Modern MMOs are theme parks where everyone gets the same ride (with pay per win). UO was a living world where your role emerged from what you chose to do, not from a quest marker telling you where to go next.
Sort of. They disabled big parts of the "real economy" in beta. Turned out that players didn't like it that NPC shopkeepers kept standard working hours and didn't want to buy their 5000 skullcaps from their skill grinding.
Likewise they even more quickly got rid of the real ecology feature, both because it was computationally intensive but also because players would strip mine the ecology.
Players didn't buy those 5000 junk skullcaps either. They wanted stuff that was actually valuable, which meant those practice items were recycled or thrown in the trash.
I remember when the UO team added trash barrels and created the "Clean up Brittania" event. The game's servers were struggling to deal with large numbers of these junk objects that people littered on the ground so the devs decided to enlist the players' help cleaning it up, just like a real-life public park cleanup project! Players got rewarded special items based on the amount of junk they cleaned up.
But that's what I meant by "sort of", as it wasn't the pure simulation that was originally promised. Another example was that all the early dupe bugs created a real need for serious gold sinks that weren't planned into the original design.
Even WoW had a player economy via the auction house, and that's about as dumbed down as an MMO gets. Though I agree that the evolution of the player run markets, plus the eventual vendor support added by DD & crew were cool.
I've experienced it first hand, but I can't grasp why it worked well like it did.
Also there was a whole niche industry of collecting non-droppable items which spawned in the game world but were not fixed on the map (we think they were added post map creation), so they could be "pick pocketed" off the surfaces they were on and taken back to your home every wipe. There was a huge rush after servers came back on after a wipe for folks to go find the most rare items to stock up their towers and keeps.
The bugs were part of the game culture. The first time that you learned that items in the bottom right corner of your first house -- because they could be stolen through a bug even if your house was locked -- was something everyone jointly went through.
UO also had maybe the closest thing to a true player economy than any game. There was a legitimate path to making money (and having fun) to just mining ore and selling ingots. You would sell your iron bars in an unattended vendor to other players at your own price. Those bars would get bought by a blacksmith player to produce armor that they sold to other players... who would buy it to go adventuring in the dungeons.
I'd go a step further, not just equally compelling, but it'd be interesting to see some games, particularly RPGs, where combat is effectively optional. One of many ways to level up your character and complete the objectives of the game.
There aren't many out there where you could have a complete pacifist playthrough, for example, and if there is, you usually still have to resort to theft, or use of paralyze & calm spells.
In most RPGs your professions (farming, herbalism, mining, etc.) are just secondary skills to help you progress in combat, and all the good stuff comes from killing enemies.
Eve Online accomplished something a little more combat-focused, but similarly diverse in playstyle, mostly by dint of having a single large persistent world-shard with minimal functional instancing.
What do you mean by this?
But to answer your question, there are three different clusters but contradictory sets of answers. And this was the problem.
1) It was a sandbox game developed with a focus on recreate a living world. A real ecology, real economy, skill based character system instead of classes where your skills tracked what you actually did, a focus on all sorts of roles - part of the original pitch was players could be the town blacksmith or whatever. I knew someone who spent several months playing an interior decorator for instance. Some people, such as myself, were attracted to this.
2) The same freedoms from #1 attracted PvP style gamers, especially from the then nascent FPS style games. Griefing, rampant slaughter, that sort of thing.
3) It also attracted PvE players who weren't at all interested in a realistic world and demanded the sort of conveniences we see in modern MMOs: mobs pinned to locations, predictable drops, predictable quest lines, instancing, optional PVP, etc.
You'll note that most of the people you see reminiscing online are from groups #1 and #2. Group #3 by and large hated the game and left as soon as they could. And your typical group #1 player eventually got annoyed at group #2 and just left altogether.
It's a hard problem to recreate UO because of this tension. Without allowing group #2 to exist you don't have the same environment. But by allowing group #2 to exist, they'll eventually take over and chase away everyone else.
At the end of the day, UO was a game that was simply a moment in time that can never be recreated. Too much of what made it great was due to the fact that it was a new thing.
UO forced many different types of players to coexist in the same world that simply do not mix anymore. You had peaceful dungeon crawlers and craftsmen coexisting alongside killers, rapists, thieves (wild that stealing items from other players inventory was actually a thing, probably unheard of in today’s MMOs).
The friction between these different types of players is where the magic happened, it’s what created real conflict and higher stakes in the world. When you stepped out of your house, there was always a risk that killers could be lurking ready to murder you and loot your house dry. And if you forget to lock the door, someone passing by will clean your house out for anything valuable.
In a way, old school UO was a true Middle Ages type MMO, everything since then has only grown more civilized, more enshittified. People don’t want to pay for a world that doesn’t give a shit if they have a bad experience. The truth is though there was no “bad experience”, it was all just an experience.
The defense to this was to carry dozens upon dozens of nested bags, because each bag opening could trip the pick pocket detection.
Also the defense to your home was to literally circle it in tents/buildings creating an empty courtyard that you could only teleport into with a rune you kept safely in your bank box. There were some warping bugs that would allow you into a courtyard though, or even through the front door (circle of visibility bug, as well as floor tile warping).
I mean there absolutely were bad experiences. Griefing drove lots of players away, which is why they implemented Trammel.
You want enough friction to generate interesting interactions, you don't want so much freedom that the worst exploiters start to crowd out every honest player, because then, just like in a rundown lawless neighborhood, you're getting a lesson in the broken window theory and you're only left with the scammers.
I think the barrier to entry is the equivalent of several complete, fun, balanced single player games operating together in balanced harmony. Not impossible, but highly improbable.
The whole point of the game was to live in this fantasy world, not beat it. There were no quests. No antagonist. Just good and evil and everyone in between. For once I wish a studio would take this to heart and build something like that again. Minecraft exploded due to this sandbox nature. However, you still got to give players a shovel and a bucket.
I loved Everquest and World of Warcraft but those didn't feel "raw" enough for me.
The Realm is my dark horse submission for best MMO. (Yea, yea, yeah Meridian 59 and Underlight too)
I think this changed during the Mondrian era but in my favorite era, SA/Renaissance, those were the baddies that made you run.
Lich King as well.
It sounds like a fan-driven reboot of this game has a fairly decent following, in a very similar way to what UO experiences? It feels like there is still player desire to have mundane sorts of immersive RPG experiences in this way.
I played on the JP/KR asian servers in a PK/APK/PVP guild so maybe it was just my bubble but it was pretty common to see players with 7 skills maxed out. If I remember correctly
- sparring
- swordsman or fencing
- magic
- magic resistance
I don't remember the rest. It's not quick or easy like modern games, but we would regularly power level each other's alts and it took maybe 2 weeks to max out all 7 skills? We had a bear trapped in the guild house so we could power level wrestling and other combat skills.
It was a sad day when UO introduced Trammel.
Haven't put any time in MMORPGs for 15 years, but aren't there still "exclusive" guilds that do things regular players can only aspire to?
That game was my life. It's how I learned how to code among many other skills.
This is honestly the best way I have ever heard this described! It really is that 'end of the road' feeling that I get, once I have experienced a large chunk of the game loop, that has me disconnect from games and feel hollow.
This is probably why I keep going back to huge modpacks for Minecraft with a friend. It is so open and expansive, with so much to do, that you never really feel like it's the end... You just feel like you have had your fill, until next time.
I personally only got to watch my older brother play UO, and then he brought me into the launch of WoW which was a pivotal experience. But the end game always felt like it falls flat.
In an odd sort of way I suspect UO would have been better off had it come out a year or two earlier. It'd not have been remotely as popular, but wouldn't have attracted such a large crowd. And because they drew from a much larger crowd than the intended audience there were a lot of people who got disgruntled. But it makes sense because the game was literally not designed with their desires in mind.
>It's very different from modern games, where each player looks like the fantasy version of a Marvel super hero
But isn't this true for most games?
>UO was the only game that I've ever played where you had "commoner" players. A lot of players failed to scale up, or to obtain top notch equipment.
I guess the main example I'm thinking of is Path of Exile. There is such a massive difference between your average player and the top tier. Or even not the top tier but enthusiasts.
I mean almost by definition most people wont have top notch equipment?