2 months here, my impression

[Calvin]

i'll do the rest in 1 post.. summarys

you wrote so much! lol
fun to reply to tho, im not complaining really.
some might.. ;P

what do people want from mmos... hopefully different things i guess is the best answer. cos then they fill different roles in the community - again something WoW changed, now everyone's a hero, and it is a combat game :/

suppose everquest started it... it's in the name actually, thinkin about it
in that regard uo has become a bit messy tbh.. because that did assert itself as the dominant play style ultimately, and we all ended up with support characters that are just support for our hero.. so yeah, kinda didn't work i guess. still im not sure we should abandon all hope of it working and just say the only games are combat games.

cant believe you menationed legacy of kain, i was literally thinking that with the spirit world when i was thinkin about the time travel thing.

yeah i know ultima 1 was homebrew lolz. but the point is, it was never the storyline that made the appeal. Garriott is not Tolkein or even JK Rowling. it's not like Final Fantasy with super emotional twists and stuff.. i suppose maybe, that bit with the torturer.. anyway you get the point.

you can run UO on mobile on a windows phone... but really i dont think it's a client issue at all.
people like simpler gfx and clients, i still use the 2D client, look at games like Rimworld and Valheim - the trend is actually for stylized gfx, and uo does that fine.

"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."

why? you dont *have* to do them, just if you want the stuff from them, you have to, or you buy them. and if no-one does it, the price will go up to the point that people will. they're not intended to change the game at all, just make people go "oh i'll just nip on for 20 mins and do the daily.." ... ... *6 hours later*

dont see why it would stop you playing either, you wouldn't have to do it every day, just 7 times to get the reward, and only once per day so you cant script it. could take you a month to get the 7 things, could take you a week. maybe you farm one and buy 6, then you've done it in a day. or just buy the prize item? where's the problem?

i dont mean the core client, or the core server. i mean the core concept. the idea behind UO, is a good one, the engine is fit for purpose. i dont think you need to modernize the gfx or anything at all - look at UO steam, that is actually detracting from the immersion of the game, and making it a more technical management game. which is fine really. there's games like hearts of iron, it's all text and menus, the whole game, doesn't matter because the mechanics are there. all you're on about really is the interface.

when i say improvments i dont mean with the interface, or events. i mean like... conventions. like imagine a modern RTS game where you cant right click to move. it would be a nightmare. that is a simple improvement that improves the game. lets take another one, again from RTS - my unit is not a single unit anymore, it is a group of units. take red alert for example, if you wanna make a squad of bazooka guys, you need to make like 5-10 bazooka guys, put them all in a group, then move it around. instead, now, you make 1 unit, that is a squad. see what i mean. it's just simple advancements, that make the whole thing better, and smoother.

there's loads.. lets take FPS - stamina, bullet spray, etc. they're not what the game is, but they are expected, because they serve a function. those functions are left unaddressed in UO, because it doesn't have the modern conventions, and it does suffer for it. like.. a looking for group feature. just simple things like that, which would make the game way more playable.

[Calvin]

"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."

got you into a guild though didn't it?
got you playing every day for a few months tho didn't it?


it's a hook, if it cant keep you on the line after you're hooked, that's not a good game.
regardless of the IP.
but that is a game made 20 years after UO. it does not have UO's core concept.
it probably has WoW's core concept.

anyway im not saying daily quests are the way to go, it's just an example of a modern system that is used to achieve something from the players.

"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."

you're actually 100% right on this. that IS the core economy of these games. which is why letting people script stuff AFK, messes up EVERYTHING, because the entire economy is supposed to be based on time and work. ours actually isn't now, because of that. it's now based on luck, and freak crafts or loot drops. sorta works tho, just it's more like a fruit machine... you actually work for rolls, not currency. it does work though.

the games in general thing.. see in them days it was trial and error. yeah Sid Miere made Pirates and Civ. Tom Schiefer made Monkey Island. John Carmack made Doom. +. +.
but how many games didn't make it? you can do that when it costs nothing to make a game.. but when it costs millions... cant really afford to do it so much.
i actually agree with you though, and i love the indie market these days, a lot of people do. in fact, i'd maybe say the indie market is bigger than the AAA market these days. hence things like Unity3D, RPG maker, err.. there's another one like unity that just came out..
but you get the idea. you can still have creative concepts explored cheapy, and they do make good games - look at minecraft for example.
but the point is like.. you might be making a car, and it might need wheels. you dont have to reinvent the wheel to put it on your car.
UO is like a car that was made before wheels were invented, alls im sayin is maybe it would work better with round wheels instead of square ones. like, we have improved in *some* areas. im not saying it needs an electric, carbon fibre body make-over. but round wheels...

daily quests.. looking for group button and que.. reputation system maybe.. none of this would effect the current game.
there's loads, honestly, just play any modern game, they're all there. suppose you kinda have reputation with the library things.

another thing is like.. and i hate this, personally. but soulbound things. i know what you're gonna say, i hate them too. but. it serves a function - non-tradable rewards, and you could actually implement it in a different way, that doesn't contradict the game world, like, make it a blessing instead of an item. doesn't take much, it's the same thing really, but narratively smoothed over to fit the game.
kinda have it with spell weaving quests - but again sort of not really. vitue system in fact is sort of a reputation system. okay fair enough, they got that one. decay on it hurts tho for people that take breaks.

[Calvin]

just remembered actually, i've posted this before, but when you asked what people want from mmos and said you could write a thesis on it; someone did

[Vampire337]

i dont think UO is this at all... i suppose in the sense of the character, monsters, items... hmm. Doom actually invented FPS is why it is what it is. before Doom it was basically just mazerunner.. John Carmack pretty much invented the whole genre.

bloodwytch was such a good game..

Doom was the first real "multiplayer FPS", before FPS was ever coined. In reality it took two games to cement FPS as a genre: Wolfenstein 3D being the first Carmack entry brought the gameplay, but Doom made it a multiplayer thing, and it wouldn't have taken off I don't think unless you could kill your friends. The two together created notoriety, a la demonic and Nazi themes, to what would eventually be FPS. I mention both because no one came up with a name "first person shooter" and invented a game; they took some of the ideas expanded from games you mention, as well as simple graphical dungeon crawlers like Bard's Tale, and they made a thing where you ran around shooting things in realtime. The genre could not have existed if people didn't get a taste in Wolf3D, and most assuredly would never have taken off if not for the networking capability (and absolute immersiveness) of Doom multiplayer. And Spear of Destiny was technically in there, but it didn't add anything so much as just pad time before Carmack figured out IPX/SPX networking protocols.

My point wasn't only to wax poetic about how old I am, but to note that yes Carmack rightly created the FPS gaming genre, and Garriott equally created the MMORPG genre. Each using elements that existed before it, but tying them together into a new thing. I don't think it's fair to say WoW killed MMORPGs any more than CoD or MW killed FPS. As a non-gaming example, when Ice T called out Soulja Boy for "killing rap" and Soulja retorted with "shut up ur old", Ice T may have pioneered the art, but he can't stop new entrants from growing it decades later. The MMO game ain't dead; maybe ur just old.

lemme read through and edit this reply, but i actually disagree with you here on the MUDs (multi-user dungeons). cos they were just dungeons really.. it is slightly before my time to be honest, but are we not talking about something along the lines of Eye of the Beholder or Bloodwytch?

Hired Guns as well.. are they MUDs... hmm, it's really not something i know a lot about tbh, you're going back to like BBS days.

"MUDs are nowadays mostly historical, however some still exist and are running. They were created to be played in a text mode on text-only terminals initially. Today many implement their own clients, however the mechanic remains the same: the whole interaction is text-only. Some implement ASCII-art to represent logos of the games and simplified maps."

ah right okay.. so text adventures with multiple users.. i dont get it. lol

bit before my time tbh, i'll have been about 5 when people were playing these
i started early, but not *that* early

honestly i dont think it has *that* much bearing on UO.. maybe inspired it cos RG played them i guess.. i mean what is it like, rooms with arrays of objects? it's not even object orientated programming :S
s'more like a text advanture made in basic :S
i must be missing something here... anyway, moving on.. lol

I mean, UO is "just dungeons really.." A town is a dungeon without monsters. A house is a dungeon you can decorate. My favorite mining caves are dungeons where monsters don't spawn. It's all just basically tile regions, right?

What was released in 1997, UO was at heart a next-gen take on MUD, underneath the flashy-for-its-day GUI. It is a set of maps upon which you go battle things. One might argue that a MUD is more akin to a turn-based strategy where you return your actions against the server's prompts, and UO is entirely realtime, which is a fair point. But at the end of the day, it's just a giant 2d tilemap and the game is designed to let you do stuff in the tiles of that world. The skills systems, the magic systems, the crafting systems, all ingeniously layered on top of it, but still a virtual persistent world where people go wandering around doing their thing. The quintessential MUD, but with 1998 visuals instead of 1978.

And I'll admit, I'm not old enough that I have a ton of MUD experience. But more than WoW.

A MUD is not a popular thing now because it is by definition text-only, and no one today is gonna play that monthly, which is why they made a point to make MMORPG its own genre. The fact that MUDs existed in an age before object oriented programming was feasible means that it wasn't object oriented, but most certainly could be if one really wanted to make one now. It is a path of evolution, and to me exciting because just as I was getting into the idea of joining MUDs, UO came out and took it to the next level.

I'd played uo, in fact i was on demise when WoW was released lol.

when i went to uni a lot of people were playing WoW tho, i resisted for a while, cos i could see it wasn't UO, and it was in fact some travesty of an MMO where you couldn't drop things into the real world. but eventually i joined to play with uni mates. tbh, it was a frikkin brilliant game. insanely immersive, awesome community of like, everyone. million other things. i just wish everything haddn't copied it, because it was not a true mmo, and it killed the genre. the ride of WoW is fun, but it is a ride, and it does have an end. it's not replayable like UO, you consume the content, then you move to the next content; and the devs have a permanent job feeding the consumers. it was a solid *business* model. that was the problem as well.

You aversion to WoW because it "wasn't UO" sounds like how I approached EverQuest and Runescape. But Runescape was wonky and looked like ass back then. I saw Runescape came out a couple months ago on Steam, it looks like that's the girlfriend I shoulda stuck with. I never got into either of them because I wanted UO, not a copy-ish of UO.

I do have the impression that what you like about UO and what I like about UO are different. UO is a bit bland in that it's a great platform to go do stuff, but you're generally not progressing through it and unable to go back to old content. Partially because there isn't real "content" outside of global events that have long since been held (all the Ultima scenarios). The content is all "go fight the monsters in this dungeon again". And repeat ad nauseum until you get the right RNG loot. And at the same time, there is a ton of UO world which is just wasted space, and I would argue that it is like you describe of WoW: I would presume there are vast areas you've long moved on from. The "content" is all in grinding spots, peerless/champ spawns and Ilshenar if I'm not mistaken. No one is walling in the old bone knight room under Dagger Isle for healing and swordsmanship gains anymore. No one is farming balrons in Hythloth, because the spawn rates are higher in Ilshenar and everyone wants paragon chests. Vast areas in Malas are just empty and the only foot traffic is people looking for IDOCs. These are symptoms of blight in an MMORPG.

Side note: I'm reaching that lull where I like making money because I'm stacking those magical checks in my house to remind myself how much I've accomplished, but my attention is starting to drift from my ol' mistress again. Last time I did this I just checked out and didn't come back for like 3-4 years, but the game was still here waiting on me, minus my house that collapsed and Vander Nars apparently owned a tower in its place when I returned. I'm still playing, but I'm not sure what I'm playing for. There's no real content for me to *do* now that I've done all the stuff I wanted. I'm not really that committed to grinding Heartwood for perfect Sampire rings.

Guildwars was more like Diablo 2. had this debate when it came out as well.. the town was basically your lobby, just a graphical lobby, but the whole world was instanced. that's how they managed to make it not have a subscription - cos there was no persistant world to need servers running it, everything was done either locally, or on a temporary server - like diablo 2.

I guess I can see how GW would be like D2. D2 was more open to hacking, which hurt it pretty badly, but not enough that people didn't have a great time with it. GW didn't charge a subscription fee, (which is surprising they didn't do like Bethesda with ESO, make it optional but hamper the game if you don't pay), But they sold expansions, and that paid for development. At the end of the day I concede that a game is not going to stay running unless you're actively paying for it. Long live the carts on my Atari 2600, SNES & Genesis!

"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."

people in general, literally gave the guy no choice. it was the only way for the game to stay playable, and for all the systems other than the pvp one, to have a chance. might be something to do with games and teenage boys, thinking about it...

it actually makes me kinda sad, because it speaks volumes not about games, but about humanity; and i bet making tram was the last thing he ever wanted to do, but there was no choice, it's not a combat game really.. like 5% of the game is combat. but it was the only 5% these kids knew, and it destroyed the other 95%. so.. they had to take the toy away from them, makes any parent sad when your kid disappoints you like that innit ;P

Trammel is a love/hate thing for everyone, and I don't doubt Garriot felt it too. The data shows players returned for Trammel, and new players flocked for Trammel, with its promise of not losing all your stuff and doubling the land where you could place housing. Always amazed me how premium housing was in a virtual world. You'll hear no end to the hate on it, but it was more popular than not when the subscription fees rolled in. Trammel brought the greatest playerbase size the game ever knew, if I'm not mistaken. And this effected the development of WoW and GW in particular: in neither game do you die in PvP and really lose your stuff. They learned that while this was a good mechanic in what became Felucca, it hurt playability of the game for most people. Hell, I ragequit so many times, broke a keyboard, punched a monitor, I hated to lag out and lose stuff. If I'm really honest, the amount it sucked to lose what little I had to PKs prolly scarred me enough that I'm avoiding PvP even now because it sucked so hard. So, in a way I'm a pre-Trammel Trammie with PTSD. Like seriously, I hadn't considered how angry I kindof still am over losing digital nonsense so forever ago.

UO was a collection of massive failures, just not the kind you couldn't learn from and move on. The original intent to have animals breed and multiply and therefore punish players who culled to herds too much, was a non-starter. People mowed down all the animals for resources and they had to go with stupid old spawn maps. In a perfect world they should have balanced it so there were more animals, or animals were harder to wipe en masse, but it wasn't a sustainable world like it was dreamt up as. PKing and stealing were other "failed" mechnics or grand systems that weren't sustainable. It's hard to balance something that makes thieves and murderers feel like they're running their turf without making people ragequit because they lost all their stuff. Ultimately they had to nerf it with insurance and moonstones to avoid culling the herd. With what computers are today, I think Garriot could remake his dream, but he's long moved on.

your game idea is actually a very good one. it's not UO tho. you could make a total conversion mod in the UO engine, that could be this, and actually, the time travel and living in different eras thing, is a fantastic idea/mechanic. you'd end up with something like Looper... man that would be cool.

time travel in an mmo... pfff... that is a big door of posibilities, but yeah, not UO, so not on topic really.
... could change stuff in the past and effect the future era... it would take a lot of figuring out, but defo is a niche not explored.

Thank you, but... My game idea is entirely UO; I wouldn't have mentioned it if it wasn't. But it would be a storyline-driven UO, where they didn't have to end the campaigns, simply let them rage on in their ever-playable biomes or time. In the same way Ilshenar was supposed to become the hub world for all the shards (another massive technical cluster they couldn't pull off because it was too ambitious but they made it work), you'd have a common place to explore and do stuff in your chosen era, so the pre-Trammies could have a T2A world where there is only Felucca, the SE haters could stick to their chosen world, etc. It isn't the UO we know now, I admit, but it would be a UO that let them turn UO into everything it ever was. But I sent my resume to Broadsword years ago. Either they didn't give it a serious look or their website lies about them looking to hire. A small part of me hopes to one day win the lottery so I can buy a failing UO from EA and show the world what it should be.

i'll do the rest in 1 post.. summarys

you wrote so much! lol
fun to reply to tho, im not complaining really.
some might.. ;P

Good lord, I was responding to your one post on page 3 and then saw you've got 3 more on page 4. I didn't think you'd mind someone who rattles on as much as you. I also enjoy a good discussion.

what do people want from mmos... hopefully different things i guess is the best answer. cos then they fill different roles in the community - again something WoW changed, now everyone's a hero, and it is a combat game :/

suppose everquest started it... it's in the name actually, thinkin about it
in that regard uo has become a bit messy tbh.. because that did assert itself as the dominant play style ultimately, and we all ended up with support characters that are just support for our hero.. so yeah, kinda didn't work i guess. still im not sure we should abandon all hope of it working and just say the only games are combat games.

Wish I'd played some EQ, so I knew more of what I speak of there. I know it was one of the original competitors to UO. Blizzard was brilliant in letting UO mature some before bringing out WoW; they effectively never competed with UO because WoW was next-gen tech. UO never did figure out how to evolve their GUI.

For me, to say that an MMORPG is literally the sum of its parts: "massively multiplayer" and "roleplay game", is to recognize the growth of RPGs from "Akalabeth" to "Zork", and to note that Adventure games from "Hugo's House of Horrors" to "Leisure Suit Larry" influenced RPGs almost as certainly as JRPGs did. And the multiplayer concepts of a persistent world which is the platform for a game literally thousands could play on simultaneously had their foundation in what were once MUDs. We may prefer the classless freedom of UO to the WoW level-based template form, but they're all just extensions of the same genre. These games live on as long as someone hosts them and someone plays them. And presumably, as long as people write ridiculous forum posts immortalizing their experiences.

cant believe you menationed legacy of kain, i was literally thinking that with the spirit world when i was thinkin about the time travel thing.

LoK is one of the greatest story-driven tales of time travel, IMO. The first one is a bit dry to get through the gameplay, but oh to have grown up with the Playstation was new and that game felt like magic. And then to watch Crystal Dynamics turn it into a great storyline, and now a fairly forgettable MMO (not RPG). I wonder if... It shut down in 2016. I'm sad that I never took part. But it was all PvP, and I prolly would've been disappointed. But yes, UO has its own spirit world when you die, but they never chose to do much with it. They got as far as "Spirit Speak can let you talk to ghosts", but who remains a ghost and has a conversation? Imagine how much fun could be had if you had a wraith world with quests and such built in, maybe some virtue path to give you a reason to visit after you completed them.

yeah i know ultima 1 was homebrew lolz. but the point is, it was never the storyline that made the appeal. Garriott is not Tolkein or even JK Rowling. it's not like Final Fantasy with super emotional twists and stuff.. i suppose maybe, that bit with the torturer.. anyway you get the point.

Garriott as Tolkein. Tolkein wasn't Tolkein, in terms of making a LotR video game. He WOULD have made a MUD. That man wrote like six pages describing walking through trees. If Tolkein made a game, he'd need Michael Bay to make any of it flashy enough to play.

My point is all games on PC in a certain era felt homebrew. Even the Apogee & Epic Megagames releases had a semi-professional feel to them at best. Id made Doom, but they also made Commander Keen. Have you played the original Final Fantasies? I'll just fanboy out here and say I named a child after a FF6 character, but their story writing left a lot to be desired before 6. And IMO some of the complexity in 7 and after made for convoluted tales that didn't always makes sense until you went back and read what they intended to do.

Garriott's niche wasn't the Fantasy world of summonings and battling empires and amazing orchestral musical scores. He wasn't writing endless books to put children to sleep either. And nor was he into building the magical what-if world for children to hide from their muggle parents like Rowling. He played in Molyuneaux's space of teasing out the ethical values and consequences of adventuring. Where Molyneaux explored what it is to be a good or evil god in "Black & White", Garriott was trying to find a way to discourage evil behavior in the adventurer in a world without having to make all the guards and innocent people invulnerable. If anything hurt him about UO, it was that every important character has to be yellow because some trash panda will kill it for the lulz.

you can run UO on mobile on a windows phone... but really i dont think it's a client issue at all.
people like simpler gfx and clients, i still use the 2D client, look at games like Rimworld and Valheim - the trend is actually for stylized gfx, and uo does that fine.

You can do it, but to what end? UO is a passable but fairly clunky interface from a touchscreen perspective, holding down buttons to run and having to navigate with all the macros, and opening containers and moving windows around and.. it's a tedious thing for a mobile client. I am an interface guy; my professional tasks are generally centered around how can I get more actionable data through the screen and into a user's head so they can make smarter decisions. In a game sense, there is no way running UO on a phone the way it is designed is even playable. Unless one is a masochist.

What I'm generally not is a UX (User Experience) specialist. Which is fine, they don't get paid as much anyway. A mobile client port of UO would do best if it had some options for graphics. A minimalist pack for lightweight loads, larger pack of high res for better graphics on tablets, options for theming gumps. These are the fluffy things that I'd find unnecessary, but people pay good money for themes in chat apps, so you'd be missing out to not provide the people what they'd surely want.

The goal of a mobile app isn't to prove that UO doesn't need to be anything more than a 1998 client. The goal is to put the experience into the hands of the younger generation. This game dies with us if no one new picks it up. No one looks at the graphics of UO and says "I wanna try this dinosaur out!". I agree the house has good bones, but it's sporting popcorn ceilings and 80's wood paneling.

"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."

why? you dont *have* to do them, just if you want the stuff from them, you have to, or you buy them. and if no-one does it, the price will go up to the point that people will. they're not intended to change the game at all, just make people go "oh i'll just nip on for 20 mins and do the daily.." ... ... *6 hours later*

dont see why it would stop you playing either, you wouldn't have to do it every day, just 7 times to get the reward, and only once per day so you cant script it. could take you a month to get the 7 things, could take you a week. maybe you farm one and buy 6, then you've done it in a day. or just buy the prize item? where's the problem?

So here's me with daily requirements: I liked DuoLingo, an app that teaches you languages. It's good. It gives you stupid "points" for coming back each day. But ultimately this caused me great levels of anxiety. Because if you miss a day, you lose your streak, and I don't know what's wrong with me but I can't handle that. I'll prolly never learn another language because I can't be berated for missing a day. I've played numerous mobile games and if they so much as hint that I'll lose a streak if I miss a day, I'm done the moment it happens. Done done. And if there's a thing that you need to return each day to get in UO, you get the sense that there's a need for it, and I'm certain that toxicity would end my love affair with the game.

Despite Bethesda being a terribly greedy developer, ESO is an amazing game. My wife and I got it on Steam sale a few years ago, and we played it enough that I splurged and got the subscription for us both. I'm way to cheap to pay the monthly fee, so I bought the one year special. And we played daily. I grinded those missions. Every. Stinking Day. And then one day I missed. I got home too late or something, I didn't get my daily loots or whatever, and it broke the game for me. Despite being the tightwad I know I am, I couldn't stomach playing the remaining months of my subscription, because something just broke for me to leave it on the table like that. I prolly need a shrink to have me show them on the doll where gaming hurt me, but at least I'm self aware.

i dont mean the core client, or the core server. i mean the core concept. the idea behind UO, is a good one, the engine is fit for purpose. i dont think you need to modernize the gfx or anything at all - look at UO steam, that is actually detracting from the immersion of the game, and making it a more technical management game. which is fine really. there's games like hearts of iron, it's all text and menus, the whole game, doesn't matter because the mechanics are there. all you're on about really is the interface.

when i say improvments i dont mean with the interface, or events. i mean like... conventions. like imagine a modern RTS game where you cant right click to move. it would be a nightmare. that is a simple improvement that improves the game. lets take another one, again from RTS - my unit is not a single unit anymore, it is a group of units. take red alert for example, if you wanna make a squad of bazooka guys, you need to make like 5-10 bazooka guys, put them all in a group, then move it around. instead, now, you make 1 unit, that is a squad. see what i mean. it's just simple advancements, that make the whole thing better, and smoother.

there's loads.. lets take FPS - stamina, bullet spray, etc. they're not what the game is, but they are expected, because they serve a function. those functions are left unaddressed in UO, because it doesn't have the modern conventions, and it does suffer for it. like.. a looking for group feature. just simple things like that, which would make the game way more playable.

If MMORPG were FPS, then yes, these might matter. But in the same way the RTS is not FPS is not Battle Royale, the only things that matter are those that, well, matter to a genre. As far as RTS, I got the remastered C&C collection a couple months ago. Well worth it, but a reminder of how clunky RTS interface was when it first came out. Whatever you have to do to move is unintuitive to me by now. Side note, back when I still did LAN parties we broke out old Doom and I learned I'm not at all able to play an FPS without a mouse anymore. I used to be so OP at Doom!

I agree that UO is solid bones. It is the epitome class-free open ended character build system. The Peerless and PvP and so on are all decent systems that people can grind on for eternity and have fun doing so. The customization of housing keeps a lot of people around, because it's flexible and attainable. The game is still around because it's a solid core concept. But as a game, I believe it will inevitably go the way of Blockbuster and Eastman Kodak if someone isn't trying to innovate. UOSteam is a double-edged sword. It is the only reason player run servers like this are still around, so people get their methadone drip of RNG drops, and perhaps a challenge to write scripts for nerds like me. But it all but totally destroys immersion. UOSteam isn't the fix, it's a bandage that rots the game out and what's left is what we've got. It isn't bad, but I tend to play for months, then quit for years, and come back hoping it still exists. Thus far, it has remained.

I don't know how many people play UO on Demise, all player run shards, or on EA's production shards. But I know it's not a growing number over time. I know cludgy interface is a large deterrent for a game. I know wonky mechanics harm a game. UO as it is can't last forever. That bothers me, because it could became a common thing if someone with some creativity pumped some effort into expanding it into something better. And truthfully, this may not even be a discussion for a shard like Demise. All I see is complaining that casting is "broken" and no one seems too keen on changing it.

"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."

got you into a guild though didn't it?
got you playing every day for a few months tho didn't it?


it's a hook, if it cant keep you on the line after you're hooked, that's not a good game.
regardless of the IP.
but that is a game made 20 years after UO. it does not have UO's core concept.
it probably has WoW's core concept.

anyway im not saying daily quests are the way to go, it's just an example of a modern system that is used to achieve something from the players.

I still stand by the core is MMORPG, and UO & WoW have their own flavors of MMORPOG, as does ESO. Dailies are not a core thing, but they're inevitable in modern MMO, much like loot crates and IAPs in mobile games. These exist because of bean counters. They cause anxiety and it turns into money, but they're not a boon to gaming; they're just okay because everyone else is doing it too. Sure, I played it for awhile, and if EA added it to UO I'd play it for awhile, but IMO life's too short for a game to feel like a chore. I'd do better using my gaming PC to mine bitcoin than risk getting jailed for mining ingots.

Also, I now realize I re-explained that ESO burnout story. Sorry, it's hard threading four forum posts back into one.

"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."

you're actually 100% right on this. that IS the core economy of these games. which is why letting people script stuff AFK, messes up EVERYTHING, because the entire economy is supposed to be based on time and work. ours actually isn't now, because of that. it's now based on luck, and freak crafts or loot drops. sorta works tho, just it's more like a fruit machine... you actually work for rolls, not currency. it does work though.

I'll devil's advocate you here. You believe AFK scripting messes up the game because anyone can AFK gain a ton of wealth. I believe these levels of wealth, being necessary to equip a character with the basics to do most of what people actually do on here, would be absolutely unattainable to any new player, and the game would eventually die out. I think that for this reason, AFK/semi-AFK macroing is the only reason a shard like Demise has an economy.

the games in general thing.. see in them days it was trial and error. yeah Sid Miere made Pirates and Civ. Tom Schiefer made Monkey Island. John Carmack made Doom. +. +.
but how many games didn't make it? you can do that when it costs nothing to make a game.. but when it costs millions... cant really afford to do it so much.

It doesn't cost millions to make a game. That's just some bean counter's idea of how to churn an optimized pile of money out of an investment. It's as formula driven as making pop music, and has about all the heart:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

i actually agree with you though, and i love the indie market these days, a lot of people do. in fact, i'd maybe say the indie market is bigger than the AAA market these days. hence things like Unity3D, RPG maker, err.. there's another one like unity that just came out..
but you get the idea. you can still have creative concepts explored cheapy, and they do make good games - look at minecraft for example.
but the point is like.. you might be making a car, and it might need wheels. you dont have to reinvent the wheel to put it on your car.
UO is like a car that was made before wheels were invented, alls im sayin is maybe it would work better with round wheels instead of square ones. like, we have improved in *some* areas. im not saying it needs an electric, carbon fibre body make-over. but round wheels...

Well, I don't "love" indie gaming, but there is a place for it in my heart. There's good stuff from indie devs. I learned Unity, and somewhere in the back of my mind I think I'll build a mobile UO client if I ever figure out the magic involved in getting it to log into RunUO. But there's also a lot of dollar store trash that gets pumped out to sift through if you want to find those rare gems of genius. But indie gaming is as necessary for gaming as a whole as AAA developers are. I just hate on the game.

Minecraft confuddles me. Terraria is immensely better.

daily quests.. looking for group button and que.. reputation system maybe.. none of this would effect the current game.
there's loads, honestly, just play any modern game, they're all there. suppose you kinda have reputation with the library things.

another thing is like.. and i hate this, personally. but soulbound things. i know what you're gonna say, i hate them too. but. it serves a function - non-tradable rewards, and you could actually implement it in a different way, that doesn't contradict the game world, like, make it a blessing instead of an item. doesn't take much, it's the same thing really, but narratively smoothed over to fit the game.
kinda have it with spell weaving quests - but again sort of not really. vitue system in fact is sort of a reputation system. okay fair enough, they got that one. decay on it hurts tho for people that take breaks.

It might not be fair to have lumped all this into one response, but it's about bedtime here. I enjoy the discussion, and don't want to ignore parts. Account-binding hurts trading, but it's necessary to curb drowning the economy in 'free' rewards. I don't think Demise needs this, as there isn't much of an economy to drown in items. I see some fluctuation in vet rewards and I like that. Making things bound to one's account removes them from that economy, and I see that as a bad thing. More mechanics to facilitate trading would be better. I am vaguely aware WoW had some sort of sales hub ingame; UO would have done very well to have something like the Demise vendor search to be built into its interface. Sort through for the items you want, then have a little arrow over your head tell you which direction that vendor is until you cancel it. Low hanging fruit from my level of coding ability. Maybe no one thought of it, or maybe no one at EA would pay someone to build it.

UO has been multiple games over the years. All of them lovable to some group. I think the best thing a developer could do with the game is to incorporate a space for each and let players pick and choose, rather than forcing them to go to the free shards. It would have been more efficient than trying to make game events happen and shape the shards without allowing the event to continue in some capacity. You burnt your content and all that's left is the playing field, EA. The things you mention here, some are great ideas, some would be abused to monetize the game, and some of it is a necessary evil to compete in today's gaming environment. Or, they can continue sucking quarters from the dingy laundromat. It's working.

It's a pipe dream for me to even think I could be involved in. The irony is that I could handle doing so many things, but time isn't unlimited (unless I'm typing in a forum apparently). I don't think I'll find a game dev that wants to pay me what fortune 25 companies pay to have their diaper and shampoo lines make more products & faster.

[Calvin]

problem with WoW was just that publishers would only sanction games that copied the model :/

they think in terms of "show us it has worked before and we will invest".
but that's not how games work.

"I would presume there are vast areas you've long moved on from. The "content" is all in grinding spots, peerless/champ spawns and Ilshenar if I'm not mistaken. No one is walling in the old bone knight room under Dagger Isle for healing and swordsmanship gains anymore. No one is farming balrons in Hythloth, because the spawn rates are higher in Ilshenar and everyone wants paragon chests. Vast areas in Malas are just empty and the only foot traffic is people looking for IDOCs."

totally beat your own argument at the end there
we do go back to those places, for things like idoc hunting, or the scavenger/easter egg hunts, or mining, or lumbering, or house placing, or for shops that have been made there, or player build villages, etc. that's not like wow at all, you will literally NEVER go back to a lower level area once you've completed it.

the fps stuff, yea. i kinda just class all ID's games as the same game these days lol. wolf > doom > quake, it's all the same thing really.

the MUD stuff.. meh. it was different in them days, the games industry wasn't an industry.. there wasn't much scope for different genres and things.. i just think the grouping is a bit too loose. tho you'd end up with like 1 game in each catagory if you tightened it up lol

jesus christ, i was just thinking Zork, and scrolling up to continue reading, i skim read "Zork" lol. are you like secretly me when im drunk or something?

"Last time I did this I just checked out and didn't come back for like 3-4 years, but the game was still here waiting on me,"

game will always be here waiting for ya
that's the beauty of it. i think everyone is kinda in a similar boat tho when you say about not knowing the purpose of it. you make your own purpose though.. again this is where UO is different to most games. you are 100% correct in saying it's more of a platform than a game, erm.. yeah there's not much to disagree with here really, just to say players and GMs should use the platform to make content, tell stories, etc.

"Always amazed me how premium housing was in a virtual world."
muh sandstone patio in compassion desert on Europa <3
i sold it for like 10x the gold i'd ever had in the game lol

"Hell, I ragequit so many times, broke a keyboard, punched a monitor, I hated to lag out and lose stuff."
i put a hole in the wall when my mum unplugged my internet one time
lost my silver hally of power tho! i mean c'mon!

"The original intent to have animals breed and multiply and therefore punish players who culled to herds too much, was a non-starter."
yeah, most of the stuff in games is smoke and mirrors, so what you think is happening, isn't really. my mate did games programming and wrote his disertation on making a neural network for ai in rpg games. so like you say, the shopkeepers would get hungry and go to the tavern, or close up for lunch, etc. it was weird to me, cos in design they teach you the opposite; so immitate those things without actually doing them. it's just way more practical. like "does the room exist if i leave it", with games it's like, not really, 100% optimised, the game does not draw things that you cant see, in reality - to an extent. it loads the levels, or the instance, more for speed when you're playing it than anything else - you are a camera in a persistent world, but that persistant world stops at the level boundry. notice UO is not like that
it's a tough call to make though, because a lot of that is purely technical limitations.

"WoW; they effectively never competed with UO because WoW was next-gen tech. UO never did figure out how to evolve their GUI."
yeah but that was the fad of the time. we're not living in a world of "when's the next graphical beast coming out" anymore.

ya know, thinkin about it... that's possibly the problem as well; i remember back in the day i would go on chat rooms and stuff, and just meet people to talk to.. like people used to do the cyber thing on UO lol (not me), but all im saying is why is that not a thing now, is it cos we got older, or is it because the world moved on from internetional connections being a novelty? maybe we just need younger players? they play like VR chat and stuff, that's just chat rooms..

" In a game sense, there is no way running UO on a phone the way it is designed is even playable. Unless one is a masochist."
lol yea, true. but you dont get much that's any good on a mobile. frankly PUBG amazed me.

" A minimalist pack for lightweight loads, larger pack of high res for better graphics on tablets, options for theming gumps."
naah. as i say i think UO's engine is fine. if you wanna improve the interface, you could do that, but it'd be with things like.. simplified commands. so instead of walking to the bank, you just click "bank", and it walks to it using some path finding.

"Because if you miss a day, you lose your streak"
problem is just the streak, not the daily cap.

"old Doom and I learned I'm not at all able to play an FPS without a mouse anymore."
not sure if it's still active, but there was a modern version called SkullTag that had mouse look. you can turn it on in Quake 1 as well if you put +mlook in the console.

"UOSteam is a double-edged sword. It is the only reason player run servers like this are still around, so people get their methadone drip of RNG drops, and perhaps a challenge to write scripts for nerds like me."
dont agree
UOS is a monumental thing that happened on the platform, and it took the whole world in a certain direction. but that's all.
UO is like the planet earth like people say "save the planet", you're not really saving the planet, you're saving the habitability of the planet for your species. the planet will be here regardless, and new forms of life will grow on it.

"But I know it's not a growing number over time"
it's not a decreasing number either, it's a fluctuating number.

"UO as it is can't last forever."
you say that like it has to innovate, but 90% of the time people are asking for old era servers lol
it is what it is, and it is good. do you get bored of like... i dunno, bread?
"this bread stuff is good, but it's not innovating, it'll never last forever"

"Dailies are not a core thing, but they're inevitable in modern MMO, much like loot crates and IAPs in mobile games."
mmh... not like loot crates and IAPs. those are pay to win monetization based on gambling..
i suppose you could argue it's a work based economy, and letting people for example buy a skillball, sell it, then buy what they need instead of grinding for it; is the same. but that is the monetization of free to play games. making that gambling with the loot crates is brutal. but it's kinda fair to say if one person has time, and another has money instead because they work hard, they can both still play. IAP/micropayments are another harsh way to just make people spend more than they intend to.
monetization isn't bad, but those are kinda a step beyond that, getting into exploitation.

"I'd do better using my gaming PC to mine bitcoin than risk getting jailed for mining ingots."
lol that is a weirdly apt comparison. bearing in mind that bitcoin mining is used to maintain the darkweb; would you still do it if they made bitcoin mining illegal?

"You believe AFK scripting messes up the game because anyone can AFK gain a ton of wealth. I believe these levels of wealth, being necessary to equip a character with the basics to do most of what people actually do on here, would be absolutely unattainable to any new player, and the game would eventually die out. I think that for this reason, AFK/semi-AFK macroing is the only reason a shard like Demise has an economy."
well you're supposed to spend the money if you dont have the time.. it's not really a problem though, you can make a full character and gear it up to like 90% effectiveness, very easily. getting that last 10% is what takes the grind, which is fine. that effectively solves the problem. the economy would adjust, like, ingots might cost a lot more, gold might be worth more, not sure how it would balance out, but it would.

"It doesn't cost millions to make a game. That's just some bean counter's idea of how to churn an optimized pile of money out of an investment. It's as formula driven as making pop music, and has about all the heart:"
kinda cynical
you're right about the pop music, cos people use cheap stereos now, and a lot of modern pop music isn't wrote by the artist themselves, the "artist" is only a part of a professionally constructed entity.. thank people like Simon Cowell for that.
in a way this is the AAA industry. nowadays. but not in like 2000-2010, in them days it was pitches to publishers from developers or studios.

tho to play devils advocate in kind
“There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.

There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination
they produce more hues than can ever been seen.

There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of
them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted.”
- Sun Tzu


There are so many good indie titles i wouldn't even know where to start..
AAA stuff is kinda trash these days. oh great, Fifa 9000 with new player names. CoD 6,000,000 with new ways to get money out of you. pfft.

"removes them from that economy, and I see that as a bad thing."
it's not for removing things from the economy, it's for adding things without impacting the economy.

"I am vaguely aware WoW had some sort of sales hub ingame; UO would have done very well to have something like the Demise vendor search to be built into its interface"
have to admit the auction house was quite a big improvement.. but it's not for UO.
what you're not appreciating, is that when the guy was making that vendor search website - that is actually UO gameplay. because UO is just the platform, to allow you, to come up with, and make things like that.

"It's a pipe dream for me to even think I could be involved in. The irony is that I could handle doing so many things, but time isn't unlimited"
*looks at his watch*
how long until you retire?

[Arden]

@cal

tldr

[Calvin]

*note to self*
how to avoid Arden trolling your posts: make them longer than his attention span.

[The Silvertiger]

*note to self*
how to avoid Arden trolling your posts: make them longer than his attention span.

Add another note:

how to avoid people reading your posts: make them longer than their attention span.


Most people don't have long attention spans. That's why commercials are so short.

[Bama]

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[Calvin]

[Calvin]

UO would have done very well to have something like the Demise vendor search to be built into its interface"

btw im not complaining at all cos it's pretty awesome.

but pretty sure it's not me that said that

[Bama]

UO would have done very well to have something like the Demise vendor search to be built into its interface. Sort through for the items you want, then have a little arrow over your head tell you which direction that vendor is until you cancel it. Low hanging fruit from my level of coding ability. Maybe no one thought of it, or maybe no one at EA would pay someone to build it.

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[Bama]

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but pretty sure it's not me that said that

[Calvin]

hehe easy mistake to make tho, we are both wafflers

[Calvin]

how about a full screen map at the push of a button?

you can even leave in the requirements that you have a map and sextant in your pack to open it

it is a bit arrogant and presumptuous for me to say this - but when they modernized UO, they did it wrong.