6 ms·

This is such a good observation. UO had a real economy and social hierarchy because power wasn't handed to you. You could spend months as a fisherman or tailor

This is such a good observation. UO had a real economy and social hierarchy because power wasn't handed to you. You could spend months as a fisherman or tailor and still have a meaningful experience. The gap between a grandmaster swordsman in full plate and a guy selling fish at the Britain bank was enormous, and both of them were having fun. Modern MMOs are theme parks where everyone gets the same ride (with pay per win). UO was a living world where your role emerged from what you chose to do, not from a quest marker telling you where to go next.

haolez 7mo ago
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.
- NDizzle 7mo ago
  Well, it was kind of the only game in town. Sure, you had Dark Sun Online and Meridian 59, but in 96/97 you were playing UO if you liked the idea of online worlds. 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.
  - haolez 7mo ago
    Btw, I've never met a player of Meridian 59, but seeing YouTube videos about it, it might have been popular in my community if we had access to it at the time. Looks super interesting, although it didn't age well, of course.
    - NDizzle 7mo ago
      Really. I wonder if there are any historical videos about it. I have stories, but they are mostly exploit stories…
    - jghn 7mo ago
      A big cluster of my in game UO friends had come from playing together on M59. Just like we view UO to have been ahead of its time, the stories they told me made it feel ahead of its time back then. It wasn't *that* different from the MUDs of the day, but more video gamey, which was a big step up
- vunderba 7mo ago
  You’d need to start with the premise that combat shouldn’t necessarily be the focus of the game. Work on making other aspects (farming, hunting, taming animals, etc) to be equally compelling mechanics.
  - mapt 7mo ago
    They're by no means equally compelling. But they are viable ways to generate currency, you progress in them over time as a specialist, they feed back into the player economy performing tasks that other people want performed, and they are, importantly, in the same world, on the same shard. I know not to go near Orc Camp because there's a group of player killers down there, despite the fact that there's a rich Agapite vein running through the mountains near the entrance that I would love to mine and make armor out of. Back to the relative safety of Minoc for me, however crowded. In some timeline two weeks in the future, I band together with a bunch of other players (most of whom just want to farm orcs) to kick them out. Territorial control, even without any formal mechanics of territorial control, is closely correlated with narrative and socialization; I wouldn't have met any of those players if we were all on our own separate instance. 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.
    - haolez 7mo ago
      > having a single large persistent world-shard with minimal functional instancing What do you mean by this?
      - throwway120385 7mo ago
        Eve has every player on the same global system, and "shards" only by running the code for a particular system on a particular server. As a result, if you're in Eve Online every other player has some influence on you however minute.
      - mapt 7mo ago
        The concepts come with the idea of a persistent game map, which is online 23/7 and never wipes. 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.
- deadbabe 7mo ago
  It’s largely impossible now, it’s not a technical problem, it’s cultural. 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.
  - stackghost 7mo ago
    >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.
    - deadbabe 7mo ago
      Grief is a natural consequence of player freedom, but it’s not worth giving up that freedom for some safety.
      - Barrin92 7mo ago
        turns out it is for a lot of players which is why the kind of game is extinct. Just like in the real world, there's a fine line between risk and adventure and walking into something that looks like Liu Cixin's the Dark Forest. 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.
- codezero 7mo ago
  I say this unironically, but a lot of bugs. The bugs are what made UO fun, and the team often treated the bugs as features because the community demanded it. The most famous example (I think) is the "true black" dye. Another bug I ran into was when a certain shade of brown hair got turned "true white," I was able to petition a game master to let me keep my true white hair after the bug was fixed because I made it part of my "persona" at the time. 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.
  - eclipticplane 7mo ago
    UO came out when I was in high school. I would time my morning routines around the server reboot to grab those special items, some of which didn't respawn during routine reboots. 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.
    - mwigdahl 7mo ago
      How does the economy compare with the structures in EVE Online?
      - eclipticplane 7mo ago
        It was smaller scale and simpler, easy to understand without spreadsheets. Even a middle school student could understand their slice of the economy.
- havblue 7mo ago
  Is scarcity part of it? Making sure there are some jobs people have to do that don't involve combat but still drive the in-game economy?
  - haolez 7mo ago
    I think a component of it is a zero sum model. Like, not everybody can be incredibly successful. Not sure how to implement this, though.
- nzeid 7mo ago
  UO didn't have a global concept of a level. You had a maximum number of points per character, which you allocated to skills by doing the corresponding activity. This is how you can skill cap your character without killing monsters or players.
- shiftpgdn 7mo ago
  I still think 90% of what made UO unique is the fact there was no Google or central repository of expert knowledge. Yes, UOStratics existed, but it wasn't perfect. A lot of the fun was in the fact basically nobody knew the BEST way to play, and therefore everyone was just doing whatever they thought was fun.
  - NoOn3 7mo ago
    If someone create a new MMORPG in which rules changes a little every day or several days in unpredictable manner then no one will be knowing the BEST way to play or at least harder to find the BEST way. But maybe there will be no balance.
    - JoshTriplett 7mo ago
      I don't think that would work: either the rules change little enough that you can still document meta-strategies, or the rules change too much and players can't learn them either.
  - jghn 7mo ago
    I remember spending so much time every patch day with other people on my server where we just tried out different combinations of spells, weapons, armor, tactics to see what worked this week.
- jghn 7mo ago
  The big problem that UO ran into was that it turned out the people who liked what UO was is a pretty niche audience. In a lot of ways Everquest was a direct rejection of the features that folks like me think of as the golden years. 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.
- ajxs 7mo ago
  Unfortunately the missing ingredient to recreating UO is a playerbase that can see the virtual world with innocent eyes. This HN post[1] always comes to mind. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33189823 2: http://tdr.iwarp.com/main_nfl.html http://tdr.iwarp.com/main_nfl.html
codezero 7mo ago
My friends mocked me for spending months as a llama herder, until I could tame dragons and grief people by pulling them through portals.
- DonHopkins 7mo ago
  Oh yeah, you could tame animals to make them your pets. One Halloween I logged into UO, and my character had been transformed into a deer, as some kind of a sick joke! All my inventory was gone, and all I could do was deer stuff. Then some bastard came along and TAMED ME. That totally sucked! I had to follow him around obediently all day. I guess I'm lucky he didn't skin me and make me into leather armor.
eclipticplane 7mo ago
Core memories of carefully setting my fisherman on a boat with `ezmacro` before I got ready for school. I'd come home to either a boat full of fish (to later cook into fish steaks), or be dead from a player killer who found my boat and killed my macroing guy to try and steal the boat.
- SenHeng 7mo ago
  I always forgot where I parked my boats. Or that I even had one.
  - faidit 7mo ago
    I always checked the harbor for unlocked boats and took them on joyrides.
    - andrepd 7mo ago
      None of these experiences would be possible in a "WoW clone" MMO. Only with the freedom of an immersive sim can these memorable moments happen. We could do it in 1999. Why has no one done it again? Why isn't there a BotW-engine MMO?
      - prox 7mo ago
        I think Star Citizen might be the closest thing. It’s certainly unparalleled. There is an interesting talk with the techtool guy from last Thursday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmxmkx87qcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmxmkx87qcE
      - jghn 7mo ago
        Because this style of game appealed to two clusters of gamers. The first one is small and niche, and thus not profitable. The second one are the griefers who only want to play if they have victims available, which isn't going to happen in a small & niche game. These kinds of games *do* exist, they're just, well, small & niche as they've learned to either build in protections against griefers and/or stay small enough to not attract notice. If you find yourself in the first cluster and not the second, you may want to check out the latest project from Raph Koster, aka Designer Dragon from UO. [1] [1] https://starsreach.com https://starsreach.com
jghn 7mo ago
> UO had a real economy Sort of. They disabled big parts of the "real economy" in beta. Turned out that players didn't like it that NPC shopkeepers kept standard working hours and didn't want to buy their 5000 skullcaps from their skill grinding. Likewise they even more quickly got rid of the real ecology feature, both because it was computationally intensive but also because players would strip mine the ecology.
- chongli 7mo ago
  They disabled NPC participation in the real economy. This gave way to the real player economy which took place in player-run shops built inside player-owned and customized housing. Players didn't buy those 5000 junk skullcaps either. They wanted stuff that was actually valuable, which meant those practice items were recycled or thrown in the trash. I remember when the UO team added trash barrels and created the "Clean up Brittania" event. The game's servers were struggling to deal with large numbers of these junk objects that people littered on the ground so the devs decided to enlist the players' help cleaning it up, just like a real-life public park cleanup project! Players got rewarded special items based on the amount of junk they cleaned up.
  - jghn 7mo ago
    Right. On my server I actually had one of those larger 2-room houses right at the crossroads as a vendor shop, so am familiar with what was there. But that's what I meant by "sort of", as it wasn't the pure simulation that was originally promised. Another example was that all the early dupe bugs created a real need for serious gold sinks that weren't planned into the original design. Even WoW had a player economy via the auction house, and that's about as dumbed down as an MMO gets. Though I agree that the evolution of the player run markets, plus the eventual vendor support added by DD & crew were cool.
mbonnet 7mo ago
This is why I enjoyed EVE Online. You had to earn it, and if you lost it, that was that.
andrepd 7mo ago
UO and Star Wars Galaxies were both MMOs with that experience you describe, and I really can't think of any others. For my money the only ones to truly live to the promise of a virtual persistent alternate world. WoW in 2004 truly scorched the field; after that MMO became synonymous with WoW clone. The same action bar, the same pov, the same control, the same short "kill 10 kobolds" quests with an exclamation mark, the same progression... I was big into MMOs a long time ago. But I never imagined that 22 years after WoW the field still wouldn't have produced another gem in the level of UO or SWG.
idiotsecant 7mo ago
UO only had this experience because there was nothing else like it, exactly. PVE and PVP players and casual and sweaty tryhard and everyone was in one world, and the game actually forced interaction between those players, often to the detriment of one party. People say they want experiences like that, but they don't. They want a walled garden that isn't too hard and will give them new shoulder pads for spending 2.5 hours grinding after work. UO was the last MMO that made the mistake of trying to be a world for everyone to live in.

haolez 7mo ago

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.

NDizzle 7mo ago
Well, it was kind of the only game in town. Sure, you had Dark Sun Online and Meridian 59, but in 96/97 you were playing UO if you liked the idea of online worlds. 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.
- haolez 7mo ago
  Btw, I've never met a player of Meridian 59, but seeing YouTube videos about it, it might have been popular in my community if we had access to it at the time. Looks super interesting, although it didn't age well, of course.
  - NDizzle 7mo ago
    Really. I wonder if there are any historical videos about it. I have stories, but they are mostly exploit stories…
  - jghn 7mo ago
    A big cluster of my in game UO friends had come from playing together on M59. Just like we view UO to have been ahead of its time, the stories they told me made it feel ahead of its time back then. It wasn't *that* different from the MUDs of the day, but more video gamey, which was a big step up
vunderba 7mo ago
You’d need to start with the premise that combat shouldn’t necessarily be the focus of the game. Work on making other aspects (farming, hunting, taming animals, etc) to be equally compelling mechanics.
- mapt 7mo ago
  They're by no means equally compelling. But they are viable ways to generate currency, you progress in them over time as a specialist, they feed back into the player economy performing tasks that other people want performed, and they are, importantly, in the same world, on the same shard. I know not to go near Orc Camp because there's a group of player killers down there, despite the fact that there's a rich Agapite vein running through the mountains near the entrance that I would love to mine and make armor out of. Back to the relative safety of Minoc for me, however crowded. In some timeline two weeks in the future, I band together with a bunch of other players (most of whom just want to farm orcs) to kick them out. Territorial control, even without any formal mechanics of territorial control, is closely correlated with narrative and socialization; I wouldn't have met any of those players if we were all on our own separate instance. 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.
  - haolez 7mo ago
    > having a single large persistent world-shard with minimal functional instancing What do you mean by this?
    - throwway120385 7mo ago
      Eve has every player on the same global system, and "shards" only by running the code for a particular system on a particular server. As a result, if you're in Eve Online every other player has some influence on you however minute.
    - mapt 7mo ago
      The concepts come with the idea of a persistent game map, which is online 23/7 and never wipes. 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.
deadbabe 7mo ago
It’s largely impossible now, it’s not a technical problem, it’s cultural. 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.
- stackghost 7mo ago
  >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.
  - deadbabe 7mo ago
    Grief is a natural consequence of player freedom, but it’s not worth giving up that freedom for some safety.
    - Barrin92 7mo ago
      turns out it is for a lot of players which is why the kind of game is extinct. Just like in the real world, there's a fine line between risk and adventure and walking into something that looks like Liu Cixin's the Dark Forest. 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.
codezero 7mo ago
I say this unironically, but a lot of bugs. The bugs are what made UO fun, and the team often treated the bugs as features because the community demanded it. The most famous example (I think) is the "true black" dye. Another bug I ran into was when a certain shade of brown hair got turned "true white," I was able to petition a game master to let me keep my true white hair after the bug was fixed because I made it part of my "persona" at the time. 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.
- eclipticplane 7mo ago
  UO came out when I was in high school. I would time my morning routines around the server reboot to grab those special items, some of which didn't respawn during routine reboots. 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.
  - mwigdahl 7mo ago
    How does the economy compare with the structures in EVE Online?
    - eclipticplane 7mo ago
      It was smaller scale and simpler, easy to understand without spreadsheets. Even a middle school student could understand their slice of the economy.
havblue 7mo ago
Is scarcity part of it? Making sure there are some jobs people have to do that don't involve combat but still drive the in-game economy?
- haolez 7mo ago
  I think a component of it is a zero sum model. Like, not everybody can be incredibly successful. Not sure how to implement this, though.
nzeid 7mo ago
UO didn't have a global concept of a level. You had a maximum number of points per character, which you allocated to skills by doing the corresponding activity. This is how you can skill cap your character without killing monsters or players.
shiftpgdn 7mo ago
I still think 90% of what made UO unique is the fact there was no Google or central repository of expert knowledge. Yes, UOStratics existed, but it wasn't perfect. A lot of the fun was in the fact basically nobody knew the BEST way to play, and therefore everyone was just doing whatever they thought was fun.
- NoOn3 7mo ago
  If someone create a new MMORPG in which rules changes a little every day or several days in unpredictable manner then no one will be knowing the BEST way to play or at least harder to find the BEST way. But maybe there will be no balance.
  - JoshTriplett 7mo ago
    I don't think that would work: either the rules change little enough that you can still document meta-strategies, or the rules change too much and players can't learn them either.
- jghn 7mo ago
  I remember spending so much time every patch day with other people on my server where we just tried out different combinations of spells, weapons, armor, tactics to see what worked this week.
jghn 7mo ago
The big problem that UO ran into was that it turned out the people who liked what UO was is a pretty niche audience. In a lot of ways Everquest was a direct rejection of the features that folks like me think of as the golden years. 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.
ajxs 7mo ago
Unfortunately the missing ingredient to recreating UO is a playerbase that can see the virtual world with innocent eyes. This HN post[1] always comes to mind. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33189823 2: http://tdr.iwarp.com/main_nfl.html http://tdr.iwarp.com/main_nfl.html

codezero 7mo ago

My friends mocked me for spending months as a llama herder, until I could tame dragons and grief people by pulling them through portals.

DonHopkins 7mo ago
Oh yeah, you could tame animals to make them your pets. One Halloween I logged into UO, and my character had been transformed into a deer, as some kind of a sick joke! All my inventory was gone, and all I could do was deer stuff. Then some bastard came along and TAMED ME. That totally sucked! I had to follow him around obediently all day. I guess I'm lucky he didn't skin me and make me into leather armor.

eclipticplane 7mo ago

Core memories of carefully setting my fisherman on a boat with `ezmacro` before I got ready for school. I'd come home to either a boat full of fish (to later cook into fish steaks), or be dead from a player killer who found my boat and killed my macroing guy to try and steal the boat.

SenHeng 7mo ago
I always forgot where I parked my boats. Or that I even had one.
- faidit 7mo ago
  I always checked the harbor for unlocked boats and took them on joyrides.
  - andrepd 7mo ago
    None of these experiences would be possible in a "WoW clone" MMO. Only with the freedom of an immersive sim can these memorable moments happen. We could do it in 1999. Why has no one done it again? Why isn't there a BotW-engine MMO?
    - prox 7mo ago
      I think Star Citizen might be the closest thing. It’s certainly unparalleled. There is an interesting talk with the techtool guy from last Thursday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmxmkx87qcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmxmkx87qcE
    - jghn 7mo ago
      Because this style of game appealed to two clusters of gamers. The first one is small and niche, and thus not profitable. The second one are the griefers who only want to play if they have victims available, which isn't going to happen in a small & niche game. These kinds of games *do* exist, they're just, well, small & niche as they've learned to either build in protections against griefers and/or stay small enough to not attract notice. If you find yourself in the first cluster and not the second, you may want to check out the latest project from Raph Koster, aka Designer Dragon from UO. [1] [1] https://starsreach.com https://starsreach.com

jghn 7mo ago

> UO had a real economy Sort of. They disabled big parts of the "real economy" in beta. Turned out that players didn't like it that NPC shopkeepers kept standard working hours and didn't want to buy their 5000 skullcaps from their skill grinding. Likewise they even more quickly got rid of the real ecology feature, both because it was computationally intensive but also because players would strip mine the ecology.

chongli 7mo ago
They disabled NPC participation in the real economy. This gave way to the real player economy which took place in player-run shops built inside player-owned and customized housing. Players didn't buy those 5000 junk skullcaps either. They wanted stuff that was actually valuable, which meant those practice items were recycled or thrown in the trash. I remember when the UO team added trash barrels and created the "Clean up Brittania" event. The game's servers were struggling to deal with large numbers of these junk objects that people littered on the ground so the devs decided to enlist the players' help cleaning it up, just like a real-life public park cleanup project! Players got rewarded special items based on the amount of junk they cleaned up.
- jghn 7mo ago
  Right. On my server I actually had one of those larger 2-room houses right at the crossroads as a vendor shop, so am familiar with what was there. But that's what I meant by "sort of", as it wasn't the pure simulation that was originally promised. Another example was that all the early dupe bugs created a real need for serious gold sinks that weren't planned into the original design. Even WoW had a player economy via the auction house, and that's about as dumbed down as an MMO gets. Though I agree that the evolution of the player run markets, plus the eventual vendor support added by DD & crew were cool.

mbonnet 7mo ago

This is why I enjoyed EVE Online. You had to earn it, and if you lost it, that was that.

andrepd 7mo ago

UO and Star Wars Galaxies were both MMOs with that experience you describe, and I really can't think of any others. For my money the only ones to truly live to the promise of a virtual persistent alternate world. WoW in 2004 truly scorched the field; after that MMO became synonymous with WoW clone. The same action bar, the same pov, the same control, the same short "kill 10 kobolds" quests with an exclamation mark, the same progression... I was big into MMOs a long time ago. But I never imagined that 22 years after WoW the field still wouldn't have produced another gem in the level of UO or SWG.

idiotsecant 7mo ago

UO only had this experience because there was nothing else like it, exactly. PVE and PVP players and casual and sweaty tryhard and everyone was in one world, and the game actually forced interaction between those players, often to the detriment of one party. People say they want experiences like that, but they don't. They want a walled garden that isn't too hard and will give them new shoulder pads for spending 2.5 hours grinding after work. UO was the last MMO that made the mistake of trying to be a world for everyone to live in.