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Comment by DixieDev | Hacker News Reader

I missed UO's hayday, but when I've played the big modern MMOs I find myself instead attracted to the idea that individual characters shouldn't be able to do everything. I feel like forcing players to interact if they want to gather specific resources or craft vital items would really help a game feel "massively multiplayer".

Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other source of dependence on other players?

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> Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other source of dependence on other players?

I think Eve Online is the classic example. It's not technically true that players are limited in the sense that you mean. Rather, the limits are emergent.

The areas with the most valuable resources also have the least game provided security, so players are forced to band together into large organizations to protect themselves - essentially true virtual countries.

In addition, in Eve nearly all items (ships, modules, ammo, even starbases) are player-manufactured, player-hauled, and player-sold.

EVE is my favorite example.

There were four games I played at EA Redwood Shores: UO, Battlefield 2, EVE Online, and Microsoft Excel (because EVE).

> Battlefield 2

Really is a shame what happened to that franchise.

I spent a bajillion hours flying helicopters. Really loved 3 & 4.

Haven't played since, though. What happened?

It’s hardly even battlefield anymore

It’s like some unholy amalgamation of every shooter genre that’s been popular with kids in the past few years. It’s like hero shooter meets battle royale meets call of duty meets the battered corpse of what used to be Battlefield. It really feels like some out of touch suits said “see what kids like these days and rip it off”.

The previous game had its own controversies, and many veteran developers apparently left due to the stifling of creative control.

If you don’t mind a shitpost-ey video, I saw this the other day and it probably explains everything better than I can in an HN comment: https://youtu.be/d0lXNq2jrG8

It’s spends a lot of time on performance issues and bugs, but those are usually forgivable to me, at least as long as things get patched.

Also there’s a complete lack of content. Twenty something guns if I recall correctly, and lack of content can kill games, even otherwise good ones.

Just an addendum for anyone who clicks the video: the actual content starts around 2:40.

> Also there’s a complete lack of content. Twenty something guns if I recall correctly, and lack of content can kill games, even otherwise good ones.

The first game had something like 10 weapons and 10 maps if I recall correctly, but is considered a wildly successful game despite that.

The reason UO will never be re-created is that it was the first game of it's kind and thus every player had only one option. In modern times, the gamer population is so bifurcated that I'm not sure it'll ever be possible to have such a mix of player types in a single unforgiving ecosystem.

Plus newer game generation wouldn’t like the idea of being pk’d and losing items….

MMOs are still stuck with the concept of permanently undamagable items that can be worth hundreds of in-game hours because of insanely low drop rates.

If items had a finite lifespan and you could replace them quickly like in Minecraft, then the downside of losing your items would be far more acceptable.

This is also the reason why MMO economies tend toward deflation. Players craft thousands of food items that never perish and just pile up in some auction house or automated market place.

If every player sold their items when they quit there would be more items than players.

Or towards hyperinflation when the currency generation out paces any sinks thus driving the price levels to outright stupid levels, with only limiting factor being what players can hold and trade.

Then players simply don’t trade gold. Eventually a new currency appears will facilitate the trades anyway.

This is exactly what happened in Diablo 2. You had a gold limit, and the value for gold was so low that players began using Stone of Jordan rings as currency for other item trades.

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/22688/why-did-sto...

One of the challenges is finding the right proportional scale.

If the difficulty or fun of say blacksmithing nice items for the community. And you have it balanced out that you expect 20% of players be blacksmith. But then either 10 or 30% be blacksmiths either items skyrocket in price and make it unobtainable to most or the floor bottoms out making it not viable for most to engage in a market.

I think its solvable but itd require a lot of dynamic based systems to scale properly based upon number of players in each categories of life skill limits.

With that said, check out a game called Eco. They have life skill limits and force cooperation on small scale (30 day per server wipe). I think you can reasonably have 2 or 3 professions of 12 and people buy and sell from each other.

I don't understand why MMOs could never figure out how to make resource gathering as fun (or more fun) than hack & slashing.

Stardew Valley and other games - Death's Door, A Short Hike, Toem, etc - figured this out.

Why haven't any MMOs done it?

Dunno, RuneScape seems fun? There's lots of types of materials, lots of ways to gather? True, most of the mechanics are just click-and-wait, but it's not like most MMOs where wood isn't any different from ore...

I'd argue that New World made gathering and to a lesser degree crafting a lot of fun. The rest of the game was kinda crap, but I did actually enjoy doing material farms.

FFXIV has a decent gathering approach

I play Conan Exiles which isn't exactly an MMO, but has the same sort of resource gathering grind. While my character is new, I don't actually mind it, but once I'm no longer just surviving, but thriving as a character, the basic resource gathering becomes mind-numbing due to the shear amount of stuff I need. There's no way to automate any of it.

In early UO, say Beta through the first few months of production, I knew a lot of folks who were primarily crafts folk. The town blacksmith, that sort of thing. After a while most players developed mules who had GM blacksmith skill or whatever so it became less of a thing.

But even then there were people out there. One woman I knew spent most of her time as an interior decorator for people's houses. It was a fun element that I never really saw in other games.

I do think to a large extent it came from the genre of game being new and every play style getting mushed into one game. People looking for the more pure social RP type role will congregate in a game catering to that, while the hack & slash adventure types will go elsewhere.

I've heard Ashes of Creation is trying to implement something like this (but they don't have a release date yet, just some interesting conversations with devs on their tooling and schedule)

Certain minecraft survival servers certainly, if they have the player count to make it feel "massive". Sometimes servers establish group protected towns or cities (these work like linux group permissions on files but over an arbitrary dimension of blocks in the server map) and there would be shared resources, e.g. a farm or chests full of leftover cobblestone from mining for diamonds, or even tools free for use to members of the group.

> forcing players to interact if they want to gather specific resources or craft vital items

"sup, u gm angler?/" https://web.archive.org/web/20030731200633/http://spla.sh/bp...

A Tale in the Desert.

There is no combat, just challenges of various types that range in scope from things you can do on your own to things that require the active cooperation of many people.

For example, solo player might delve into the mysteries of flax genetics just for the fun of solving a complex puzzle, but they have the alternative of buying seeds sold by other players.

https://uooutlands.com/

It is still as fun today as it was back then.

But you still can play UO in UO Outlands server, made by people who actually understands original concept, not like OSI-UO devs which turned UO, over the years, into care-bear themepark.

Old MMOs mostly were like that. FFXI and UO are probably the most famous.

Yes, Mortal Online 2 is the closest thing to UO to this day.

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