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One of my favorite "UO was a real world" stories is that when they launched the game animals were to reproduce and prey on each other. The designers hadn't acco

One of my favorite "UO was a real world" stories is that when they launched the game animals were to reproduce and prey on each other. The designers hadn't accounted for the fact the players would simply kill everything in site and suddenly they had a world without animals.

dejv 11y ago
It is also only game, that when randomly meeting some people from old game days you still have urge to talk about thing that happen in game 15 years ago, trading stories and jokes. It is the only game that you play with people and where the people you play with are the most important element of the game that creates the game itself. In other mmorpgs you just play around hordes of people that you don't really care about: you just click and click and click.
- kiiski 11y ago
  I have to disagree. I don't play online games myself, but the people I know who are active players certainly seem to consider the interaction between players the main part. They even choose the game to play based on what their clan/guild/whatever is playing.
  - dejv 11y ago
    What I mean is that UO (at RP servers) is more like mass theatre. You actually play the character, you meet others, you go fishing, steal eggs from neighbours farm. Went on walk and get stopped by PK, killed and robbed together. It is very different experience, very unique to UO.
    - copenja 11y ago
      Other games have "roleplaying" servers as well. Notably, WOW does, but so do most MMORPG.
  - chongli 11y ago
    UO is the game people play to interact with those who are not in their clan/guild/whatever. UO is the game where people role-play as blacksmiths and merchants, selling their wares and services to total strangers, decorating their homes and outfitting them with "rune libraries" to make them more appealing to customers and generate foot traffic. When I walk around a player-built town in UO it feels lived in, something I have never been able to say about any other MMO I've ever played. In this regard, UO is more like Minecraft than (World of) Warcraft.
- louhike 11y ago
  Well, Eve Online tends also to be like that. There is a really strong sense of community in it.
  - dejv 11y ago
    What is different on UO is that you spend the "quality time" with other players: things like go fishing, decorating home or walking around woods, especially on RP servers you act and talk as a character, which makes a lot of difference to IMs somewhere else and talking about IRL stuff.
    - chopman 11y ago
      In GuildWars 2 iI spend "quality time" defending castles and killing enemies we use not IM but VoIP, which adds much more to the experience.
- anc84 11y ago
  Nah, maybe it is for you, but for me, there are other (completely different) games where I reminisce in that way.
- jib 11y ago
  I disagree on it being the only game. There are people I played EQ with from 10 years ago who I am still in touch with and would consider friends, and we spent a lot of time in the game talking about just about everything. I also had the same experience with people in quake that I played with - I am sure if I caught up with some of the guys from the swedish QWCTF scene back in the day we would have a bunch of things to talk about, same with the community around the webgame Utopia. I think it depends on how much time you put into the game and how engaged you are with it. Communities can develop around all types of games, but I agree that UO was a very engaging game and I still remember the people I played UO with 17 years later, even though I am not in touch with them anymore.
  - dejv 11y ago
    It is hard to explain this, you might have community outside the game, but UO is probably only game when you have community inside the game. You really have neighbours ingame, you meet them often, maybe some other guy you see on market from here and there will steal something from you. I still remember one guy, which I considered to be my friend, to betray the city, making the portal that leads to small house full of PK, quite a few people get killed and robed out of equipment that you need to spend weeks of full time dungeon going to get to. There was greed, noble characters and also evil ones. You lost your precious equipment forever easily, you build ingame friendships and hatred by seeing same people every day. There was also another guy, who by playing his role pretend to be mentally ill, but was actually using greed of other players to steal out of them. Just by talking, little bit of using known bugs (for hiding his name), using different clothes and stuff like that. He wrote it up when he did his act and it can be great book, but it actually happened in game and you were part of it. These stories are 12 years old, tell me about your frags ;)
    - Justsignedup 11y ago
      This. The fact that you literally had to build communities... I would meet neighbors, get along, not get along. There would be people where if you see them, you immediately run into your house, lock the doors, and just have to wait it out. Probably safer not to try returning to your house or use a alternate "safety" rout.
- dtparr 11y ago
  I have that same experience from WOW, in particular in the larger, pre-LFR raids. There was definitely a sense of teamwork and community that went into succeeding in those, and stories/inside jokes/etc. from those days still get referenced.
warfangle 11y ago
Not only that, but so did monsters. And monsters had to eat. At one point in beta, enough of the wildlife had been killed, and enough of the middle-difficulty monsters had been killed, and there was a bug where town guards didn't work quite right .... and a dragon strolled down the streets of Trinsic, leaving a trail of bodies behind it.
- shiftpgdn 11y ago
  I remember the days of beta where the guards only had 100HP and could be killed by monsters or regular players. In specific I remember finding a blade spirits scroll and casting it (when scrolls could be cast by anyone) on the border of Vesper towards Cove. Many many guards and players died quickly. I managed to escape and hide until it went away. I then took a dead guard's plate, cape and halberd equipped it. Looking exactly like an NPC guard I wandered around the city tricking other players. You could enter combat stance and everyone would flee. Funny to think I can still vividly remember this 18-19 years later but can hardly remember the plot of many of the recent AAA titles.
  - anarazel 11y ago
    > Funny to think I can still vividly remember this 18-19 years later but can hardly remember the plot of many of the recent AAA titles. Might also be age related ;). Joke aside, I recently spent some time partially replaying the two games I most vividly remember (Baldurs Gate II, FF7 PC version), and it's by far not as memorable now as it was back then. And I haven't played at all the last 12-15 years, so it's not that I got used to different types of games.
    - jib 11y ago
      I think the age thing is relevant, but more as "everyone has a few early experiences they anchor and way future experiences against". I'll always compare games to pirates, UO, EQ, privateer, d2 and qwctf because they were my seminal games in various categories. Other people will have other games they measure against, whether that be wow, Starcraft, cs, myth, monkey island, syndicate, fallout or whatever you first were captured by.
Shorel 11y ago
That's actually sad and reminds me of the histories about Rapa Nui.

dejv 11y ago

It is also only game, that when randomly meeting some people from old game days you still have urge to talk about thing that happen in game 15 years ago, trading stories and jokes. It is the only game that you play with people and where the people you play with are the most important element of the game that creates the game itself. In other mmorpgs you just play around hordes of people that you don't really care about: you just click and click and click.

kiiski 11y ago
I have to disagree. I don't play online games myself, but the people I know who are active players certainly seem to consider the interaction between players the main part. They even choose the game to play based on what their clan/guild/whatever is playing.
- dejv 11y ago
  What I mean is that UO (at RP servers) is more like mass theatre. You actually play the character, you meet others, you go fishing, steal eggs from neighbours farm. Went on walk and get stopped by PK, killed and robbed together. It is very different experience, very unique to UO.
  - copenja 11y ago
    Other games have "roleplaying" servers as well. Notably, WOW does, but so do most MMORPG.
- chongli 11y ago
  UO is the game people play to interact with those who are not in their clan/guild/whatever. UO is the game where people role-play as blacksmiths and merchants, selling their wares and services to total strangers, decorating their homes and outfitting them with "rune libraries" to make them more appealing to customers and generate foot traffic. When I walk around a player-built town in UO it feels lived in, something I have never been able to say about any other MMO I've ever played. In this regard, UO is more like Minecraft than (World of) Warcraft.
louhike 11y ago
Well, Eve Online tends also to be like that. There is a really strong sense of community in it.
- dejv 11y ago
  What is different on UO is that you spend the "quality time" with other players: things like go fishing, decorating home or walking around woods, especially on RP servers you act and talk as a character, which makes a lot of difference to IMs somewhere else and talking about IRL stuff.
  - chopman 11y ago
    In GuildWars 2 iI spend "quality time" defending castles and killing enemies we use not IM but VoIP, which adds much more to the experience.
anc84 11y ago
Nah, maybe it is for you, but for me, there are other (completely different) games where I reminisce in that way.
jib 11y ago
I disagree on it being the only game. There are people I played EQ with from 10 years ago who I am still in touch with and would consider friends, and we spent a lot of time in the game talking about just about everything. I also had the same experience with people in quake that I played with - I am sure if I caught up with some of the guys from the swedish QWCTF scene back in the day we would have a bunch of things to talk about, same with the community around the webgame Utopia. I think it depends on how much time you put into the game and how engaged you are with it. Communities can develop around all types of games, but I agree that UO was a very engaging game and I still remember the people I played UO with 17 years later, even though I am not in touch with them anymore.
- dejv 11y ago
  It is hard to explain this, you might have community outside the game, but UO is probably only game when you have community inside the game. You really have neighbours ingame, you meet them often, maybe some other guy you see on market from here and there will steal something from you. I still remember one guy, which I considered to be my friend, to betray the city, making the portal that leads to small house full of PK, quite a few people get killed and robed out of equipment that you need to spend weeks of full time dungeon going to get to. There was greed, noble characters and also evil ones. You lost your precious equipment forever easily, you build ingame friendships and hatred by seeing same people every day. There was also another guy, who by playing his role pretend to be mentally ill, but was actually using greed of other players to steal out of them. Just by talking, little bit of using known bugs (for hiding his name), using different clothes and stuff like that. He wrote it up when he did his act and it can be great book, but it actually happened in game and you were part of it. These stories are 12 years old, tell me about your frags ;)
  - Justsignedup 11y ago
    This. The fact that you literally had to build communities... I would meet neighbors, get along, not get along. There would be people where if you see them, you immediately run into your house, lock the doors, and just have to wait it out. Probably safer not to try returning to your house or use a alternate "safety" rout.
dtparr 11y ago
I have that same experience from WOW, in particular in the larger, pre-LFR raids. There was definitely a sense of teamwork and community that went into succeeding in those, and stories/inside jokes/etc. from those days still get referenced.

warfangle 11y ago

Not only that, but so did monsters. And monsters had to eat. At one point in beta, enough of the wildlife had been killed, and enough of the middle-difficulty monsters had been killed, and there was a bug where town guards didn't work quite right .... and a dragon strolled down the streets of Trinsic, leaving a trail of bodies behind it.

shiftpgdn 11y ago
I remember the days of beta where the guards only had 100HP and could be killed by monsters or regular players. In specific I remember finding a blade spirits scroll and casting it (when scrolls could be cast by anyone) on the border of Vesper towards Cove. Many many guards and players died quickly. I managed to escape and hide until it went away. I then took a dead guard's plate, cape and halberd equipped it. Looking exactly like an NPC guard I wandered around the city tricking other players. You could enter combat stance and everyone would flee. Funny to think I can still vividly remember this 18-19 years later but can hardly remember the plot of many of the recent AAA titles.
- anarazel 11y ago
  > Funny to think I can still vividly remember this 18-19 years later but can hardly remember the plot of many of the recent AAA titles. Might also be age related ;). Joke aside, I recently spent some time partially replaying the two games I most vividly remember (Baldurs Gate II, FF7 PC version), and it's by far not as memorable now as it was back then. And I haven't played at all the last 12-15 years, so it's not that I got used to different types of games.
  - jib 11y ago
    I think the age thing is relevant, but more as "everyone has a few early experiences they anchor and way future experiences against". I'll always compare games to pirates, UO, EQ, privateer, d2 and qwctf because they were my seminal games in various categories. Other people will have other games they measure against, whether that be wow, Starcraft, cs, myth, monkey island, syndicate, fallout or whatever you first were captured by.

Shorel 11y ago

That's actually sad and reminds me of the histories about Rapa Nui.