If starting from scratch, what would an MMO need to replicate that?
I've experienced it first hand, but I can't grasp why it worked well like it did.
I've experienced it first hand, but I can't grasp why it worked well like it did.
Also there was a whole niche industry of collecting non-droppable items which spawned in the game world but were not fixed on the map (we think they were added post map creation), so they could be "pick pocketed" off the surfaces they were on and taken back to your home every wipe. There was a huge rush after servers came back on after a wipe for folks to go find the most rare items to stock up their towers and keeps.
The bugs were part of the game culture. The first time that you learned that items in the bottom right corner of your first house -- because they could be stolen through a bug even if your house was locked -- was something everyone jointly went through.
UO also had maybe the closest thing to a true player economy than any game. There was a legitimate path to making money (and having fun) to just mining ore and selling ingots. You would sell your iron bars in an unattended vendor to other players at your own price. Those bars would get bought by a blacksmith player to produce armor that they sold to other players... who would buy it to go adventuring in the dungeons.
Eve Online accomplished something a little more combat-focused, but similarly diverse in playstyle, mostly by dint of having a single large persistent world-shard with minimal functional instancing.
What do you mean by this?
When UO came out, it had to deal with a large game world that nevertheless would be too small to reasonably hold a number of players that represented financial success. So the game world was duplicated on multiple servers running the same map. A player on Atlantic server could have no interaction with a player on Chesapeake server. If you wanted to play together you needed to make characters on the same server. In-game this was reflected in cosmological lore about the world being some kind of crystal that was shattered into shards. This jargon spread, to some extent, to be a generic terminology in MMORPGs.
I believe UO launched with only three shards, and added a couple dozen at the height of its popularity.
Eve is notoriously a single-shard game, with the player count being accommodated in other ways as the map grows larger and more organized play is added patch to patch, and the actual play changing notably from the era of 5,000 simultaneous online to the era of 50,000 simultaneous online.
Even without deep skill-stat specialization, when your alliance has 500 people it lends itself strongly to role specialization, because an alliance of 500 people is an organization of 500 people, who find different things fun in different contexts, and whose operations have every category of need you would find in a small nation state, from diplomacy to collective resource allocation to logistics to surveying to espionage to military service, recruiting, communications, practice and command.
I'd go a step further, not just equally compelling, but it'd be interesting to see some games, particularly RPGs, where combat is effectively optional. One of many ways to level up your character and complete the objectives of the game.
There aren't many out there where you could have a complete pacifist playthrough, for example, and if there is, you usually still have to resort to theft, or use of paralyze & calm spells.
In most RPGs your professions (farming, herbalism, mining, etc.) are just secondary skills to help you progress in combat, and all the good stuff comes from killing enemies.
By complete coincidence, yesterday I was just looking at the website for a guild I was in 25 years ago on Oceania [2], which is somehow still online! I had a great time playing UO back then, but I don't think the experience can be recreated today. The people have changed.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33189823 2: http://tdr.iwarp.com/main_nfl.html
UO forced many different types of players to coexist in the same world that simply do not mix anymore. You had peaceful dungeon crawlers and craftsmen coexisting alongside killers, rapists, thieves (wild that stealing items from other players inventory was actually a thing, probably unheard of in today’s MMOs).
The friction between these different types of players is where the magic happened, it’s what created real conflict and higher stakes in the world. When you stepped out of your house, there was always a risk that killers could be lurking ready to murder you and loot your house dry. And if you forget to lock the door, someone passing by will clean your house out for anything valuable.
In a way, old school UO was a true Middle Ages type MMO, everything since then has only grown more civilized, more enshittified. People don’t want to pay for a world that doesn’t give a shit if they have a bad experience. The truth is though there was no “bad experience”, it was all just an experience.
I mean there absolutely were bad experiences. Griefing drove lots of players away, which is why they implemented Trammel.
You want enough friction to generate interesting interactions, you don't want so much freedom that the worst exploiters start to crowd out every honest player, because then, just like in a rundown lawless neighborhood, you're getting a lesson in the broken window theory and you're only left with the scammers.
So from a philosophical perspective sure you're right. But from a dollars and cents perspective it's just good business to find ways to legislate griefing out of games. And that's why the market moved the direction it did.
The defense to this was to carry dozens upon dozens of nested bags, because each bag opening could trip the pick pocket detection.
Also the defense to your home was to literally circle it in tents/buildings creating an empty courtyard that you could only teleport into with a rune you kept safely in your bank box. There were some warping bugs that would allow you into a courtyard though, or even through the front door (circle of visibility bug, as well as floor tile warping).
Its time to shine was short lived, I want to say it didn't even last the entirety of October '94. At the time it was out of reach of most toons anyways, but each individual meteor was close to instakill, plus it was AoE. The downside of course was it was AoE and friendly fire would make you red.
I remember one time in that time range getting called in because an argument was brewing between some guild mates and another guild in some dungeon. I arrived, decided to end the argument with a meteor swarm, promptly killed literally everyone from both guilds due to the AoE, and was a dread lord for a while. Needless to say, not how I drew it up on the board!
I think the barrier to entry is the equivalent of several complete, fun, balanced single player games operating together in balanced harmony. Not impossible, but highly improbable.
But to answer your question, there are three different clusters but contradictory sets of answers. And this was the problem.
1) It was a sandbox game developed with a focus on recreate a living world. A real ecology, real economy, skill based character system instead of classes where your skills tracked what you actually did, a focus on all sorts of roles - part of the original pitch was players could be the town blacksmith or whatever. I knew someone who spent several months playing an interior decorator for instance. Some people, such as myself, were attracted to this.
2) The same freedoms from #1 attracted PvP style gamers, especially from the then nascent FPS style games. Griefing, rampant slaughter, that sort of thing.
3) It also attracted PvE players who weren't at all interested in a realistic world and demanded the sort of conveniences we see in modern MMOs: mobs pinned to locations, predictable drops, predictable quest lines, instancing, optional PVP, etc.
You'll note that most of the people you see reminiscing online are from groups #1 and #2. Group #3 by and large hated the game and left as soon as they could. And your typical group #1 player eventually got annoyed at group #2 and just left altogether.
It's a hard problem to recreate UO because of this tension. Without allowing group #2 to exist you don't have the same environment. But by allowing group #2 to exist, they'll eventually take over and chase away everyone else.
At the end of the day, UO was a game that was simply a moment in time that can never be recreated. Too much of what made it great was due to the fact that it was a new thing.