Calvin wrote: ↑February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am
ultima was good.. but imo it was the freedom that made it the stand out game it was.. being able to kill anyone... being able to follow the banker home, kill them in their sleep, steal the key to the bank, loot it of all the gold, take the body to lord british and have him res it, then go back and deposite all the gold into your account. that sorta thing.
Ultima was just another homebrew generic RPG, made by a guy whose friends called him "British" because he was one of those goobs who picks up an accent just because. But by Ultima 4 Ultima became an explorative into "virtues". Money was left out all over but you couldn't take it. You could massacre anyone, but you shouldn't, etc. It was the beginning of a lot of concepts we still use in games today, the internal good vs evil and the motivation to do good rather than only get rich. D&D would later do well with many of these concepts in Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, et al.
Calvin wrote: ↑February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am
but to me it's the freedom that UO carried over much more than the narrative. but in an mmo, that freedom comes with the cost of letting the players define the world.
I refer to UO the first true MMORPG, which is factual, but the reality is it was just a beautiful client frontend on what was just another MUD. I was going to love it because I was already entrenched in their history. But it was the quintessential MMO, in the same way that Doom (or Wolfenstein 3D) was the FPS. But since defining the world happened in MUDs (and D&D campaigns) already, UO put makeup on the pig but it didn't invent that.
Calvin wrote: ↑February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am
it kinda does in the single player as well, except it's all much more stage managed. bosses are singular, once killed they stay dead. the player can change the world, the closest wow ever came to this was letting you put onyxia's head on stormwind bridge. everything else was static and instanced - because it was essentially a single player game, just with co-op. uo is a true multiplayer, so you cant really rely on narrative, because you cant customize the world for every player. unless you instance it.
Despite being HUGELY into Warcraft games and history, I never touched WoW. I had played enough UO to know that I threw away a fair chunk of my life in an MMO, and another MMO where I already knew ALL the backstory because I'd beat every game and expansion for hundreds of hours was not going to be conducive to me paying rent ever again. I did play GuildWars, and they did a beautiful job of instancing in what I played. It was hokey, but it let you play solo without getting ganked. UO's greatest strength and weakness were that you could get ganked pretty much everywhere. Adding Trammel "fixed" this, but broke its soul at the same time. You weren't meant to live in carebear land, even if you hated the reds for wasting your time and taking your stuff.
That being said, I think UO could be very story driven if someone wanted. I once drew up a pretty ambitious plan for how to do that with the RunUO engine: create a world where players exist in an age past. Every year or two add a new expansion which is the same world but expanded in size, new tech because its a hundred years in the future, and players can 'gate' one way into the future, where the godly players of ages past don't quite cut it with the new skill caps and loot tables. Every NPC has a routine, they gather and collect and sell and give quests for things they can't get themselves. It would be every bit as intensive as the original UO was dreamed up, but with 2020 era computing power (I run 2 R420 ESXi virtual hosts with an R720XD and around 30TB usable space, so it's not hard to throw together a 'cheap' system to host a startup from indefinitely). You could tier the instancing to eras, and let players choose in a semi-simultaneous universe what era they'll play in (likely multiple characters across ages, ofc). Then you can create world altering events in one age and have the results affect the next age. But no small feat for a devteam, so unless I get a team who wants to work for me, I won't see it happen.
Calvin wrote: ↑February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am
i remember when i first played second age, people lived as blacksmiths. like, that was their character, their job, their online world - being the blacksmith. that was the original plan of uo really, to make the NPCs, PCs. so you bought food from the player baker, iron from the player miner, weps from the player blacksmith. and in that capacity - yes, you could steal the blacksmiths stuff, or kill and loot the baker.
he removed the problem of having to instance the NPCs, by not having NPCs. obviously it didn't really pan out.
One could write up a psychology thesis on what makes people want to do what it is they do in multiplayer RPGs. Most just want to be the most impressive character in an online world to feel more important than they do IRL. A "life" you can win when you get home from an underwhelming job taking crap from people you hate. Some were content being the much-needed smith, but over time there were so many smiths that it wasn't so special, and the only thing OSI/EA offered for the longest time was faction rewards and rewards for continuing to pay the subscription fee (account age rewards). I won't say they killed their game, but they been milking quarters out those machines for a long time.
Calvin wrote: ↑February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am
you know there's like tie fighters and moonbases in the original Ultima narrative right?
I don't ever watch the UO intro video that I don't laugh and tell *somebody* that you never kill Mondain with that sword; you use a "blaster" like it's Star Wars because that was the best ranged weapon.
Ultima 1 was the age of Ultima being just another homebrew PC RPG. Like the first Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen had to have a lot of fluff removed from the rest of the series when they made it an amazing 5-game epic. No one built a game thinking they were gonna need room to expand to many sequels.
Calvin wrote: ↑February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am
honestly i think the core of UO is solid gold. but i do think it would benefit from some modernizations, taking some pages out of the modern games book, with things like daily/weekly quests. an on rails intro/tutorial (which i think we have to some extent actually), perhaps *some* instances - again which we already have, that's what peerless are. there's probably a bunch of updates you could implement.
"Core" is a little ambiguous. The client is so dated, tho I wouldn't want to *lose* the classic look and feel, I think they need a proper mobile client before they can do dailies/weeklies. Expand to the real masses because being a PC client game, you're cornering out people with good hardware because your client is so tragically dated, and while it should run perfectly on anyone's iPhone it isn't compatible, and they'd fold bank if they could just get random people to try out UO as a mobile game. And I know for certain dailies & weeklies would render the game entirely unplayable to me, so while I know you're right it would work because that's how the formula of gaming as a business goes, I find myself angry to hear it said.
On the other hand, if by core you mean the core server side aspect to the game, that's also dated. It also needs a revamp without losing the old heart. And while RunUO is cute because it runs on C#, we're deep into the world of Docker containers being far more efficient than Windows VMs. There's plenty of room for improvement if someone really had the reigns of a dev team. Ultimately, I think you don't necessarily mean either of these, but you mean events and such. Which is the cheesiest of "improvements", and the most likely for a company like EA/Broadsword to bother implementing.
Calvin wrote: ↑February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am
like, what if the daily quest required a party of 3+. what would that do?
what if the reward was like 7x something, hand in for something else.
whats the value of the big prize? now whats the value of the smaller things of which you need 7.
see, it would make players interact more, actually group up, just stuff like that.
and then oh! im having to group up a lot, well this guy is regularly on, and i group with him a lot, we're getting strats made up for the instance, maybe we should make a guild. see how it works?
how are you gonna macro grind something you can only do once a day and need a group of 3 for?
it's just an example, but do you see what i mean?
I think I get the scenario. I think it would turn UO into something that's already done a dozen times in other games, and UO would stop being whatever it is now. Which is a shell of what it was, so maybe I'm just old and resisting change. Ultimately it would play out like BODs: People will find the most efficient way to jump through the hoops to get the required items in the cycles offered, and they'll repeat until they get the good stuff, pushing the supply & demand functionality until the low level rewards are trash left at banks and the high end stuff becomes so common that it's a new currency. It's ESO's dailies. I enjoyed daily grinding the thief guild quests for a few months, and selling the loot on vendors, which required you to be in a guild to sell, and if you didn't sell well they cut you so you had to be good. And it got tedious after a few months and I quit with sub time on the board. It was SOOOO tedious and horrible, despite the game being actually amazing.
Calvin wrote: ↑February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am
now that thing, does not require work, it requires time. how much time, does a rich person have, and how much time, does a poor person have? the same.
so how much, is this item worth?
some advancements are gimmiks, some are cash grabs, or ways to monetize things. but some, are actually good evolutions of the genre.
Time is money. There are restrictions to the conversion rate, but there always ends up being one. This is played on heavily in gaming development, and why rich people drop $$$$ on games to avoid waiting for timers. I'm slightly jealous that people found a way to make rich people pay money to do nothing more than skip timers in games.
Calvin wrote: ↑February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am
like have you played dune 2? it's an rts. you literally have to click move, then click the position. right click to move would help that game a lot.
I haven't played Dune 2.
Calvin wrote: ↑February 20th, 2021, 1:19 am
(im trying not to post academic stuff, but the fact is, this is what the science is. they literally do things like test the average attention span, then aim gameplay to be that length. it's really more about the people than the game.)
This is the root of all badness in gaming, from my perspective. PC gaming was fun when it was low tech and Richard Garriott or Peter Molyneaux could make the greatest things by hiring a team of hungry friends. Now it has become a world where AAA players dominate it because bean counters beat programmers into game release schedules *cough* Cyberpunk *cough*. Indie devs will eat so long as there's Hipsters who are too cool to pay for the latest Assassin's Creed because they want something that looks like Minecraft and PacMan had a weird pixelly baby. The rest is rinse-and-repeat mobile shovelware for the bored housewives. Gaming has become a sort of cynical caricature of itself, or else I'm just cynical because I miss the old ways.
It's hard for me to hate, because as an automation engineer, it is my life to mine data and improve systems. I should love the inherent efficiency in what they do, but it's like driving on the roads and seeing how terribly programmed traffic lights are. All I can do is hate the mediocrity. I miss the days when the game was the product, instead of the attention mining of the people. The bean counter says: Sure developers, *you're* telling a story with this game, but *we* paid for that story, so *we* have no attachment to it, and *we* need to pump in enough content for the sheep to feel full for the $120 including DLCs we're going to ask them to pay. And if *they* won't pay for the content, *you* get a resume stain. Just corporate bean counting, not the soul of making games as I once saw it playing out.