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Ultima Online Interviews: Fifteen Years & Counting
It's hard to believe that the Grandaddy of Them All, Ultima Online, is fast approaching its fifteenth anniversary. We recently had the privilege of chatting with UO Associate Producer Bonnie "Mesanna" Armstrong. It's a short but informative interview about the venerable Ultima Online. Read on!
By Garrett Fuller on January 09, 2012
| MMORPG.com: | Ultima Online has been on the market for almost 15 years, can you tell us why you think it has such longevity? |
| Bonnie Armstrong: | Ultima Online is the ultimate Sandbox. We have something for everyone from designing your house from the foundation up to slaying dragons. We are probably the only game on the market that you can still run on a low end computer, in addition to the personal one on one interaction with the players that has forged an amazing community. I personally have played UO since 1997 and worked on it since 1999 and I continue to learn or see something new and entertaining every day. |
| MMORPG.com: | When working on the game now, how much of a voice does the Community have in terms of game development and fixes? |
| Bonnie Armstrong: | I personally love sitting down with the players listening to their ideas for the game. As far as bugs go the players play a large part as to when a bug is fixed. |
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| MMORPG.com: | Tell us about the recent Publish 73.0 what were some of the biggest changes you made to the game? |
| Bonnie Armstrong: | We have started to revamp the older areas such as the dungeons to encourage players to revisit the dungeon; we have established a new itemized looting system being used in the dungeons. Introducing Arena's into the game to allow people to fight in a controlled area with no fear of getting looted. For changes to the game, this December is the 3rd year of the current EM program. We have worked hard to keep players interested and entertained with our stories. |
| MMORPG.com: | When doing Publish updates, how do you decide on what gets fixed or upgraded first? |
| Bonnie Armstrong: | The team is looking to updating a lot of the out of date things in the game, such as the high resolution art, dungeons, quests, and armor, PvP, and may other things. We as a team sit down and figure out what we can do in the time we have for each publish including fixing as many issues as we can in the time allotted. |
| MMORPG.com: | What would you like to say to true Veterans of the game, to players who still log in consistently? |
| Bonnie Armstrong: | Let's get together on our 15th birthday and have a party! The players of UO are so dedicated I just want everyone to know how much I have enjoyed working and playing with all of you. Thank you! |
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| MMORPG.com: | What can we expect in the future for Ultima Online? |
| Bonnie Armstrong: | There will be some fun things going on to celebrate our 15th anniversary! You can expect to see the UO dev team be as passionate and as dedicated as our players, we love the game as much as they do! We will be working hard to keep our players entertained and hopefully around for another 15 years. |
Never played this game. But do hear a lot of positive things about it.
UO today is not what it used to be. It undergone major changes. Havnt played in years so not sure how it looks exactly atm.
Still in it's days (up to first few years after release) it was great game. Everything was player oriented , player-made , alot of freedom. Of course that also created alot of problems and game suffered from many bugs, etc - after all it one of first mmoprg's.
Still apart of maybe SWG no other mmorpg was so rich feature wise.
Maybe ArcheAge will share some similarities, even though ArcheAge will be more casual friendly and also bring many themepark elements.
Even so cannot wait for AA to hit western shores. For it to succeed very good company (caring & having very good GM support + reacting fast to exploiters, botters, etc) have to publish it.
It that kind of company will do it, then this game imo have a chance of success in west.
also pls P2P for AA. Sandboxy features would be ridiculed in microtransaction , item shop based game...
Loved it until they did "care-bear" lands, also there are many free servers to play on out there supporting hundreds of players and endless customization, what-ever floats your boat :P
Oh, man! I'm still in love with this game ...
Feeling so nostalgic right now ...
Haha, yeah. Same here. I just wish I wasnt at work so I can install it XD
This is the game that started it all being the true first graphical mmorpg. Later on a few developers left Origin and created the second biggest mmorpg known as Everquest.
Ultima Online really started it all so here's to UO in it's 15th anniversary
I'm just throwing this out there... but who WOULDN'T want a new Ultima? Online or Off? I mean, seriously.
Oh wow... OMG!!! i used to love this game!! was totally addicted to it!!! It was so much fun!!!
I still remember my Grand Master Mage, she was a tank mage and of course she was a Murderer from time to time :) had so much fun!!! until they created the expansion and the 3D and the carebears land.. that kinda ruined it all... Oh well.. still good memories!!! maybe ill play again someday :D
Not me;)
I rather see a succesor to Asherons call speically Darktide server with was alot better then UO in my humble opinion. AC1 this year 13years and counting.
UO is still a very feature rich game. It's a shame that there are a lot of players who still refuse to believe anything good came from the game after Age of Shadows.
There is almost a generation gap now, too, where an entire generation will not know what Ultima is; that just sets the game up to be "reinvisioned" for a new audience if EA even decides to bless us with that.
I can't think of a studio at EA that I'd like to create a new Ultima title, online or not. It definitely isn't Bioware or the current skeleton crew running the game, though.
edit: Also, what's with this website's formatting? My post is separated here on the forums but in the comments section they look like a garbled mess?
Yeah ,just not Bioware. They're not suited to create this type of game ,besides imho their games became bit too streamlined compared to Baldur's Gate series times (not that BG was not streamlined ,but just not as f.e. DA2 or ME2 ).
Would require people with vision ,propably team consited from some old mmorpg dev vets coupled with some fresh innovative blood. & given quite a bit of freedom from EA.
Not much chance of that happening propably.
Investors play way too safe in last years in overall AAA games market and even more in mmorpg.
One of the true MMORPGs where the gameplay was so free and you could do pretty much anything, go anywhere. Truly a virtual world.
It had tons of bugs and rampant player killing, in the beginning, but still the feeling not to be on rails and not be sponfeed content by the devs. was so refreshing. Sadly it was only for a niche crowd as most people seem to prefer casual, linear games like WoW over this.
What world is perfect? UO is a truer reflection of societies making up what their world will be, bugs n all :)
So much is player generated that the UO Team almost becomes a back up to the players storylines with the Event Moderators catering to each shard. It's good to see Bonnie "Mesanna" get the attention she deserves for supporting UO and the players all these years!
Depends what you mean. If you mean an Ultima which is a linear, casual Themepark, I for one would NOT want yet another such game.
On the other hand if you mean a sandbox UO, like the original one but with modern GFX, UI etc probably many Themepark players would not like that.
So it is not really that cut and dry as one might think.
I think he's also referring to the legacy Ultima had even prior to UO. WRPG and JRPGs both owe a great deal to the early installations of Ultima.
edit: What is going on? My edits aren't showing half of the text I'm editing!
Here's to another 15 years of Ultima Online!
UO was way ahead of its time. There were features in UO in its early years that only now are newer MMOs starting to finally incorporate. It's incredible what UO brought to online gaming and virtual worlds.
Agreed! Man that would be great.
This was the game that I would wake up an hour or 2 before school to get in some crafting or skill gains....man I was addicted.
I honestly didn't like the griefing. Kinda happy the game is barely on the radar anymore.
One of my fondest memories was standing around the Britain blacksmith with a few other smiths and a line of people with their gear in bags waiting to have it repaired. Everyone chatting about their dungeon crawls and warning of the PK hotspots of the day.
That social element now is pretty much all but lost now, unfortunately. It isn't entirely the players faults because the developers still have to create systems that encourage or at least assist in socializing. Instantly slinging random players together into 15 minute dungeon runs isn't the way to do that.
Which is why I find gamer's pleas for more innovation from developers so depressingly ironic. There isn't really much need to 'innovate', they just need to look at the mechanics that UO incorporated and work off that.
I have so many fond memories of UO... I just wish that Tom Chilton hadn't turned the game into a boring item grinder with the Age of Shadows expansion... who not so ironically jumped ship shortly before the expansion release to move to Blizzard and work on WoW.
This is the game I lost my teenage years to, when other people were in great outdoors i sat in my room playing this game.
I still go back to it for a month once a year, LOTS of good memories.
I know I would. UO was my first MMO and is still the game I compare all others to. None have come close to providing the kind of true sandbox freedom that UO did.
UO was great because it wasn't about loot and it wasn't really about stats.. you could GM skills quickly and get your stats situated and locked even faster.
Only MMORPG I have ever played where nothing felt like a grind.
Even the "grindy" parts you could generally just macro (wasn't frowned upon too much) while you were out/sleeping.
Only MMO where the game really started from day 1 and there wasn't an "end game" that was completely different from the rest of the game.
Truly a sandbox, no other MMO has come close.
I wonder if bank sitting at Brit and conversing with everyone about your recent adventures is still being done to this day.
My first love.....ahh UO back in the late 90's with dial up trying to get back to my corpse at 5am, 3 hours before work..
I LOVE YOU UO!!!!!
Haha, yeah. And the "rubberbanding" you did cause of server lag. Still didnt bother us. We didnt care if we would be walking around and lag out and have to log off and back on, only to have your screen turn black and white because you were killed by a wandering Mongbat. Man, I think i might install this after work....
UO's still amazing, you just have to know where to look to find the experience that caters to your preferences. When EA came along with their vision of Ultima Online, I had to bail: it's really nothing like the years surrounding T2A.
UO: One of the games that kept me from playing MMOs for years.
Glad you all had fun though.
Yeah, I'll agree with you there, Lawlmonster. I bailed around the same time. I wonder what Serers are most popular now. I guess Atlantic(the shard I was on) is still pretty popular.
Last I played on official servers, which was around five years ago, Atlantic was THE PvP server, which was odd to me because I came from Great Lakes (probably one of the most comptetitive shards at the time, we always thought Atlantic was for the RP).
*Open bottle of pink champagne while shaking*
Yeah, that is kind of strange. I was on Atlantic and it was pretty big with the RP(reason I was on it) I always thought Catskills was a big PvP shard as well.
Depends really on what kind of game "they" would make Ultima out to be.
If EA continues with the status quo and gives us another themepark / linear progression / gear based MMO with the UO IP tacked on top....it will be a swing & miss on most of the folks that look back on UO nostogically, or for those folks that are yearning for a virtual world experience that the original UO brought.
Being a staff member of MMORPG, I'm sure you're aware of Richard Garriot's new MMO project. Richard mentioned that he's been in some preliminary talks with EA about the possibility of leveraging the existing UO IP on his new sandbox MMO. While EA denys any such talks have occured, Richard says that a "spiritual successor" to UO will happen, whether or not it will officially include UO IP, or not.
With that said, Isometric games are making more apperances these days (Battle of Immortals, Diablo III, Torch Lite 2, and Lineage Eternal), and presents the right scope (from a money & time resource standpoint) to take a chance on a sandbox game that plays to a more niche audience in the overall MMO market.
So long as MMOs require 100s of millions of dollars to develop a complete polished game, the niche sandbox audience will never see a new MMO. The economics just don't add up. Besides, the sandbox audience will take a feature rich sandbox game in an cheaper isometric solution over a linear gear based game that has a bunch of pretty models any day.
Same. I know a lot of people that rave about Ultima. I got a lot of the same experience MUDding at the time this game was in its heyday so I'm not sure how much I missed out, but I'd definitely love to see a couple of more games created in Ultima's spirit.
Saddly, this part of UO wasn't there last time I decided to kick the old tires earlier last year.
Granted, I have been out of the game for over 5 years, and they've added a lot more cities & hotspots.....but when I logged in, the typical areas of West Brit Bank, Moonglow Bank were completely dead. I even traveled to all the new cities and couldn't find the same "Farmers Market" scene where people stood around advertising their wares or showing off their "phat lewt"
That is sad, indeed. I wonder how they would handle a server cluster to make the shards more populated. Not sure how that would work with all the housing and want not. Probably the reason they haven't done it yet.
There were some nice things added with AoS....but the itemized loot wasn't one of them. It essentially made the one thing about UO unique (player's ability to play their character > Gear) into something more similar to itemized games like WOW.
People don't understand that the fact the items in UO were common is what allowed many of the sub-systems of UO to work so well.
One being the Full Loot system. If the outcome of a battle is determined primarily by the gear you are wearing, then the stronger the gear is...the more rare it must be.
If the gear is rare, then it becomes unfair to loose it all when dieing. Hence....the birth of Item Insurance.
If a player no longer has to worry about loosing items, then the cost of dieing is diminished.
If the cost of dieing is diminished, then the experience becomes cheap....and people are less likely to critically evaluate what they did wrong in an encounter and don't progress in the skill department.
As evidence...I give you exhibit A....."Any given World of Warcraft Battleground".
It also forced people that enjoyed PvPing (and not PvEing) to PvE....ALOT...to get the best set of gear available to keep up with the Jones'. Otherwise, the damage modifiers (or lack of damage mitigators in your armor) would allow the better equiped player to put you down faster than you could reasonably respond or counter.
The new skills they introduced with AoS also contributed to this problem as well.....not to mention things like Jujitsu and Bushido that quickly followed.
So those simple changes (having nothing to do with sandbox play by the way) completely underminded some very core mechanics of UO that made it special among the other MMOs on the market.
P.S. Forgot to add....the itemized change to loot also killed the player economy for crafters. Aside from some weak bonus stats applied to crafted gear through getting rediciously hard to get smiths hammers or sewing kits....all the best loot to be had came from dungeons.
Associate Producer on Ultima Online?
Does she even do anything?
Supervises the EA summer interns they higher to work on UO? LOL
Should have happened many years ago. Sadly, I doubt we'll ever see anything like it again because the industry has been watered down themepark-style.
Would love to see a up to date state of the Art UO..
This was moved to Luna. It's the new player appointed Capital or at least was 2-3 years ago which was when I left.
I would never go back to the official servers, they are such a mess. WHy would you want to give money to someone that backstab you again, and again, and yet again? Not only it is ridiculous to do that by principle, but experience proof now how wrong those guys were. I mean imagine a single second those guy kept on the sandbox aspect alive, at least "mostly" let's say. I mean you could understand for example they listened the agony from the themeparks gamers just before EQ hit, but after, i mean years later, like AoS. And even now, i mean they put "slot" on bags some time ago, can you believe that? Do you really think the game got anything from that crap, wouldn't it would be today like a great game if it had kept some of it's original sandbox flavor? Some players manage better Uo than Ea ever did, that's sad to say but the fucking true, and old true tbh, way before Age of shadow came player was already managing this game better. EA should be ashamed tbh, that's so dump what they made its not even funny, even for them. Who would be so stupid to threat one of their cash cow and best IP so badly for more than a decade and not realize it's just not right for their own good?
Ultima is like a monument in gaming history, and Uo was the spear head of it. Thats just so damn sad.
Once a lord or lady of Sosaria, always a lord or lady of Sosaria.
Subscription or no subscription, the experience sticks with you.
Would easily become the most anticipated game this year (if it remained true to its sandbox nature)
UO is nothing like it used to be. It's full of gear grind now, and everything else is affected.
It's killed the fantastic craft/trade system UO once had, and all the social interactions that players used to enjoy.
Even dungeons are "zoned by level" now. The MOBs are for certain skill ranges, you don't get skill gain outside of your range. If you want to build your skills, you have to go to the right dungeon or you won't get any skill gains (or hardly any). So the old original dungeons are mostly training grounds for newer players, which means they aren't meeting many vets, which hurts the social aspects too. And there aren't many new players. The old dungeons are pretty much dead, when they used to be teaming with players who were meeting others, forming friendships, joining guilds, and learning the game's finer aspects.
Basically, now, players log in for special events (Event Master run events, world events which are just monster bashes) and that's about it. And the only reason they do is for any new loot to collect.
EA has not supported UO with very much funding. The result is a mish mash of new systems added on top of old. They added a quest system, then added 2 more quest systems over the years. That's right, they have 3 different quest systems, each with different functionality. They have different functionality in crafting systems for the same reason.
Similarly, they kept adding to items with new properties to the point that if you get even a mediocre magic item, if you aren't familiar with the terms, you don't know what the hell it is. I've heard of old timers going back, and looking at an item, seeing a list of about 25 different properties, and not understanding what any of them meant. And just walking away.
The reason for this is because various head honchos over the years tried to give the players something more than they had the funds available to clean up with, they wanted to change UO, and they all felt like they could do it better.
One thing a lot of people don't know about UO's subscription numbers. They had a lot of gamers try the game. Just as many, or nearly, as EQ and other games until WoW brought in that huge influx. It was the rampant PKing that drove most of them out right away. If not for the PKing, Sandbox would probably be looked at with much more hope for subscription numbers, at least on an equal basis with Themepark. And this kills me every time I think about it.
i really want to love UO. i've tried playing it a couple of times, but the graphics, UI and controls are really backdated. it's charming in a way, but i wish the graphics could be cleaner and controls would be less clumsy.
I know this has been a long standing issue even in the UO community itself. What was once the tram/fel facet debate is now the classic/enhanced client debate. Both are available with the enhanced client using a UI most are used to now with newer MMOs and even offering some legacy mode toggles as a hybrid of sorts to keep the "feel" of UO with a newer UI.
The thing is, recently titles like Minecraft seem to understand that as long as you offer players a bit of control over their world, graphics or lack thereof can be forgivable.
I personally play both clients depending on what I'm in the mood for and play all styles including PvP (where I try to leave some things lootable for my many deaths). 15 years is pretty cool and one UO players are proud of. After all, we're the ones that keep it going :)
Thank you MMORPG for highlighting grandpa. He can still kick some butt!
I played UO from 1998-2004 and I'm still searching for a game that grabbed me the way it did.
Great memories.
man, i miss the good old days in Brit (up and around the bank) :) hehe
+1
everyone who used to play UO wants it and you know it :p
I would love an Ultima 10 or even a reboot like they do in the movies.
UO is the most unique game. It's a true virtual world with freedom to do anything (house decorating, crafting almost anything, skinning deer, ride your boat with the newer boat manuvering, etc).
I still sub to UO although I don't get compelled to log in much anymore. The world has gotten too big and although there are a million things to do, I feel it's in need of a real serious graphical & UI revamp that only a UO2 could offer at this point for me. But EA is not the one who can do it. Hence the problem.
While a lot of people harken back to the "Pre-Trammel" era as the glory days of UO.....my personal opinion is that the right balance was reached with the "Rennisance" expansion, that introduced Trammel.
For those not familiar, essentially EA introduced a PvP Switch to the game by making a carbon copy of the world where there were consentual PvP rules. So one facet of the world was called Felucia, where there was Free For All combat, and had a very wild wild west feel to playing. Almost all the PvP happend in this part of the game world. The other facet was called Trammel, where players were protected from PKs and unwanted PvP (Most of the PvE happend in this part of the game world)
It gave players choice, and I spent most of my time in Felucia because I liked the excitment of having to look over my shoulder...be constantly aware of my surroundings, and of course the PvP.
With that said, I don't buy the argument that PKers drove people away from UO. They had a whole "carebear" version of the world all to themselves to play in without worrying about player killers.
Secondly.....Themepark games would still be just as popular today if UO never had a FFA system.
And the reason is because most of the casual gamers that tried, and were turned off, to sandbox MMORPGs back in the day went back to their consoles & other casual play games because there wasn't game mechanics to direct their every move. The learning curve was high, and many of the tasks were repetitive and mondain to folks that were just looking for some quick gaming action. The time it took to make progress in the game was way to long for the casual gamers that only had 30-40 minute play windows.
ENTER WOW
Now you have quests to direct people around the map....constantly re-inforce and reward players with gear & xp. You had a simple UI that anyone could understand, and an extremely lowered learning curve that a 5 year old could pick up. Marketing & Polish not withstanding, the reason WOW pulled in so many new gamers from other casual gaming generes is because it was designed for the casual gamer. It's express intent was to make as much of the game accessable by the most people possible. And the Themepark is born....and a precident is set in the MMO industry.
I'm not saying PKing wasn't one aspect of sandbox game play that turned some folks off.....what I am saying is that the Virtual World kind of MMO, like UO, was rejected by most mainstream casual gamers for ALL it's qualities, not just PKing. The Themepark "sit back and enjoy the 30 minute ride" was something suited for the casual crowd and they responded by the millions.
Birthed from a generation of dice rolling, choose-your-own-adventurists, the players of Ultima Online (UO) are given a massive list of skills in which to build their character, opening a world of options to create the one stop shop crafter, or powerful purist/hybrid class for your goals whatever they may be. Many games of today have lost the flexibility to template one’s own character, to combine varying themes into a single avatar. The choice of class now typically serves to simply limit your pool of abilities to choose from and your eventual “role” in any real scale combat. ..
During a time when we were amassing hoards of phat loots, spread out as Magic the Gathering cards, pewter, and bytes in a few text MUDs (multi-user dungeons) that actually saved your character, Ultima Online gave me a home where I could HOARD. In this shelter for my hard earned pixels I was able to display my loots to /raise eyebrows, derive some oohs and aahs from the newbie I bring by to give some junk from the community chest, or display the latest murderer’s head I hunted down as retribution for killing my guildmate (or somewhere to safely run to hide from thus said red)...
You remember when you first turned into a dragon? I remember the first time I was a dragon, back when we were inputting /attack goblin and WPS (words per second) was your limitation, not ICD (internal cool down). OK Granted you couldn’t actually BE a dragon in UO =P. But you sure could have one as your loyal companion! Why does it always have to be time to kill the dragon?
Ultima Online (UO) was at the dawn of time in the immersive worlds that brought fantasy to an online visual, virtual experience over the years. The game offers exploration, treasure, and helping or killing-a-plenty of both monster and player; aspects which appeal and serve/d well to satisfy the desire of MMO players for all these years.
Much Appreciated,
~V~
Have they considered making it into an iPad app, yet?
You jest....
Richard Garriot has stated that his intention is to make his new "Spiritual Successor to UO" MMO a game that plays across all platforms, including iOS & Android.
I loved "old school UO", even as a player that is not driven by PVP, the "wild-west" feel you describe is defintely great for the MMO push to not venture out alone. That being said, I do feel that it is best to keep this open world pvp to a level where the player has been able to grow to a point they could manage to compete with either similar or higher levels. This can be done thru the common flagging systems of today or by the UO regulation we saw of guard zones.
Something about the timing in regards to when you refer to the Tram Xpac for UO. if I'm not mistaken, the release of EQ (which was more catering to a beginner and much less threatening) and the UO expansion which split the worlds are very curiously coinciding.
~V~
Can you point out to me the source information you are using to back up the fact that a great deal of gamers turned away from sandbox games because of rampant pking in UO? For a start non MUD mmorpgs where still in their infancy in the pre tram days, to somehow think that there was a massive crowd already there playing and then quitting seems inherently incorrect.
SWG doesn't really fit into that remit either, given it was a sandbox without pking (ignoring the Jedi system). Nor does EVE, given it is successful and has pking in it.
Moreoever the actual increase in subs UO gained post Tram was not really much over what you would have expected given the rise in internet access for gamers, the awareness of the mmorpg genre and the bump in subs seen with major expansions.
EQ (which you touched upon)and the rise of the more graphically orientated mmorpgs (followed by more single player/casual centric mmos) is what "did for" UO in terms of it being a major market share holder. The ismoetric world was simply behind the times and the majority of gamers new to the genre wanted 3D.
UO is for me certainly the greatest mmo there has been, but it is not what it once was and that boils down to what occurred with "the split". If you removed the pking/ffa from EVE it would still probably go on, but it would be a mockery of the game it once was and that is exactly what happened to UO.
That is not to say there wasn't issues with pking of course.
I obviously can't speak for everyone that "graduated" to PvPing in UO, but from my personal experience in UO....Trammel was an important step in my maturation as a MMO gamer.
The protections that Trammel offered allowed me to get my MMO legs under me and get proficient at playing my character. After my skills were raised to a level that I could compete with other players, I got board with the predictable AI the monsters in the game had.
It was that point where I moved to Felucia for the next challenge....playing against the ultimate AI, other people. Even PvEing in the Felucia zone was MUCH more entertaining due to threat associated with playing in that "Wild West" environment.
With that said, the progression I made may have not come if I weren't able to get myself aclimated to the game in the lands of Trammel (where there are more protections for new players)
Contrast that with games like Darkfall that smack newbies over the head with a blunt weapon as soon as they step out of town. Not saying that MMOs have to cow-tow to new or less experienced players....but they should alteast provide for the opprotunity for players to grow to a point where they willingly look for additional challenges in a FFA environment. The Trammel / Felucia system as a PvP switch was a lazy way to fix the problem, but effective none the less.
Facebook does indeed play on most platforms.
For the record
Ultima Online Renissance launched in 2000
Ultima Online hit it's highest peak in subscribers in 2003
Ultima Online Age of Shadows was launched in 2003
After Age of Shadows the steady decline began
Trammerl didn't kill UO, people wouldn't sit around for 3 years in a game that no longer appealed to them.
Age of Shadows and the insane itemization did.
If Trammel killed UO it wouldn't have peaked 3 years after it happened lol. While some of us (Myself included) enjoyed the FFA PvP the fact remains that far from all players do. When persistent characters are involved the majority out there do not FFA PvP. The Tram/Fel split was an excellent answer to this as the PvP'rs were able to continue PvP'ing and the trammies got to stay safe and PvE. It was a steady rise after the fel/tram split up until Age of Shadows.
You can say UO's hayday was before trammel but thats the opinion of only a few UO's hayday was from 2000-2003. After that it was all down hill.
While you personally may disagree the fact remains that UO's popularity increased when Tram hit.
This!
UO had huge server and bug issues after Age of Shadows was released. Took them 2-3 months to get things stablized. The itemization issues just enhanced the exodus. Lances were so bugged that they were immediately FOTM and it took them quite a while to fix that problem.
UO did not need itemization. Another example of developers messing with success to come up with a disfunctional game.
The most important thing about a pvp game that has item loss, is to keep replacement equipment cheap. Even with insurance it became very expensive to outfit your avatar after that. Became very expensive to make anything useful too.
No, I can't support that statement. My sources are lost on the internet or gone.
What I can tell you is this. I've seen several statements to this effect from the original big dogs at UO, Koster for sure, and I think Garriott and Star Long, but maybe others instead.
Raph Koster posted as Holocron on the SWG boards before release that the numbers of players that left UO directly because of PKing was in the 6 figures. So anywhere from 100,000 to something short of a million that left UO directly because of rampant PKing. I think it's safe to say that it was on the short end of that range, but that's quite a number.
One of these guys said in an interview once (I think it was Long, but it might have been a later big wig) that UO had more than a million gamers try it, but most leaving. But I don't know the time frame there, it could have been over 5 years, I just don't know. But also, all these games have a lot of players try them out and leave. One of WoW's developers that talked about the percentages of keepers more than a few months, and how low it was for all of them, even WoW. It was something in the 20%-25% range for WoW. The hidden numbers out there are much larger than we gamers know because they aren't talked about much.
But I don't have links, and I've tried before to find these things without luck, so I'm not going to even try now.
Let me add that EQ came out only 1 year after UO. Their numbers were quite a bit larger. Do you think that there was that much of a new community of gamers that knew nothing about UO? In one year? And if said community did grow that much, was it because they were aware of UO, the first truly massive MMORPG and heavily in the gaming news, or not?
One of my biggest regrets in my time playing MMORPGs is the fact that I've been unable to get PvPers as whole to realize their affect on their games. And I've tried for quite a few years. I mean, all you have to do is look at what happened to any game or server that allowed wide open PvP. UO (until Trammel was added), UO's PvP Felucca, AC's Darktide server, Shadowbane, Darkfall, Mortal Online, all of them. They may have started well, but al started sufefring the hemorrhage of attrition as players found out that they aren't going to be King of the Hill, and there's no room for any other play in such an environment.
You know, you just can't have meaningfull PvP as part of a game world unless PvPers give something. But PvPers won't give. Neither will non-PvPers. I can offer you a system that makes PvP meaningfull in one world, and separates the PvPers from non-PvPers, through the use of a "military" function in guilds and adding a separate supply chain/resources/territory (a combined system) to fight for, but I've been shot down before so I won't bother now.
I don't believe anyone tried to say that the tram xpac was UO's downfall. It was merely a turning point where the many generations of UO players differ greatly in schools of thought.
Personally, I have done plenty of stocking my house with multiple sets of banged out armor, guild colored clothing, and reagent bags for recovery situations in hopes you could retrieve the goods from the PK or that are soon to decay on your corpse in the dungeon.
When they took away the fear of gear loss, and introduced lower reagent cost (I NEVER want to go back!), I adapted and happily hoarded those pixels of jewelry and armors that I might use for one of my characters or my friend's guildmate's cousin who just started.. or that noob that I saw sweating so hard chopping wood to build their first house that the axe mightve flown out of their hands! ~V~
perhaps it wasn't feasible to continue to poor heavy investment into the title a handful of years down the road. So instead EA appeared to keep UO as a bank that was dwindling every year and put limited funds into that arrangement - instead of trying to keep it going full-fludged for years and years to come. Eventually all games die. No one knows when.
To suggest that all the subs, or even the majority of them (in SWG) came purely from people who had rejected UO due to pking is a leap into the realms of fantasy. Frankly if Koster said that it numbered 6 figures who left UO purely due to pking then all the data that is on the net with regards to subs must be totally and utterly false to a factor of about 10. Which is unlikely.
All the data that you can still access on the net, actually points to the sub numbers steadily increasing over time up until the point the pleothora of more graphically advanced and all round less complex mmos came to dominate the market.
EQ was indeed just after UO, but it heralded a new dawn which clearly appealed to a larger userbase. Not everyone rushed to it from UO because not everyone was playing UO in the first place. That is not surprising given how new the genre was to the market place still and how few (when compared to now) people actually played mmorpgs.
i'm not debating the pros and cons of ffa here, I just think you are being somewhat hyperbolic with regards to your thoughts on the negative impact UO's ffa stage had upon the sandbox market place.
Ultima Online is to me the best MMORPG made too this days, and even with some wrong turns it is still the best one out there (which is sad).
Played it on and off for 10 years, and nothing came or comes close to it. People often says AoS destroyed it, well it changed, and not for the better at that time, but today its a really really solid games which could work for the masses if it just got a new updated client with new graphics (still keep top-down view else its not UO) and UI.
Why don't you improve the game's Graphics for God's sake?! This is a hudge drawback for almost every player including old farts like me who played it from 1997. I got spoiled by the 3D areas of EQ and so forth and i am sure that there are many other people who feel like i do.
I know that UO is still the "WOW" of sandbox mmorpgs and there is still not a chance to find a "modern" mmo that has 10% of its features. Why don't you take advantage of UO's unique features and evolve the game as it deserves?
Because they risk losing a bulk (not all) of their current subscribers who prefer 2D and what's considered a classic client. Kingdom Reborn was the first attempt at a compromised solution but was 1.implemented way too early and 2. not promoted properly. The new Enhanced Client is a slow build this time with lots of input from players. Pinco's UI is a great example of taking the EC and tweaking it. We are already seeing more screen shots and in game videos taken with the EC than ever before which means slow and steady does win the race :)
Sosaria Reels is UO based videos with both CC and EC featured if you want to compare. It comes with a warning though that this is not your bells and whistles graphics in either case but it will highlight the subtle differences as well as a look at different shards.
Well, let me try to explain.
If a game has 100K subs, and over the next few months gains another 300K subs, but loses 250K of those new subs, plus loses another 50K of the original subs, you'd see a report that the game stayed at 100K subs. Yet, 400K people tried the game out.
And the same sort of thing with the entire industry itself in those days. A lot of people tried out UO and left the MMORPG scene entirely, while new people came in at the same time. Subs did increase overall quite considerably, especially with WoW, but also overall. Some old UO players ended up in EQ, others in AC, others in DAoC, mixed in with the new players who never played UO, and some just left the scene and went back to SPgames or FPSers, or whatever. The overall retention numbers increased, we don't know how much the overall numbers of people who didn't stick increased but I'm absolutely sure they did. The point is, that UO had about as many players try it as those other games before WoW did, game per game. But the other games had more retention than UO did exactly because of the PKing. And of you don't want to believe Koster, that's your right. But you don't know how many left a game before they could be counted as subs on a quarterly basis. Koster did.
I'll start by stating catagorically that whilst I have looked at data on the net, it is clear that obviously Koster knows far more about the situation that occurred than I do in terms of numbers. So don't take any counter points I make as me trying to make out otherwise!
That being said, whilst Koster may have been privy to how many people have ever tried the game and then quit, I can safely say that he has no idea how many of them would fall into the camp of "I quit because I got pk'd", he certainly has no clear idea as to how many of them who thought "I quit because I got pk'd and now I am put off sandboxes forever". The vast, vast amount of people don't bother to explain to a developer why they are quitting their game.
Many of those players may have just been trying it out and didn't like it for any number of reasons, many will have seen the newer games and left, a large amount may no longer have the funding or have other obligations. Sorry but I am highly skeptical of the fact that a massive swathe of people not only gave up the game due to pk'ing, but also didn't bother to go back after Tram and gave up on sandboxes in general.
What is clear though is that the sub numbers where gradually climbing and that moreover, any massive leap in the sub data did not coincide with the introduction of Tram (which saw a moderate increase that pretty much any major expansion would add), it simply carried on groing as one would expect with a product which was seeing a larger and larger potential customerbase accessing the market via the internet.
Koster went on to make a 3D sandbox with possibly one of the largest IP's seen in a game or within the entertainment industry in general, Star Wars. More and more people had access to the internet and to the mmorpg gaming sphere and yet for all of those advantagesand the game being non ffa, what happened to that? By 2004 it had 250k subs and by 2006 110-175k subs. After that they changed the core model. It may have shifted 1mm boxes over several years but that is not subs and those figures are hardly pointing to ffa being a major issue for UO.
There is no doubt (especially these days) that more people prefer not to have ffa/looting than people who do want that kind of thing. But I really don't see your initial premise being correct. The majority don't play sandbox games because they don't give a toss about world simulation, they just want to log into a game and "have a blast" or quick adventure in a graphically rich world. Furthermore the road to the loot grind started with Tram and the casualisation it brought into the game.
Personally I just wish they would make an updated (pre Tram) UO. Doubt it will happen mind you /sigh.
^ this and I would go buy a iPhone right now
Just a curiosity, why is it that everyone thinks that UO was the first, when in fact, Meridian59 came out before it did, and had much better PvP mechanics?
Although, I guess you could call UO the granddaddy, if you also assume that M59 was the grandmother that gave birth to it all. In fact, the only reason that M59 didn't become bigger than UO was because of some bad decisions by 3DO.
Indeed from time to time someone slips up and neglecting Meridian59, calls UO the first. I haven't noticed that in this specific discussion being that most people here to tip a hat to Ultima Online, one of the great ice breakers, either remembers m59or did their homework.
M59 didn't make a splash. And The Realm was before M59 too.
But even though they both were in the new genre of multiplayer (which MUDs were too), it was UO that really put the "massive" in and opened the door. The Realm, I think, was limited to 100 players per server. M59 I'm not sure about, and couldn't find anything on. But neither were truly massive in numbers for whatever reason.