Originally posted by dave6660

My corp used to play football in Eve Online with a can and cruisers with tractor beams and ewar.  We would setup containers as goal lines on both sides.

Could you do that in UO?

Bag Ball! So.... yea, you can.

Originally posted by f0dell54

Originally posted by dave6660

My corp used to play football in Eve Online with a can and cruisers with tractor beams and ewar.  We would setup containers as goal lines on both sides.

Could you do that in UO?

Bag Ball! So.... yea, you can.

Yeap, the Bag Ball was created in response to the game the players created using bags of ore. They even built an arena. Her's more info:

http://www.uochesapeakewiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=Bag+Ball

Dave,do you have video or a link with info on the football game you played in EVE? That sounds rather cool. :) 

I've played both UO and EVE for years and there's no doubt about the winner. True.

Ah yes, MUDs beat UO easily.

Originally posted by darker70

Originally posted by Venger

Originally posted by darker70

If all goes to plan avoiding disaster and maybe the end of the world,come mid 2013 there will be a game that will encompass Ultima and old SWG and a spice of  Vanguard the rather humongous clue is in my sig. 

FAQ

"There will be Player vs. Player combat. We plan to initially support two rulesets, and will consider additional rulesets (such as a PvE server) if enough demand for them exists."

When this happens I'll probably check it out.

Hope you do,cause this is definately happening with this game if the community ask for it and it is feasible they get it simple as that. 

If they build it then I will come.  I've given up on joining these ffapvp "sandbox" communities and asking/debate for consentual pvp servers.  A lot of the ffa pvp forum posting crowd are arrogant pricks that can't see past their own opinions.

EVE lacks gameplay.

Originally posted by busdriver

I've played both UO and EVE for years and there's no doubt about the winner. True.

 

Ah yes, MUDs beat UO easily.

Speaking of MUDs, Raph Koster (who was a designer in MUDs as well as UO and SWG), once said that the only difference really between a MUD and an MMORPG is what they send you. Text vs. art and animations.

That is a huge difference....but think about it and what we could have.

Originally posted by Interesting

"There has yet to be a virtual world that even comes close to the number of things you can do in Ultima Online."

 

Is this statement true or false? Could you provide examples of MMORPGs and "things you can do" in these games that "come close" to Ultima Online?

Wurm.   Probably Fallen Earth though I don't know how the game has evolved since I quit.   Eve Online.  

The Repopulation, currently in Alpha, looks like it might be the best sandbox sci-fi MMO ever made.    It's going to depend.  But those guys are really, really doing some cool stuff and it already looks better than SWG (game play) ever was...

Originally posted by UOvet

No MMO has come close to the social aspect UO delivered in my opinion. You worked with people. You had your blacksmith buddy who did everything for the guild, you had the alchemist friend who would make potions for everyone if you supplied regs that night. I don't know how much changed after 2002 - started playing 97. I was very off/on the last couple years I played because they changed just too much.

 

The type of players were also different then though. I don't know if it was "number" of things you could do that made UO great but more so how you were just free to do whatever for the most part. Want to fish all day? Knock yourself out. Mine all day? Go for it, you'll have tons of people contacting you. 

 

I'd say it was more of a social game than anything else now that I look back on it. Unfortunately, this is the main thing lacking today.

You can mine or fish all day in WOW too.

And i am not sure a "social game" is desirable. I really don't want people line up at my virtual door to buy fish. Being a sales rep at a fish store is not my kind of fun.

Neverwinter Nights persistent online worlds. As no one said MMO, just virtual worlds. NWN online is still capable of nearly anything you can imagine, the scripting system can be pushed far enough to make games of "The Witcher" level. And with a DM client to host events, run campaigns, etc. there is no limit to what you can do.

A number of servers still exist that have a large and active player base.

@OP 

i think its time to get over that , else you wont get happy . They tried to create a shadow of UO with DFO and it failed completly.

it just became a blackhole for antisocial  and mentally disadvantaged  people

Originally posted by Amaranthar

 

Overall, UO was the only game that I have played that was really ALIVE.

I agree with this statement completely..   I played UO from Beta and for about 8 yrs or more after..  I loved it. I even remember the name of the first person that PK'd me and stole all of my stuff.  I was even a volunteer "in game counselor" on a server.. I never did get to lead any of the special events but I would "pop in" like a gm does when players requested help.  I hated when that program  ended.  Anyway.. I do miss that game in its original form.  

Originally posted by ahumata

Originally posted by Kiljaedenas

Etc

Direct comparisons with Eve listed in green above. So, except for perhaps the last one UO doesn't win out against Eve outright.

-----------------------------------

Nice attempt, but let me correct the shot. Dont get me wrong, I'm not bashing Eve at all costs, Eve is a great game. Nor am I trying to shut you up or anything such, I hope I wont come across that way. But what made UO most special is that all of those game mechanics supported lifestyles, it was not just "stuff you can do", it was a million different ways you can do a million different things (clearly, my numbers here are a slight bit inflated"). That's why while probably being king in its own land, Eve will never fully cut it to us UO players the way that UO did. Eve is market, politics, crime, war. UO was society.

Lets look at the list

Stealth/Anomaly, can work.

Pets/Drones, doesn't  work. Wide variety of pets that you had to go tame in the wild wherever they lived, bring back, train and sell. Bit more complex than a crafting/trade system of drones (and drones in Eve are quite cool).

Fishing/Archaeology, might work

Grow plants/Resource extraction, doesnt work. I would have mentioned mining, skinning, wood chopping and what have you. Plants were a management minigame that could produce goods (decoration) or resources (various uses). There too, it involved getting seeds, making soil, using items and so on to go from an empty pot to a full plant.

Housing/Space stations, doesnt work. Houses you could place, build wall portion by wall portion in many different styles and shapes, wander around in, decorate, sell, fail to refresh and see collapse, burgle, etc. Eve might have something on that when their Walk In Stations system goes anywhere and has a couple of years in existence possibly, but it's not realistic to assume it'll ever go anywhere close to that.

Snoop-Steal/Blow people up, doesn't work. I didn't talk about PK'ing, I talked about stealth mechanics. The entire idea of theft was discretion, stealing stuff and people not even noticing it.

Rare Hunting/Off Mods in Complexes, not sure. Can you do that in Eve without having to fight for one second? I assume not. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

Harvesting, it's not so much about how many methods there are, it's about what gameplay is involved in it. Otherwise I could just bring out UO's list of craft skills and blow up any challenger right there. Eve does have PI though and UO didn't have anything like that. Let's call that one quits for the sake of simplicity although you can guess what I think of it all.

Craft, Well, if you wanna go there, Eve might have 9000 different items in it but they're mostly an icon and some info. UO definitely challenges that number without a sweat, and those items were actually movable, placeable or usable in some way (or several). I'd say Eve has to sit that one out. By far. Want a tree? Have a tree. Want a potion? A fire poker? A glass? A carpet? A sword? A container? A grass patch? Some wool? A bunch of stones? Some gold ore? Some bread? A ship model? A curtain? You name it. Wanna put them all in different places and at different heights in your house? Wanna dye them? Go right ahead.

Sailing vs Flying. Nah. That's missing the point. Flying a ship in Eve isn't a choice, it's not an alternate interaction mechanism, it's default. It's as if I put "walking around" as a highlight in any mmo. And even then, it's as if I came up and said that in UO you could ride a dozen different types of mounts (possibly more) each with different properties. In the end it's still riding stuff. Who cares. You did have variety in travel modes though: foot, magic, rides and ships. Apparently ships have become a much bigger portion of gameplay now too but I wouldnt know about that in detail as I've quit 4 years ago.

Social vs Nullsec. Good luck setting up a tavern in Nullsec. Good luck setting up an auction night or doing all the sorts of crazy stuff people used to socially do in UO. No match here.

Imbuing/Mats/Dyes vs Fitting. Fitting is nice but it's glorified gear-swapping. When you can modify by decision what each item you equip in your fitting window does, such as putting stats, passives, actives, whatever (not to mention customize colors, names and you name it just for fun), then Eve might be a contender on that. Not for now!

Salvage vs Nothing. It might be resource extraction, but it's also a lifestyle possibility, and that's a lot of what the original point was about. Not just what game mechanics let you do, but also how you can choose to interact with that world. Again if it were just about resource extraction I'd just have listed the many variations uo has there, not just the different skills but the different ways too. Wanna be a dungeon miner, a stealth miner, a hidden thief-miner, a monster miner... that's just for mining. Dont let me start boring you with "I combine the shit that I find and end up turning dust into gold" stories that are independent of in-game skills and are just about player knowledge and intelligent combinations.

Rune Library vs Jump Bridge Network. That'd be like botting toons in UO to open permanent moongates. Not the same. Rune libraries include a bit more than just linking people up to transport zones, it's more like giving access to every little square tile in the game to any player that comes about and decides to go there. Go to a rune library, look up the destination of your choice, and be right there within an instant. I dont think a jump bridge network covers it.

Shop vs Marketplace. Are you kidding? Running a shop, that means having a physical location that players can visit, restocking your vendors, leasing vending space to other players and all the interactions that go around that. No match there either.

Scams. Eve has its glory when it comes to that and you can definitely pull grandiose heists. UO offered more variety. I once sold a guy a bucket of white dye by making him believe that it dyed whiter than white, just by showing him some dyed clothes that actually naturally came whiter when you dyed them white. He bought it, I bought myself a new house. Eve has the epic scams, UO has the infinite variations in crookery. Let's say that's a tie to me.

Trapboxes vs Canning. What you're describing here is what used to be called noto pking in UO, that is using pvp flag mechanics to your own ends. Very different. Trapboxes were fucked up, as was locking people out of their own house. Sometime a thief snooped you by trying to open a locked trapped box that you'd placed in your backpack. Next thing you knew, you saw a guy (the thief) poisoned to death try to run away and die a few steps away. Other times, people walked around, saw that box on the ground, tried to open it thinking it was a regular dungeon chest, it blew up in their faces. Canning doesnt cover it.

Bard Skills. No worries, you could hire mercenary guilds and players in UO too. Truth is, again it didnt have the same scale and fully integral dimension Eve offers. But as with all fully player-drive, competitive, political environments, it was definitely doable. UO gets that one too.

 

Big difference, isnt there? Eve is great, but it's both too "large" and at the same time too focused to match UO on the front of freedom and opportunity. Its inherent game design ensures that it never will. I know that Eve offers a lot of non-game mechanics options, but UO did that too. Secret societies, diplomacy, spies, doppelgangers, you name it. Two great games in their own right, each doing its thing.

Counter-argument time. I'll go by the titles of what you said above and list the arguments down here for ones that I want to argue that you think UO wins over Eve (you had red text in those). I also decided to look into what can be done in UO in more detail through www.uoguide.com so that I'm not just talking out of my ass.

PETS/DRONES: Okay, fair enough, more complex in UO.

GROW PLANTS/RESOURCE EXTRACTION: Plant growing was very akin in complexity to planetary interaction in Eve. You have to find a decent planet, deploy a planet-specific central base, set up the extraction and processing infrastructure, and eventually ship it off-world. And that's just a basic base. Each planet type only gives out a certain set of materials, which can be reacted and combined with others to make more advanced products, and there's a limit of how much each base/warehouse can hold. For the more advanced products you have to combine the materials from multiple planets, and you have to fly the materials and products between the planets yourself. The extractors can be set to different cycle times, anything from a few hours to a couple of weeks, which changes the extraction rate of the resources, etc.  You could set up a planetary interaction reaction chain on planets spread out across multiple solar systems and even coordinate the operations with other players. You can even manipulate the exact material flow routes between the buildings on the planets to have more efficient logistics. Given how much you have to check in on a plant in UO and manage it, I'll call it an even match for Eve PI, but still, this is just one single harvesting method for each and Gardening is the most complex one that UO has. The Harvesting section follows up on this.

HOUSING VS STATIONS: Won't consider buying from another player since that can be done in both. In UO to build a house you bought a certain size plot from an NPC store which could have one or more levels and a particular artistic style, found a spot to put it, plopped it down and then put stuff in it, either bought from an NPC shop or crafted by you or other players. In Eve: SAME DAMN THING!!! With the exception that there is NO NPC store that sells the pre-built stuff, all you will ever get from the NPC stores is blueprint originals. And houses in UO were nothing more than glorified warehouses and safe zones with perhaps extremely limited resource production through plants, and a whole lot of purely decorative stuff that had no actual impact to gameplay mechanics. A POS in Eve (which is only one of the player-deployable station types, by the way) may not have as much decoration capability as a UO house but it has a thousand times the functionality. Lots of purely decorative non-functional stuff does not necessarily = good. I still call Eve the winner here.

SNOOP/STEAL VS BLOW UP: Fine then, ignore the blowing up part. Ninja looting is a mainstream profession for many players, and I've even done it myself. Someone goes into a mission or plex/anomaly site, kills all the NPCs and leaves to get a salvage ship, but once they leave you swoop in and steal all the good stuff, and get out before they know what happened. It happens every single day in Eve to hundreds if not thousands of players. Let's call them even.

RARE HUNTING/OFFICER MODS IN PLEXES: See ninja looting. Yes you can, just wait until someone kills the final officer with the rare mods, swoop in, nab it and get out before they kill you. You don't even have to fire a shot. Let's call this one even too.

HARVESTING: "bring up UO's list of crafting skills and blow out any challenger right there?" I'll counter that one in the CRAFT reply; trust me, it doesn't. Even Runescape beats UO from what I've seen. As for the gameplay involved with the resource harvesting, UO has five different ones with different mechanics: fishing, lumberjacking, mining, gardening and take-stuff-from-dead-things (looting). For Eve's 9 types, two of them can be effectively considered the same (ice mining and asteroid mining) so we'll call that one distinct mechanic, but that still leaves 8 distinct resource harvesting mechanics, all of which require different gameplay to do. So UO doesn't win there either by a wide margin.

CRAFT: Most of the items in Eve are not just an icon and some info. Ships, station modules, obviously you can see those when they are deployed. Each and every ship module that you can turn on has some kind of visual effect, and the turrets/missle launchers themselves appear differently on your ship. You change the ammo type in a weapon and the visual effect changes, anywhere from the color of the shot to the sound and appearance it makes when it hits a target. And as for challenging Eve's 9000 items, where are you getting your numbers from? I looked throughout the uoguide site and others and determined that AT BEST UO has 2500 "things" that a player can own either through making them, extracting them or buying them from an NPC shop, and that is being VERY generous. And as for your statement about UO's list of crafting skills blowing out all competitors, let's explore that a bit: In terms of skills that either are directly required to craft, or modify how you craft, UO has 14, and the core ones are purely "unlock" counters i.e. you need a certain number of points in them to be allowed to start crafting a particular item. Once you've unlocked the ability to craft an item, the core crafting skill does diddily in terms of making you craft a better version of it or craft it faster, the supplementary skills are required for that. Eve has 27 crafting-based skills in the Industry set alone that aren't purely related to resource extraction, which also have prerequisites/corresponding skills in multiple other fields, and nearly every one of them does something that also enhances your ability to manufacture stuff in some way. Eve utterly nukes UO in this regard, and I'm pretty sure Runescape curbstomps it for good measure too.

SAILING VS FLYING: If you're talking about different travel mechanisms then fine. Eve has flight, wormholes, stargates, jump bridges and cynos, but I guess all but the first one are effectively stargate mechanics so I suppose UO wins for that one.

SOCIAL VS NULLSEC: Why can't they set up a tavern in Nullsec? There are items that are effectively alcohol and strippers in Eve, you can sell them/trade them. And auctions exist all the time through Contracts, they have for years. There are bidding wars happening on rare items every single day. And I've seen people in Eve do everything from making a spinning wagon wheel in space to parallel parking an 18km long Titan inside a POS shield and all sorts of other weirdass crap. UO does NOT win this one outright, at best I would call it even.

IMBUING/MATS/DYES VS FITTING: Yes, in Eve you can't "buff" an individual module or put your name on it. We move that flexibility up to the ship itself. You can name  a ship anything you want (including swear words, which people often use) and the number of possible combinations of equipment, rigs, personal implants, temporary buffs through drug boosters and constant buffs through allies with gang link boosters is so large that mankind probably doesn't have a name for the number. I'm dead serious in that: there are literally trillions of trillions with a few more trillions added on of possible combinations of ship, equipment and buffs. How many different effects and roles can you put one single character into in UO?

SALVAGE VS NOTHING: It's a gameplay lifestyle in Eve too. There are players that don't even touch industry, there are other players that do nothing but industry, and this directly affects how they interact with other people on virtually every concievable level. And those dungeon/monster/thief/stealth miners you mentioned, those all exist in Eve too. Ignoring the fact that Eve has more industry options than UO and going purely by the fact that you can choose to do that and nothing but, then I suppose the two are even. But then again, you could do that for pretty much every MMO in existence that has a resource extraction and crafting system, it's purely the choice of a player to do it, so I don't really consider this a valid point for comparison.

RUNE LIBRARY VS JUMP BRIDGE NETWORK: If you're talking about custom selecting the destination then yes, perhaps a jump bridge network won't work. However, a cyno combined with a Titan bridge or jump drives does. Even at best between the two.

SHOP VS MARKETPLACE: Do you even know how the marketplace in Eve works? A player puts a buy order or sell order AT A SPECIFIC STATION, including player-owned outposts in Nullsec. If you want to buy an item you pay for the sell order and then FLY TO THE STATION WITH THE ITEMS THAT WERE JUST SOLD TO YOU to pick them up. There are no automatic location transfers. Nullsec alliances rely on this very heavily in their outposts; their members put up the desired buy and sell orders for the stuff they need/want to sell and you have to go to those outposts to get/give them. If there's an enemy blockade between you and the outpost with the stuff you want, you're royally boned unless you can figure out a way around them. Supplying your troops with a POS base works much the same way. There are some alliances that own vast areas of Nullsec and lease out portions of it to lesser corps/alliances for a regular fee. Believe me, Eve utterly crushes UO on this one.

SCAMS: Trust me, Eve has the variety as well as the magnitude, I only mentioned the big ones as they were the most noteworthy of the utterly countless ways that players can scam other players. It was basically only limited to the player's imagination. Eve is less strict on what players are allowed to do to each other than in UO, but it looks like it allows at least some creative scamming so for sake of argument I'll call them even.

TRAPBOXES VS CANNING: Okay, I'll give UO that one.

BARD SKILLS: This is limited NPC mob control, completely useless in player to player interactions. Discordance can be matched by Eve's EWAR, but Eve's EWAR can also affect players. I'm just going to lump this one into the Pets category. Yes, UO has it and Eve doesn't, but it's very limited in usefulness.

I still call Eve the overall winner. UO has lots of decorative stuff in it but a hell of a lot less meat.

Originally posted by Kiljaedenas

Originally posted by ahumata

Originally posted by Kiljaedenas

Etc

*snip*

*Snip*

*Snip* 

I still call Eve the overall winner. UO has lots of decorative stuff in it but a hell of a lot less meat.

Kilkaedenas,

Your counter-arguement fails no matter how right you are. I've played both UO and EVE. And I must say I clearly had more fun in one over the other, but thats because I was playing EVE wrong (its a social game. Solo play stagnates). I have nothing against EVE and would go back to it if I magically find a few hours a day to devote to it.

Anyway, the reason your arguement fails and always will is that EVE, being the niche space game it is, can't compete with rose-tinted glasses and nostalgia.

Anyway, I'd love to find a new MMO that melds great aspects of UO, SWG, EVE and modern innovation. There are a great many things in those three games that if taken into a new game could be greatness. The issue is finding people to do it and without allowing massive griefing and bugginess.

Originally posted by NightCloak

Originally posted by Kiljaedenas

Originally posted by ahumata

Originally posted by Kiljaedenas

Etc

*snip*

*Snip*

*Snip* 

I still call Eve the overall winner. UO has lots of decorative stuff in it but a hell of a lot less meat.

Kilkaedenas,

Your counter-arguement fails no matter how right you are. I've played both UO and EVE. And I must say I clearly had more fun in one over the other, but thats because I was playing EVE wrong (its a social game. Solo play stagnates). I have nothing against EVE and would go back to it if I magically find a few hours a day to devote to it.

 

Anyway, the reason your arguement fails and always will is that EVE, being the niche space game it is, can't compete with rose-tinted glasses and nostalgia.

 

 

Anyway, I'd love to find a new MMO that melds great aspects of UO, SWG, EVE and modern innovation. There are a great many things in those three games that if taken into a new game could be greatness. The issue is finding people to do it and without allowing massive griefing and bugginess.

You're using your own personal taste and nostalgia to counter core gameplay mechanics and content?

If that's the case, this entire forum thread was pointless right from the start. Personal taste and nostalgia is 100% subjective and not comparable whatsoever. I'm focusing on core gameplay logistics and what players are technically capable of doing, and how many options they have in doing those things. Virtually every game except the utter crap ones have diehard fans with nostalgia. There's no point to arguing on that basis.

Go ahead and argue nostalgia all you want, but in terms of non-decorative gameplay mechanics I say Eve evisceshreds UO six ways to Sunday. I'll leave it at that.

Why would I play chess in UO with a crappy interface when I can play chess with the same person in a real chess application with a better interface?

Just because a feature exists doesn't mean its a good thing.  Implementing chess in UO was a waste of resources.

Originally posted by MMOExposed
So which of the two would you suggest for somebody looking to play a sandbox? Uo or Eve? I played eve but willing to give it another chance, especially with Dust on the way, if they both good.

I can't really speak for Eve, but for UO...I feel like its golden age is over.

The official UO servers seem like an entirely different game, and even the custom UO servers with older rulesets seem way different because of the lower population and different community.

So despite the fact that I loved UO when I played it, I can't really recommend that anyone play it now.

Originally posted by gestalt11

Why would I play chess in UO with a crappy interface when I can play chess with the same person in a real chess application with a better interface?

Immersion?

Originally posted by angzt

just curious, what could you do in UO that couldn't be done since then? ^^

That's an easy one.

First, you're a dead spirit and can talk to people who has the Spirit Speak skill. Otherwise they wouldn't understand you, but obviously you'd only ask players to ressurect you.

You could actually role play and dress the part.

Being a ghost as stated before, but people acutally wanted to role play as ghosts on their own will.

Fishermen? Straw hat, shorts, a fancy shirt, and fishing pole. (most games you'll be fishing with your pimped out gear on)

Jester? They got a suit for that

Pirate? They got a suit for that

Skeleton? They got a suit for that

Uncivilized Savage? They got a suit for that

Someone even wrote a book on how to speak ORC.

The list goes on and on.

Well I hate to say this, but maybe Minecraft :P I mean, I myself dislike the game, but Minecraft is taking huge strides in communtiy and general hugeness. So maybe in the future Minecraft will catch up to it... or, lmore likely, fall into the shadows as pointless things and nonsense fill its overhyped world, and all it gave bitrth to, specifically the Youtube videos, fall with it (God willing).