Former Ultima Online developers working on MMO offering 'unparalleled freedom' | Hacker News Reader

Former Ultima Online developers working on MMO offering 'unparalleled freedom'

polygon.com

63 pointsyiedyie18 comments

I really hope they were developers in the old Origin, pre-Renaissance days; and not developers from the EA, post-Age of Shadows days.

For those not in the know, much of the open-ended nature of the game was removed or destroyed in order to appeal to the popularity of MMOs such as World of Warcraft. An entire PvP-free world removed all of the danger of exploring, item insurance and infinite item durability repair removed all of the risk of carrying high-end gear, the Doom gauntlet added WoW-style dungeon grinding, power/stat scrolls brought in near-mandatory guild raiding, endless new classes brought serious balancing issues, veteran rewards chased off new players, countless new lands combined with dwindling players made the game more of a ghost town, etc. The entire game shifted from a social gathering that was a blast to explore, into a grind-fest treadmill.

I really miss the old game, but not enough to run a hacked client on a fan-made server with under 200 users that could disappear at any time.

Instead of the split-sharding of servers for people who enjoy different themes, I always thought a company should explore how much theme could be changed on the fly depending on the specific individual present in the environment.

Example: I design a castle which really just amounts to walls + ornaments. For someone else with "space theme enabled" the castle appears as a floating ship which is just walls + ornaments at the same scale. Costumes are obviously easy to deal with. I know it's not without it's limits but it always seemed like Minecraft's texture packs were a good conceptual start since they can be server-forced or client-forced.

I think every MMO since Everquest has promised unparalleled freedom during development.

Did you read the article though? All those other MMOs talk about more player-in-world freedom, which is just a natural progression. These devs are talking about taking the role of world-gods that MMO companies are normally restricted to paid employees, and turning it over to "players" to run and manage their own servers.

It's like all those other MMOs were promising greater freedom on one axis, and often delivering it, while this is offering a whole new axis.

Is Raph Koster involved? It doesn't seem like it. It's great that this project has some of UO's developers, but without the person who designed UO and made it such a wonderful sandbox... I don't know, I have my doubts.

I used to run Stratics' UO Ideas Den[1], a forum for players to suggest game changes on the semi-official fansite. One of the most popular requests was for just this - for Origin/EA/Mythic to offer official "grey shards".

Grey shards were the name given to player-run servers running re-implementations of Ultima Online, to which the official clients could be hacked to connect to. Some of these got extremely successful, and I'm fairly sure many of the developers now work in the game industry. Some were simply opportunities to remove changes they didn't like (like removing the no-PvP lands). Others were completely new worlds. And some had dedicated teams who ran plot and tried to make the worlds seem alive.

Of course, over its years, Ultima Online did go through a number of these changes naturally in one form or another. PvP only servers were launched, and at various times they recruited players to run events and story arcs.

But what kept Ultima Online going wasn't just the old guard PvPers and the addicts to the original 2D low-res client. There had always been a very strong player community on some shards, with NPC towns used as a basis for player plot and story telling.

he tools UO offered were fairly unique as far as this went. You could build your own house, and eventually not only decorate it but design the layout from scratch all by yourself. The player NPC vendor system that allowed people to run shops was clunky, but still very impressive in terms of how creative people got and how many players simply role-played tradespeople and didn't really do the whole PvP/PvM thing. You could place objects on the floor, some of which would even block movement - emphasis added for anyone who hasn't tried any of the popular MMOs to make clear that this still is a rare feature. The crafting system again was very in depth, too.

And then there's fishing. A skill that tbh was pretty boring to use, but combine that with trade and you could enjoy yourself out on the oceans in your boat. Treasure hunting was another path you could dedicate your characters to, which included figuring out where in the world a map was showing, and needed skills in lockpicking and dealing with monsters.

The skill system was again something we don't see a lot of. Mostly this is because it is fairly complex and dull to level up at the same time. Any character could train in any skill, if they had the room to grow or were willing to give up another skill. You could really twink out with complementary fighting skills, be a tradesperson who gathered their own resources, or you could build a completely and utterly useless character, grandmaster at everything that by themselves were useless, and together only had value for roleplay purposes.

And we did just that! Ultima Online had a skill called "Begging", used to get small quantities of money off NPCs. The higher the skill, the slightly more you'd get. Some of us would roleplay beggars, avoiding all skills that we roleplayed as being "evil". We would come up with character backstories, and try to earn money off other players by any lawful means that wasn't using an 'evil' skill or against your personal ethics.

Speaking of that, the things the rules used to let you do against other players, and the fun you could have in the PvP areas... Originally, when you died your kit stayed on the corpse, and in PvP areas anyone could loot it ;)

And if it were not for Ultima Online, we wouldn't have the games we now have. Not only was it the first proper MMORPG (or second if you count Meridian 59), but it also inspired many other games. Jagex, one of the UK's most successful MMO developers was founded by a team recreating UO in java - the game that became Runescape! That game inspired another open-world java game, Wurm Online, which Notch worked on. Notch, of course, later developed Minecraft, and you might be able to see the similarities ;)

Finally, If you're into game design theory, one of the original development team of UO is now a key player in that area of academia, having published A Theory Of Fun - http://www.raphkoster.com/.

[1] Old UO player? Europa? Stratics bod from 2002-2007? get in touch! :D

Edit: And how could I have forgotten to mention the amazing bit of work that was Nick Yee's Daedalus project! http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/

Stratics was amazing, thanks for that. I had a lot of fun writing tips and guides for hunting down rare objects [objects that were part of the game world, but would become lootable upon game maintenance periods that occurred weekly].

Ultima Online was my first foray into massively multiplayer gaming. I remember lining up for the T2A expansion. Good times.

I worked on a few UOX shards (the first successful UO emulator) before getting involved with SphereServer. UOX had some rudimentary scripting, but Sphere took it a step further. I wouldn't call its source code elegant at all, and it was often a race to update the server for any major client changes that Origin released. SphereServer's scripting language was certainly -interesting- by language definition. It reminds me a lot of DwarfFortress's RAW formats.

I later moved to RunUO, which is what replaced most SphereServer shards. A full C# backed emulator, where the game logic was written in real .NET code, backed by a rich API. It was like night and day comparing the old UOX system to RunUO. It wasn't really until RunUO that full Origin game clones came about. You can even jump on shards -today- that clone the game rules from 1997/1998.

The early Ultima Online was a brutal game, of which most modern multiplayer games pale (except perhaps Eve). One foolish or accidental mistake could set your character back weeks or months, and there was no game mechanics recourse.

'Vas Ort Flam' or 'Corp Por' or 'Kal Vas Flam' – run, you're about to die.

You worked on UOX Shard or the emulator? I played Novus Opiate, worked on Alphanine (scripting / GM / Player).

Both. None of my changes (aside from scripts) for UOX ever made it to the actual binaries, I joined too late. By the time I actually had the source, most major servers had already migrated (or died/been reborn) on other emulators. Prior to that, I did a fair bit with scripting in the UOX community. Once Sphere was 'stable' (in quotes, since it was never really… stable… and initially crashed a _lot_ more than UOX!) I jumped to it, since UOX had, at that point, stagnated and, IIRC, was behind the official client releases.

I used to run an Ultima Online server on RunUO when I was in high school. Consumed me for 3 years but was a real blast and gave me the introduction to programming that would later lead me to majoring in CS in college.

I thought this was going to be about Richard Garriot's new game, 'Shroud of the Avatar' which he said he would have called 'Ultima Online 2' if he could have obtained the rights. Apparently 'Shroud of the Avatar' is trying to finally deliver a true 3D version of Ultima Online, and it looks like they have reunited a few of the old Ultima Online developers. What I find interesting is they've chosen to work in the Unity3D engine and have been able to crowdsource good portions of the map design by releasing various dungeon/city kits. This got me thinking down a similar path to the 'Shards Online' developers. Its clear players want to develop their own worlds, its expensive for developers to do it, so why not try to bring these interests together?

I'm interested to see if the curated approach of 'Shroud of the Avatar' will beat out the have-it-all approach of 'Shards Online'.

If this has a level based system its an instant fail.

I agree with the comment given the background of the devs, but less the general concept. I think games like Guild Wars (at least the first one) have shown that levels and classes can work. Similarly the Elder Scrolls games show alternate approaches that can also work, especially when combined with mods.

But strict levels/classes on a system that is supposed to give players design freedom? Probably not a wise restriction, especially not if they want to use their old fan base - which is desperately looking for newer games!

Guild Wars worked because it focused on combat and the rest was never a focus, once you got to level 20 there was a grind for items and nothing else.

The problem with level based systems is you end up with zone restrictions. There's no reason to explore most of the map because its too low level, items are not useful, etc.

UO worked cos you could go anywhere, at any time, and harder places usually meant you needed a few friends to go with you. You could still do it yourself by pulling and picking off mobs, if they didn't respawn while you were killing stuff that is.

I miss UO...

The creator of Ultima and UO is making a new game called Shrouds of the Avatar.

Wow down voted, must be from someone who never played Ultima Online.

Probably rather people who think that your unexplained statement needs explanation.

Anyone who has played Ultima Online will understand my statement. Those who have never played UO wouldn't understand since they wouldn't know any different and wouldn't be able to relate. Instead they would try to justify why their favourite MMORPG is great.

And how is your comment any different...

"WHY CAN'T WE GIVE THAT SAME FEELING OF POWER AND EXTRAORDINARY FUN TO THE PLAYERS THEMSELVES..."

This is something that I don't think will EVER beat Ultima Online - it truly holds one of the most sentimental gaming experiences for me.

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