f13.net

Raph Koster (https://twitter.com/raphkoster) decided to take questions about Ultima Online (which I am sorry I never played) for its 20th birthday.

The first one: how did UO push the genre forward? Raph answered in 4900 words. (https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/09/28/ultima-onlines-influence/)


On to question 2.

man, I have some questions but theyre all really fucking mean

But i like Raph and liked SWG so he gets a pass.

Ask away, :) Most of the answers to the mean questions are going to be "inexperience" "stubbornness" "money" and "time."

In less or more than 1,000 words?   :drill:

Most of the questions would be about the continued employment of half the cabal over there.  :oh_i_see:

I can still hear the music when that chest opened up in Beta. And the failure to connect messages that hurt every time.

As Raph stated, Dye tubs were really a huge part of the making the game great. It seems so simple, but that freedom to stand out and personalize your avatar was great. I had a friend that spend a ton of time on his outfits, housing decorations, etc. I personally was more of a function over fashion type, and would typically wear things I found off monsters or other players I killed. I saw my house as a place to pile up loot, and maybe gather up for an adventure.

I remember a thief guild on Atlantic, back in beta (I think) that went by the name "Trinsic Borrowers". They were dressed in all yellow, when you left Trinsic they would surround you so you would run out of stamina from pushing by them....and then rob you blind.

Recall runes. This was everything. Great runehouses providing a hotbed for PvP as well as commercial venues. Later they introduced runebooks, blessed so that you wouldn't lose your locations upon death, but early on I remember selling runebags with a stack of runes to great hunting sites. It was a constant seller - people would die in the dungeons from the PKs and they would need runes again. Or were just too lazy to mark their own from the runehouses. I sold bags of mage shop runes as well.

Housing. The freedom of it all. And the IDOCs. Oh, the IDOCs. With housing in UO, you could click on a sign and it would tell you the status of the building. Housing needed to be refreshed within like 3 or 4 weeks, and there were levels it would display when clicking on the sign. "Like New", "Slightly Worn", "Fairly Worn", "Greatly Worn", and IDOC: "In Danger of collapsing". These houses were going to fall within like 2 days, so any PvP guilds worth anything would make an appearance to claim the house's loot for their own. Individuals would show up to try and grab a chest and escape with the loot. Their were guilds devoted to checking all the houses on the shard, and working together to fight for and capture as much loot as possible. With all sorts of dirty tricks from murder, to monster luring/releasing. There were tricks to it, you could open gateways that allowed you to go through to any location you wanted...even if you were holding a giant heavy chest you could go through by macroing a macro to double click the gate. Many times fights would erupt before the house ever fell, with murders occuring and after 5 murders you became freely attackable and RED hued - no longer allowed to go in towns). The house would fall and all hell would break loose. Talk about an adrenaline rush!!! Chaos, controlled chaos if you were good, and escaping with loot and your life if you were better.

I miss that feeling of seeing reds appear in a dungeon I was in. Most the time, you could escape no problem. Smart players had a recall macro and a rune always handy. Sure, it disrupted your day...but you felt alive. You just had to be prepared mentally, and smart - take a minute to bank your gold, you can do it in 20 seconds. Sometimes, you could even manage to fight them, and even more rarely get the best of them...take their heads...and turn them in triumphantly for a small bounty....and more importantly, their loot. Playing at one time as an Anti-PK guild, we would occasionally catch them off guard with reinforcements at the ready. I'd say in the end, the bad guys won more often than not. But I got my licks in. I wasn't a wolf, but I wasn't a sheep either. It would be much later in my UO life that I would be the wolf.

I enjoyed faction PvP as well. Me and my cousin and sometimes another friend, we were on Council of Mages...the smallest faction on Atlantic. But we were smart. We had identical runebooks (one tile apart at all spots)...we knew how to flank popular spots and pick off stragglers and escape with our silver and points. 3 guys with experience (and on voice) could take on 6 guys in this game. You just had to be smart, and skilled obviously. There is no PvP in any game that matches up to what UO had. Period. Hell, I even still enjoyed it about a year ago on a freeshard.

I remember macroing at night, though against the rules....everyone would do it. We had a guild tower where I would always macro on the roof. Casting mage spells over and over for gains, from reagents I purchased from my time in the dungeons. I remember the pride I had when I finally because a Grandmaster Mage. I killed enough monsters to become Lord , and then on my paperdoll it displayed the Grandmaster Mage status.

And as always I have to speak of David Killmore. The first Red that ever PKed me. I was south of trinsic, farming some weak orc spawn, when his name came up. I didn't know what Corp Por meant. All I know was my screen went grey. And I was speaking OoooOoOooOO . I vowed to have my revenge on him, though I never saw him again. 20 Years later I remember this like it was yesterday. So many strong memories this game created, and for that I thank you again for your part in it, Raph.

So, in hindsight, is there any system you would have left out/modified/or instated early on in UO?

and #2, Trammel...Any thoughts? lol

Best pvp thief gameplay ever. Not the TB nonsense, but real roleplayed, indepth stuff. My favorite targets were pk guilds, especially if there were battles in dungeon. Chaos from guys fighting each other, regular players, and monsters. Sneaking and hiding like crazy and not enough people took the detect hidden skill.

Always satisfying pursuing a mark for days and finally getting the house keys when they slip up.

I initially played a lot as a rp paladin type, but the amount of jackassery in the game dictated being a jackass...to the jackasses. Felt better than allowing them to dictate the game on their terms ('anti-pk'), and just massively fucking with them while still enjoying rp and interesting gameplay.

One scheme I had going for a while involved pretending to be an npc on the pirate island. Just so much weird and creative stuff you could get into.

We offered players a Camelot. We immediately discovered players wanted to smear shit all over the walls, create giant penises out of whatever was available, rape, rob and kill their fellow players and anything else not given invulnerability while making the teabag emote over their corpses and generally be utter and complete cunts. So we dialed it back a little.

Nothing worse than a skilled thief. Fuck you guys.  :why_so_serious:

Will there be charts appearing in this thread at some point?

Lots! A lot of them around PvP.

Townstones, like guildstones but for player towns, with the ability to add a guard region, would have done a lot, in hindsight... and they kept slipping down the priority ladder. Not giving up on quests. Not giving up on the ecology, actually. Different allocation of skill points so that not every skill was "the same size." Obviously, we needed more space for housing.

If you summon SB with that shit I am going to be quite cross with you.

Do your questions involve twitch combat and how all the changes were for the better? :grin:

Ouch.

I still remember UO with very mixed emotions. I loved a lot of the simulation aspects it had and if I'd been an online RPer back then I'd probably have even better memories. However, I, and everyone I knew who played, quit because of the rampant PK issues. It got so bad that we were genuinely surprised if we were able to leave town and not get ganked within half an hour or less. (Many times it felt like I got ganked within mere minutes of crossing that border.)

If I fault you guys for anything, it's being naive about player psychology and not realizing what would happen with that total freedom.

UO was a litle too early for me, but I'm curious anyway.  So here's a question.

In my experience, the internet has changed over the years.  In some way only a little, in some ways quite a lot.

How do you think making something like UO would go today?  Anything in particular you would change, not because of any gameplay ideal but because of a different cultural ecology around the game?

Back then, all the player types had to live in one game, because there only WAS one game of that size.

Now, if you get a diverse playerbase, it's by choice. I think you can still support diverse playerbases, but these days the audience is so large that niches can sustain huge games for loooooooooooong periods of time.

I'd absolutely do much much more stringent stuff around playerkilling.

Like what ?

Making the world at least 100x bigger would have helped, for a start. If there were multiple good farming/hunting areas, PKs couldn't cover them all 24/7. There was really no 'wilderness'. Randomizing spawns would make it harder for them to target a rich area as well. Dungeons would still be lethal though. Maybe do the E:D solo/group/open model?

Hahahaha.

100x bigger. That would be a map of 1600 sq km. In 1997? I mean, Daggerfall did stuff at that scale, but it was all random. There would have been no way to ship UO at that size.

FWIW, the map was originally built for a population 100x SMALLER. That likely would also have made the game a lot friendlier...

So what your saying is that you should have enforced strict population limits and queues?   :grin:

I was thinking more along the lines of how to design a reboot.

You guys hit something that keeps getting missed when people speak about PK, most games aren't big enough for the PK-rules they employ. Its much worse in themeparks that have an obvious path of progression which means high-level characters can camp one spot and everyone have to go through that spot to reach level-cap.

Yes, this.

Ah, for a reboot, yes, no question, much bigger map. Also, ability for towns to be founded and declare their own PK rules and ban lists and blocks and the like. Dundee tried that out on his gray shard and it worked pretty well even at UO scale. I'd also revive the ecology stuff, we should easily have the CPU to model it properly now and achieve homeostasis, the science has progressed a lot.

That said, for the next one if I ever get to make it, I was thinking cartoony sci fi, with the ability to colonize planets. They start out wild including PK (frontier), and once you get the colony founded, you can set the planetary laws that remotely disable blasters. So each colony gets to decide. But each colony is only of moderate size -- probably 250 concurrent. But they are all linked into one seamless universe. And each planet has a unique map, unique resources, etc. Colonies can build up to be megalopolises, or not, as they choose. Can try to build little multiplanet empires, even.

Sinistar-style space combat in between. Retro arcadey for most systems. Smash TV for combat. Maybe even run in a browser. But full on MMO systems for social play, economics, space farming, etc. Maybe puzzle minigames for maintaining power plants and other stuff.

Anyone interested in something like that?

If you are working on it, I will always give it a shot.

Absolutely.  Maybe not the cartoon bit, but this would be awesome.

this is very close to a game I've had in my head for years except without the smash tv combat because that combat is bad

and it wouldn't look like a cartoon because that would also be bad

What schild said.

I'd prefer Moba or ARPG controls.

I'd play it, especially if there's a way to play as a retired adventurer who merely trades or explores or collects things or whatever, or if I can stand in one place and rain down nukes.

I have no idea what smash TV combat is. If it depends on youthful reaction responses, I'll pass.

smash tv is the original 4/8way shooter

it's very bad and very overrated through sunglasses of urza

here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AapB7dW3HA

Robotron: 2084 was the original twin stick shooter.

my bad it was the same guy and theyre both hilariously overrated and feature bad gameplay

anyway smash tv was basically running man if it had a stroke that left it incapcitated and no sane person would make an mmog with that as the pvp

The idea sounds great Raph (well, except basing any sort of Combat off Smash TV  :awesome_for_real:).  Go for it, the MMO scene needs something slightly original at this point.

It's an old idea, been kicking around for some time actually.

And fine, not Smash TV per se. The point was "light easy to get into" in general, so think "light fun combat" rather than ponderous.

I want Mount and Blade combat.

I remember enjoying the shit outta some smash TV, y'all some haters. Not saying I would want it in my MMO, but I have fond memories of that game spending hours mindlessly fighting off the hordes.

That's because kids will play anything.

Smash tv was always open. Kids didn't play smash tv.

It was an awesome game at its time, and today.  Unforgiving, but awesome.  My kids and I play it sometimes.

"BIG MONEY.  BIG PRIZES...I LOVE IT!!!"

It was a difficult game, as many Williams games were, as Cheddar mentioned above.

Edit: a

Yeah, that was the very first arcade machine I learned to avoid as a child because it destroyed my limited quarter ration.

I was fine at Smash TV. Time Traveler can eat every dick though.

LOL, oh god, I had forgotten about that game till you posted that.  I remember deeply wanting to play it every time I went to the mall in the city near where I grew up, but never got to.  This was because they were charging something rediculous like a couple dollars a play in the 90's, and I grew up a poor black redneck child.

I was thinking Time Pilot, when you all were talking about Time Traveler and we would spend some time off from deployments spending quarters at the laundry mat on Smash TV. Great fun.

So Raph, who made J. Wilson's? I know it was a jab at the PC Gamers editor that called UO "Coaster of the Year" but was it suggested from a lower rank and LB gave the go ahead? What was the deal with Green Acres, Dungeon Doom (before the remodel), and how could making black dye from coal actually hack your servers/client?

http://spla.sh/bp/meet_gypsy_files/bone4.htm

http://www.imanewbie.com/main/mainframes.html

And the comics that came from the game, was an awesome ride, even it was crazy.

I think it came from Starr. I don't remember who actually made them.


The map was a rectangle. It didn't fill the rectangle, because we needed dungeon space. Dungeons were actually on the surface of the map, and you teleported to them. There weren't so many dungeons that the strip on the side was filled up. The open space got called Green Acres. Inevitably, it got used -- GMs built jails there, people managed to hackl their way to it, some folks marked recall runes there, etc. Not sure what else there is to say.


Drawing a blank on this.


If you mean true black dye, it's because tinting colors actually looked up into an index of palettes -- they weren't single colors, but palettes of colors, color ramps. If you managed to pick an index that was undefined, you got back no color at all for every slot in the palette. The result, true black with no highlights or shadows.

What's holding you back?

I would guess "money" and "the market is utterly different now".

Balls.

Yes. I want to fly to the player-corp-run multi-planet megalopolis in my tweaked spaceship with something exotic that grew on my farm, travel downtown and do a black market deal in a back alley, but they have a chance of policing me.

Why the fuck did you link imanewbie again ???

So many hours lost reading and re-reading.