7 ms·
It only killed the franchise if you don't count Ultima Online, which is probably one of the most important games in video game history.
by Alex3917 6y ago
It only killed the franchise if you don't count Ultima Online, which is probably one of the most important games in video game history.
- fatsdomino001 6y agoUltima Online is the best gaming experience I ever had. In my opinion, nothing has come close to it in regards to game dynamics, was a proper open-world sandbox. As I never found anything close to Ultima Online, I basically stopped gaming entirely. UO raised the bar too high.
- dstick 6y agoSame here - though Dark Age of Camelot came close. It wasn’t sandboxy but the RvR did scratch the PvP itch!
- andrepd 6y agoStar Wars Galaxies was another absolute gem at its prime. I never played it, but reading stories about the game makes me feel it's the one game apart from UO which truly came close to fulfilling the promise of a "virtual, persistent, shared world".
- bovermyer 6y agoI played SWG from its release until its final shutdown, though I had several months-long breaks during the run. I posted a few articles on my blog after it was shut down in 2011. Here's one of them, going into the crafting system: https://benovermyer.com/post/2012/star-wars-galaxies-crafting/ https://benovermyer.com/post/2012/star-wars-galaxies-craftin...
- syoc 6y agoJust want to say that I really liked the blog posts. Very insightful.
- bovermyer 6y agoWhen I wrote the post I mentioned, it felt like just writing down my feelings on an extant system. Now, ten years later, it feels like I documented a part of history that hasn't replicated itself. I can't help but feel really sad about that.
- myko 6y agoRaph Koster had a lot to do with both Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. In some ways he's as influential as Lord British in this space. https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/postmortems/ https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/postmortems/ He has a book called Postmortems where he compiled essays (many found on his web page) about his early days writing MUDs and developing fantasy worlds, including UO and SWG.
- waynesonfire 6y agoNothing has come close and nothing ever will. Mainly due to the fact that it wasn't just the game mechanics; but that all player types had no other option except to play UO. This, combined with the game mechanics, is what made UO a one-of-a-kind experiences. I feel blessed and honored to have had the opportunity to be a part of it. After so many years failing to find a UO replacement; I've accepted this conclusion as reality and as result, have stopped searching.
- matwood 6y agoDAoC had some of the better PvP mechanics of that generation of MMOs. I played DAoC for years, and eventually moved to WoW for a little while. WoW always felt too easy and never really gave me the same rush that DAoC did. I still remember the day I gave a friend of mine my DAoC accounts. He later sold them when he quit, and gave me some cash back :)
- andrepd 6y agoIt's incredibly sad that by far the best MMO experience --- indeed one could say the only game which lived up to the promise of a shared, virtual, persistent world --- was also one of the first. It was all downhill after WoW. It was a great game, but it was precisely because it was so good that it soon hegemonised everything. Rather than being one possibility out of many, it became "the" MMORPG, in that due to its success every subsequent game copied WoW, often superficially, and maybe even sometimes accidentally. Its specific conventions became the genre itself.
- meheleventyone 6y agoEVE Online as well but that’s quite a different flavour. I played loads of UO back in the day and spent four years working on EVE. Very few games come close to touching either in terms of being so complex, almost to the point of being real spaces to navigate and live in.
- avdlinde 6y agoI'd just like to point out the 'played UO' and 'working on EVE' =] I love EVE, I just can't find the time to work on it anymore.
- meheleventyone 6y agoHaha, in my case I literally worked at CCP making EVE rather than the second job it can become playing it. Still some of the best community moments were with that job and the awesome people that play EVE. I had several great Fanfests.
- NickBusey 6y agoThere are plenty of great, free Ultima Online servers to play on. No need to stop playing!
- milofeynman 6y agoIt was a great experience. And I'll cherish it. Free servers aren't the same. Might setup a server on my local network some day to play with my kid.
- matheusmoreira 6y agoTibia comes pretty close The older versions, anyway. Apparently it even started as a copy of Ultima. Never found anything close to it either. Every kid in my school played this game... It was like an IRC client with a fun game embedded in it.
- pkorzeniewski 6y agoTibia was absolutely HUGE in my country (Poland) around 2002 and it was my first and last major experience with MMO. I remember it was the only time back then I voluntarily woke up early in the morning long before the school because the servers were usually empty at that time and the spawn locations were full of monsters which meant quick exping :-) Trying to sign in after the school usually took a looong time but once you did it, it truly felt like going to a different universe. Some time ago I got a craving to play the Tibia version from my childhood and it turns out there's an active server called [1] Classictibia where you play using the 7.1 client version on a faithful recreation of the world from that time - a real blast from the past! [1] http://classictibia.com/ http://classictibia.com/
- gpderetta 6y agoI played UO on an unofficial RPG shard for about one year. The server was was only up only a few hours during the evening (and would often crash), most of the mechanics weren't implemented, and those that were were often buggy. It still was one of the best (if not the best) gaming experience I ever had as well.
- jedberg 6y agoI only very briefly play UO. I'm curious if you could give more details of how how it was different to make it the best experience you ever had. What are games today missing?
- fatsdomino001 6y agoIt was a incredible world to discover and explore (especially custom servers with custom maps and content). There was no 'point' to the game, i.e. no final destination or quest to complete... in fact there were barely any quests at all. It was all just up to you. However you wanted to play you could. I.e. you could just have a blast logging in and hanging out in a player's house which they converted into a bar and play chess chatting about w/e. I even played some great roleplaying shards which were legit, e.g. a LOTR one and it was soo epicly awesome. Good pvp dynamics. I did love the ruthlessness of losing everything when you died. I loved how custom shards could tweak so many of the variables pretty easily. I just have so many absolutely golden memories, hilarious and absurd memories. Idk... it's just really hard to convey how the game was the best. I think a lot of is just because it let you do whatever you wanted, but also provided you with fun PvE, PvP, roleplaying, etc. What are games today missing? They're not persistent open-world sandbox games. Sure we have open-world games, but they're not sandbox and often not persistent, and we have sandbox but they're not open-world and often not persistent too. I can't do it. I can't adequately describe what games today are missing which UO had. It's a quality of the combination of all the features UO had that just resulted in the best memories and fun I've had when gaming. I just don't see enough support for player-generated content as UO had, which I suspect is a big part of it too.
- jedberg 6y agoThanks for the writeup!
- kingaillas 6y agoNot the OP and I didn't play UO, but I did play a peer game out at the same time, Asheron's Call. AC, UO, and of course EQ were the big 3 early MMOs. Anyway, there was definitely more community back then, if only due to how there were basically no modern quality-of-life considerations. No auto-group finder, minimal instancing (no instancing?), loss of items on death... you had to lean on others to help you out and they would, because eventually they'd need your help. A classic example is doing a corpse run to recover your items. In a modern MMO, you die and can rez at some convenient spot with all your items. No real loss or penalty for tough fights, no risk. In AC, you lost xp on death, lost items on your corpse, and had to make your way back to your body to erase the xp penalty and get your stuff back. I think the timer was something like 3 hours before your corpse would decay and either anybody could loot your body or time items disappeared. I think UO and EQ were the same. Some of the most memorable corpse runs where when you lost your armor and had to get some friends to come with you since you were now half naked and perhaps weaponless.
- agentultra 6y agoIt's being revived: https://uo.com https://uo.com
- jackstraw14 6y agoThey've tried so many times to "fix" it. At this point, I think UO Outlands is probably the best UO experience you can get.
- User23 6y agoI earned my college spending money arbitraging UO real estate between in game gold and Ebay prices. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but I recall earning well over minimum wage per hour.
- datalus 6y agoUO was my #1 gaming experience and sadly like others have mentioned: probably won't have that exceeded by an MMO again. However, there was a brief moment when Sierra had more control over the LOTR MMO (known as Middle Earth Online) and it looked very similar to early UO.
- Alex3917 6y ago> probably won't have that exceeded by an MMO again It'll happen once VR takes off, even if that takes another 20 years to happen.
- vpilcx 6y agoI've always been searching for another MMO experience. Eve Online was close but not quite the same. While not exactly an MMO experience, Rust is the closet modern approximation that I've experienced.
- orbital-decay 6y agoARK: Survival Evolved is a much better example of a game in the UO/Eve Online spirit. While also being a cutthroat PvP sandbox like Rust, it has complex politics and power games between massive inter-server tribes, making it more MMO-ish.
- kowlo 6y agoUO was great. Lots of games from long ago that were good: - legend of mir 2 - phantasy star online (dreamcast) - lineage - myth of soma - ragnarok online - many more
- matheusmoreira 6y agoYeah. Had friends who played Ragnarok. So many memories of dead games... How many are still online? I know Tibia still is, they emailed me a free week of premium last christmas.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dlitvakb 6y agoRagnarok Online is still alive and evolving, there's also a non-complete, but still super fun and playable mobile version, which is not the cash-grabby kind of mobile MMORPG (even though... of course you can pay to advance faster)
- jerf 6y agoIf you zoom up a bit from the level this article is in, as I understand it, while Ultima was on the rocks anyhow, it was Ultima Online that comprehensively killed the franchise by being too successful. Rational business logic said to pour the effort into the moneymaker UO and the single-player Ultimas couldn't compete for resources. IMHO, there would still have been a lot of winds against the series anyhow. The exponential increase in the difficulty of technology was not playing well with Origin's high level of aggressiveness on that front. And perhaps a bit more controversially, the series just wasn't headed in a good direction; after the impressive founding of the series' reputation on the virtue system in 4 and 5, the series was headed ever faster into a nihilistic undercutting of its own foundations. (And I'd highlight the undercutting aspect over the nihilistic aspect; while I'll cop to being less impressed with nihilism than probably the average HN reader, nihilistic RPGs aren't intrinsically a bad thing, but in this particular case it undercuts the foundations.) Even a fully-realized Ultima 8 was never going to fit the series very well, and IMHO could even have ended up with a worse story in some aspects than we got.
- kbenson 6y agoWell, I distinctly remember there being a lot of hype a while after Ultima IX came out that Ultima X would be a reimagining of UO in 3D. I'm not sure how much of that was wishful thinking on the part of gamers that were looking for a silver lining in the steaming pile that was Ultima IX (me included) and how much of that was founding in fact, or at least the plans of Origin/EA. One would think if UO was so successful they would want to funnel people into something new with even more longevity. On a side note, Ultima IX was not only not a good game, it's the only game I know of that ever sent me a complete set of new CDs with an updated version on them months after release without me even specifically requesting it. I still remember the mostly (entirely?) blank white tri-fold (or quad fold?) cardboard CD enclosure it came in with all new disks. I don't think I ever used them, partly because I already had that version or one better from the internet prior to it arriving, and partly because the game still had such horrible performance on my moderately good system that I had already given up on it because the gameplay itself wasn't nearly good enough to make me subject myself to that.
- duxup 6y agoDue to an unstable modem connection during the UO timeline I never could play. UO always seemed like more of a sand boxy 'lets see what happens' kinda world. Meanwhile MMORPGs all seem to be more 'lead you by the nose progression'. I miss more of the 'lets see what happens' kinda games.
- castwide 6y agoMMORPGs have always been a mix of both. UO was definitely one of the most sandboxy, but it also demonstrated why a sandbox full of children needs a supervisor.
- Shivetya 6y agoUO was definitely a new direction, considering for online you had MUDs or limited graphical games like The Shadow of Yserbius. However it was quickly eclipsed by Everquest which came in 99 and I would say is far more important to the MMO landscape than UO ever was. Asheron's Call quickly followed EQ and while it never had the numbers was the first no zone MMO - you could travel anywhere and no load except into dungeons which were nothing like what people are used to today. It was certainly a time for experimentation to see what players liked and disliked and for all sorts of fun bugs if not exploits in each game to rile a community.
- debaserab2 6y agoUO is the only game that allowed players to completely dictate the social norms between players and didn't allow players to box themselves into their own segregated safe experiences. It's easy to understand why MMO's evolved away from this approach as they attempted to reach the masses, but there's an entire audience looking for something else that got abandoned. It's a shame, really.
- nemo44x 6y agoShadowbane allowed this too. Was a great experience with the natural politics emerging since resources were fairly scarce and you needed to stick together to survive and not get your things taken from you.
- Alex3917 6y ago> didn't allow players to box themselves into their own segregated safe experiences For the first year or two at least.
- musicale 6y ago> It only killed the franchise if you don't count Ultima Online, which is probably one of the most important games in video game history. And Ultima Online has been running since 1997 and is still going ?!?! https://uo.com https://uo.com That it is still "Online" with active players is an extraordinary accomplishment. It really is one of the most important games in video game history. (Note FFXI and WoW are also remarkably long-lived MMOs.) Also imagine playing a full MMO on a 233 MHz CPU with 32MB of RAM and downloading updates via blazing fast 56kbps dial-up internet... GameSpot gave it 4.9/10. ;-)
- IntelMiner 6y agoWith the pace of technology today UO is probably just running in a VM on some machine somewhere, barely taking up enough resources to notice It's effectively "free money" for EA now I suppose
- amanaplanacanal 6y agoEverquest is still alive too, and it is older than WoW or FFXI.
- rrivers 6y agoJust hopping in to agree about UO, one of the primary gaming experiences of my life. A fascinating culture, community, and experience. Chesapeake baby.
- AzzieElbab 6y agoI couldnt make myself play that and eq. The amount of repetitive tasks was just daunting. It felt like these games were designed by sadists
- ryanbrunner 6y agoThe thing I really loved about Ultima Online is you could have fun without caring about that. I mostly just hung out in the "town" my guild created and built furniture / organized our resources and managed our vendors. Most of my skills didn't ever get far beyond newbie level. That's unthinkable in WoW - the game is 100% focused on progression and advancement.
- vharuck 6y ago>Most of my skills didn't ever get far beyond newbie level. This is the best test for whether a game really allows freedom in player interaction. If players can have fun and build characters without ever relying on game-mechanical progression, they have true freedom. I made more money in UO running dice games next to the bank than running dungeons.
- rootw0rm 6y agoUO was incredible. I learned ASM and how to use a debugger because of that game. Released open source tools to patch all 100+ versions of the game client. Some day I'll make a proper sequel. There's been no better balance of risk vs. reward since UO...I think a couple titles have come close, but nothing has captured the magic of T2A.
- dalu 6y agoI tried to like it again and again but I just couldn't. It was always a super boring experience. I preferred Meridian 59 and later DAOC. EQ wasn't my thing either, so much downtime. 1 minute of fighting 5 minutes of waiting. UO endless whacking of rocks and chopping of wood. One time I did that 3 days only watching the screen and I wrote an automation script to do that. After that I never looked back. Ultima Underworld however was awesome and when thinking back was a true gem.