics.

did you guys ever read that story, which I believe I found on HN, about the guy who live in SF and wa basically the EVE accountant and manager for an EVE sydicated where he didnt play the game, but just managed monies and logistics?

Ill have to find the link.

That is an interesting comment...

WRT game philsophy, one might say WOW is combat focused (dungeon raids) where UO was much more personal-politcs focused (with the combat) and thus I think UO to be an 11 and wow an 8... regardless of how much $$ WOW has made... it is detracted by the fact that its massive, dedicated, userbase has never experienced original UO...

Indeed. WoW was great for that and I enjoyed it but there was always a piece missing.

The politics of games like UO and Shadowbane where a thief stealing a single valuable item from some folks farming for the guild could set off a huge war with backstabbing and deceit and alliances and everything else really made those games dramatic and fun.

Yeah you'd lose your stuff sometimes too and the most scary thing in the game was seeing a group of players from an aggressive guild descending on your farming and XP group. Everyone would scatter like buffalo being hunted by a group of lions.

It was hard to setup towns near valuable farming resources and there would be battles for dominance. All the different player personalities would take on different roles that appealed to them in a guild - some where the leaders who worked out deals and alliances; others were social butterflies who like to chat and farm; others liked to help harass enemies and some were mercenaries ready to work for whoever paid them. And other people enjoyed going solo as a thief and hated by all but other thieves.

It was a world only as good as the players could make it with what felt like real consequence to decisions and actions. Trust mattered.

I'll add that I don't think a game like that can ever really exist again. At least not with the dynamic those games had.

At the time there were no other options for people who wanted to play an MMO. You had to enter that world. So it was made up of all types of people but mainly you could break the community into 2 groups: Wolves and Sheep.

There were always plenty of sheep for the wolves to hunt for and terrorize and for the "hero wolves" to come in and protect. The relationships were real.

As soon as WoW came out anyone who preferred the sheep role (farming, socializing, building community, etc) had no reason to play a game they could be killed and have their spoils taken. It became a hassle when WoW gave them a peaceful world to coexist in. Where your enemy couldn't really hurt you or take anything you've worked for. A nice, safe space. The wolf types just became the hard core raiders competing to get eventual identical gear first and the sheep were the casual raiders and farmers and social butterflies.

>I'll add that I don't think a game like that can ever really exist again

I agree with this sentiment 100%

> the original 1997-ish release was so much fun

It was insanely laggy, when the servers were up at all. It probably was the best game ever made for a six month period, between when the servers finally got semi-stable and when they started releasing the expansions, which basically took all the fun out of the game. (What was the point of accumulating wealth and power once you could disable PVP to prevent yourself from getting randomly killed, and when there was now unlimited space for houses? Basically none.)

I agree with the latter half of your sentiment, but to the former, like I said, I was playing on the newest machines intel could build and I had an OC-48... so no lag. but after the housing insanity... it did go down hill.

I DLd the open version(which is incredible how that was reverse engineered in-and-of-itself) and it was literrally entirely populated with house and was no fun AT ALL.

but yeah, there was some where near a year where that game was amazing.

It is funny to think though, even though the game was revolutionary, how quickly it was grokked by people and play strategies were realized.

Fuck, look at twitch and how basically computer game culture has evolved!

there will be PHD level courses on this within 20 years.

The time period between mid-closed Beta UO and roughly that Christmas was my all time favorite time period for gaming.

PVP existed in MUDs long before UO was a thing.

I vaguely remember some UO developers showing up on rec.games.mud.* and asking a lot of questions.

one of my deepest historical tech regrets is that I never got into MUDs

I did, however, play Trade Wars and the PIT on BBSs in the 80s...

I recall smoking pot while playing trade wars in about 1991 or so... and I was trying to corner the market on grain, but instead of buying all the supply with my massive bank roll, I accidentally sold all my grain and screwed up my position on the galactic totem pole.

I had tons of notes related to Trade Wars and planning my moves.

I played some MUDs during university in the early 90s, but once I realized how much time I was spending on them, I decided I needed to stop for the sake of my grades. Of course, getting the original Civ game right before exams one year wasn't a good thing either from that perspective.

I got grounded for a month because I was calling the BBS in San Jose from Lake Tahoe, where I lived, to play those games... the phone bill was $926 dollars and my dad was so pissed that I ran up the long-distance bill that high.

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