Nope. UO was one of a kind. What made it special is the way it brought together people with many different play styles and allowed them to form their own communities which were self-policed.

Every multiplayer game since UO has tried to learn lessons from it by policing the players centrally, through the limitation of player interaction. The result is that all of the different play styles have gone their separate ways to games which cater specifically to them.

This phenomenon mirrors the filter bubble phenomenon that resulted from search engines and social media recommendation engines giving people more of what they want.

Edit: for examples of the games that cater to the play styles I’m referring to, look at Fortnite, League of Legends, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Diablo 3... When I look at this list it’s rather shocking to me that one game could house all these diverse play styles. The magic of it was that it worked, for a time, until more specialized games came along and started drawing away the player base. Then EA brought in Trammel and split the player base which was the beginning of the end.

Disclaimer: I don't play massively multiplayer online games, only read about them. But isn't this precisely the selling point of EVE Online? Self-policed, no rules, no backstory, the entire universe, its rules and the emergent behavior that results is 100% in the hands of players?

A majority of the player base lives out of NPC-controlled space. Originally, this was intended as the 'safe' tutorial space, where players would quickly want to leave to go for the more lucrative but more dangerous parts of space where everything is indeed player controlled.

In the earlier years, you could easily make a week worth of 'hi-sec' grinding by spending half an hour in 'null-sec'. You would indeed risk losing that half hour of work when trying to haul it back to some market, but the pay would make it worth it many times over.

However, as the years progressed, the developer seemed to realized that the majority of the players simply did not like to leave the NPC-policed space, and started catering to those. (Another factor is that jump-capable ships made hauling things back to high-sec markets low risk, which had a huge impact on prices of null-sec-only goods.)

A large amount of content has been added to the 'hi-security' parts, giving less and less incentives for players to leave for 'null-security' space. The player-generated content in null-sec is what makes EVE appear in the news and attract new players, but the reality is that the majority is not directly involved with that part of the game.

(In fairness, the universe and markets are still unified, so both those worlds still impact each other. But for many players that impact will be limited by price changes and getting blown at 'Burn Jita'.)

It wasn't all your stuff. The bulk of your assets would be in your bank account or, if you were wealthier, in your house. The only stuff you would take out into the wilderness or into a dungeon is whatever you needed for that particular trip. So your losses would be limited to whatever you brought with you, plus whatever loot you had accrued while hunting or mining or whatever.

So yeah if you were only playing for 20 minutes a day and you were constantly dying, I understand why it would be bewildering and upsetting. But if you were actually playing for 5+ hours a day because you were 12 or whatever, it was just part of the fun.

Haha, agreed. If you are 12 it's no big deal. I wonder what's the target audience and age for current MMO games.

EVE definitely does support different play styles, I just don't think it's as many as UO.

I feel weird about games like UO. I obviously won't play it now, and for whatever reason I didn't play it in its day, and now I feel I missed an important milestone in gaming history. I'm familiar with it only by reading about it. EVE Online is different: I know it exists, I know it has some interesting emergent properties, but I don't feel I missed anything by not being a part of its community.

It was a magical time and place, but there will be more magical times and places in the future. Once VR gets good enough, we may get a similar kind of magical time and place for the first couple years there also.

WoW was the game I had always wanted. I found it better than UO because it had the interactivity and sophistication I had dreamed about.

That came with a downside. I like to describe WoW in these terms:

"So you like ice cream right? Here: go eat this truck full. Go on. You said you liked ice cream, go do it. /points gun at my head/ ... EAT."

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Wasn't WoW just a theme park MMO? You walk around alone or with friends, killing camps of monsters and completing fetch quests?

UO had ridiculous levels of interactivity. You could go into the forest, chop some wood, turn the wood into bows and arrow shafts. Kill a chicken and butcher it for meat and feathers. Use some wood to build a fire and cook the meat. Use the feathers to fletch your arrows.

Now you're got a bow and arrow. Hunt a deer and butcher it for a large amount of meat and hides. Take the hides back to your house and tan them to make leather. Tailor the leather into leather armour with your character's name on it! Dye the leather a unique colour and put it for sale on your vendor NPC.

Come back another day and find other players shopping for leather armour in your store! Chat with them and make friends. Go on an adventure together. Build and design a new house to live in together.

UO was Minecraft before Minecraft. Servers had thousands of players and there was a ridiculous amount of interactivity between players and the environment.

With that said, FF14 is still a theme-park MMO in every other way, but the crafting and housing systems are amazing.

Try playing WoW. Just about everything you described in is in WoW. The crafting system is crazy.

That said, the big difference is that crafting in WoW at launch, and for many years thereafter, was very much an adjunct to the primary game of combat. You cannot level up in WoW without combat.

In UO, combat was not a requirement. You could play the entire time, and become rich and powerful, just as a tailor, or whatever.

Early on in WoW development, I was one of 2 people in the company that played Ultima Online. And I was going to interview in depth about the way I played it. I guess my play style wasn't what they were looking for and they went in the direction of being combat focused like WarCraft.

But that discerning nature is what made the game (UO) what is was. It was very much an organic world. I had 4 different characters in UO across 2 shards and sometimes 3 or 4 shards. And each play experience was different.

I found one play style surprisingly effective. That being my thief character. Because noone leveled up their thieves. They mainly just stole scraps in mainland towns. Players were very cautions in these large places and called out "guards!" too often. And there was a lot of competition with low level thieves looking for quick wins. So I decided to level up my thief character with simple mage abilities & teleport to Occlo to see whats there. There I found a group of thieves and they welcomed me into their guild. And together we devised a plan to see if we could start stealing from all the mages that would congregate. Occlo was a mage hot spot because they would feel safe from thieves because it was an Island. We became a notorious thieving guild of 5 on the island. And called ourselves 5FD. We would literally surround one mage, basically lasso them into one corner of the super packed mage shop and steal their on-hand weapons as they packed their regents. And some mages would make deals with us, so they could shop safely without interference. etc.

Imagine having the ability to craft this kind of play style in any game today.

As an aside, I was reading one of your comments on one of my threads and realized you were the lead designer of UO. Really amazing to meet you here!

All of these houses and shops were customized and decorated to an incredible degree, giving the world a very cozy and lived-in feel. I know Star Wars Galaxies had player-owned housing but from what I remember the interiors of the houses were instanced away from the main world. This totally destroyed immersion. I can't tell you how many times I was playing UO, crafting in my house, when I'd see people outside wander by and step out to chat with them. Incredible stuff!

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uo+house+decorations&t=osx&iax=ima...

Makes perfect sense. I was an Elder in UO (a player character with special powers that advanced the storyline) Or basically; as I realize today, an unpaid intern at Origin. And afterwards QA lead on WOW and I can definitively say UO wasn’t a game. It was an alternate universe. It was transcendent unlike any game and blizzard games included.

It wasn’t the first as there was “Meridian59” which came out before and people were basically divided into 2 camps. After “City of Heroes” and “Dark Age of Camelot” came out, then it (mmo) became a genre.

It's a shame because I feel like the gameplay was kind of already destroyed by the time the servers were relatively stable and bug free, so it feels like it never really lived up to its potential. But during the few hours a day when it actually worked properly, damn.

I also had so much fun on Siege Perilous when it was those color wars with the 4 castles. I can't believe they ever changed that.

FWIW, Raph Koster ran a MUD before he worked on Ultima Online. The original creators of Everquest played MUDs too - Sojourn in particular.

Meridian 59 launched with 250 player capacity. UO launched with around 2800.

Nowadays if you had a game with glitches that allowed people to steal your items outside of intended game mechanics, there would be an uproar on Twitter and punishing 1-star steam reviews. Back then it was infuriating, but part of the atmosphere. The night was dark and full of terrors, so to speak. Also the actual concept of real-estate, with a real house and your own vendors, was really next-level stuff for immersion. Exploits like duping that ruined the economy weren't beneficial to the atmosphere though, and actually broke immersion.

Nostalgia holds up a lot of it though I'm sure. Just like anything else, playing it again now probably wouldn't bring back the same experience.

Although obviously single player, I have to admit I was extremely impressed by Breath of the Wild. It could have benefits from another couple years of polish, but it was extremely fun regardless.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks the engine would make a great MMO :p

The thing about MMOs is that your first great experience is going to be tough to top. Even if I tell you there are 20+ sandbox MMOs that do what UO did, it will never live up to UO for you.

I miss UO. It’s what got me into programming to begin with. I ran a shard with 250 people on at peak times called Sacred. And was GM on Alphanine, and for a short time before it died, Novus Opiate. I got into programming to make my own UO game but ended up just making software.

Overpowered players were really rare (in the golden age, at least). And they were usually very famous, like celebrities. It was very very hard to improve your character's skills. The game wasn't tailored to boost your ego with custom looks and mean-looking armors and weapons - it was what it was, and that usually meant frustration.

At least for me, it was fun and unique. I don't see anything like that in the current generation of blockbuster MMO games.

Those were savage days, where simply being killed and having your body cut up and looted dry was considered acceptable for an MMO. At one point even having someone steal your house key meant they could enter your entire house and loot it dry.

Another thing is the graphics. Yea everyone thinks 3D graphics are cool but 2D graphics allow for imagination to fill in the blanks more. The graphics are less literal, the less detail is shown the more your mind fills in the blanks. Your mind begins to imagine what these characters would look and sound like if they were real people.

Also consider that even the GUI in UO was often in-character, you open a bag it looks like a bag, open a backpack and it looks like a backpack. And items could be dragged anywhere and positioned however you wanted, sometimes causing a mess. Organizing your backpack was like a little mini-game within a game.

Most games these days abandon those kinds of details in favor of grids where you can neatly place items into discrete slots. Convenient, but a lost opportunity for emergent game play.

Also, text appearing above peoples heads when they speak instead of a chat window meant you always kept your focus on the world in front of you and conversations felt natural, it feels more like reading a comic book, as opposed to some instant messenger.

It was an incredibly special time in video game history I’ll always cherish

Piggybacking on this, has anyone made an open world single player RPG better than Ultima 7 yet?

The bad: Unfortunately, while it had a ton of potential, there were lots of issues and eventually it just stopped being as fun. For me dealing with a red was easy, but for new players the learning curve was so steep what ended up happening was roving gangs of reds and gank guilds griefing new players into literally quitting forever. A world that was too open, so didn't feel living, despite the player impact and control. Much later players could build walls on game vital paths and completely block off areas of the world. Basically the freedom of working towards a UO system has a lot of potential weaknesses and the devs at StarVault learned all this the hard way.

The good: some amazing emergent gameplay I have yet to experience anywhere else. A crafting system that should be an inspiration to every game that has crafting. Hidden things, with not everything in a database you can just look up, guilds and people that horded info, and political intrigue and subterfuge. Really fun combat for it's time if you had a good connection. Full loot pvp. A large world that was very fun exploring (there is no in game map, I was one of the people who literally participated in a guild mapping of the continent that is still used at https://www.mortalonlinemap.info/ A large single persistent instance (no sharding).

The devs, recognizing many of the issues stemmed from complications of using UE3, are now working on Mortal Online II in the UE4 engine. I hope it goes well for them but haven't tried it yet. https://www.mortalonline2.com/

EVE and WoW cater to very different play styles (even and especially between each other), so "better MMO" is a loaded question with a diverse number of answers depending on your intended play style and what about an MMO you are looking for.

No.

EVE comes close. In particular, it actually surpasses UO in many ways, like a complete player-based economy. Almost anything you could ever need or want is crafted by players. There are 'loot drops', but ones that are actually better than what players can craft are rare. And are sold in the market.

Similarly to UO, death has consequences. You lose your ship, everything on it, all cargo. There's 'insurance', but it will only pay for the 'market price' of the ship. You yourself may have paid more (but usually not less, otherwise people would build and destroy ships to claim insurance).

EVE also has skills, much like UO. Unlike UO, those are 'trained' over time, not by usage. But there are no 'levels' and for the most part there aren't any ships which are 'better' for any role. An unprepared battleship can be destroyed by a couple of fast moving frigates that cost a tiny fraction of resources and skills to pilot. One that's fitted against small fighters will suck against other battleships, and so on.

Like Ultima Online, movement is very important in combat. In EVE, even more so, due to gun tracking(and how missile explosions work). This is the main reason why the battleship scenario above works.

EVE also has forms of 'housing', as in player made starbases, corporation offices and apparently stations now.

EVE has consumables. Other than laser-based weaponry (mostly Amarr), you have to buy ammo. Like casting spells in UO requires reagents. WoW has very little consumables, and you certainly can cast spells all day long.

It also has a very 'lawless' world. Some systems have no security response at all, others will have delayed response depending on the security rating. Just like UO, if someone really wants to kill you they can, although there may be consequences.

Unlike UO, there are no 'shards'. Everyone is on the same server (or more specific, cluster). Even 'instancing' (used for NPC missions) is part of the universe, you can join the instance if you have the location(or can scan).

So, EVE has very deep and detailed systems, to the point that people used to call it 'spreadsheets in space'. But I can't directly compare it with Ultima Online – mostly because they are quite different games, thematically. One is a fantasy world full with dragons and spells. The other is a very futuristic and highly advanced space game.

WoW... is entertaining. Has amazing and detailed lore (although EVE's is good, it's not even in the same league). Locations can be such an eye candy. Even boring 'collect item' quests can be very entertaining.

Have I mentioned how quests can be entertaining? Because there are some incredible ones.

World of Warcraft also has 'classes'. Which is again a completely different philosophy from either UO or even EVE. Take a Mage. Maybe it will be specialized as a 'frost' mage. No matter, two frost mages at the same level will have the exact same skills and spells. Equipment may change, but it is not like they will have a bow, they will just have different stats.

But WoW suffers from a very simplistic gameplay. You have 'levels' – which will immediately set it apart from Ultima Online. You have also lots of skills. Using them effectively and timing them is important, but in the end it's just about selecting a target and pressing a few function keys(this is actually something that it has in common with EVE, except for the role of movement and position in EVE).

Death is essentially meaningless in WoW. You don't lose any items. You may have to pay repair, but that's it. Compare to UO: you drop everything you are carrying – you can try to get it back, but someone (or something) may get to your corpse before then. Or EVE, you lose your ship, items, equipment and even skills if you can't GTFO with your pod and forgot to update your clone. PVP in either UO or EVE is much more of an experience than WoW. And in either game you won't necessarily have a level 100 one-shotting a level 10 character.

Ok, this is already too long, but I could contrast even further. But WoW is more popular for a reason: one can log in, start a queue for a dungeon, go complete some quests and have _guaranteed progression_. While on EVE, there were a few days where I logged in and got incredibly lucky, but in other days I wished I didn't login, as things went very badly. Similarly on Ultima Online. On both, you learn a few rules: trust noone, don't carry(or fly) what you can't afford to lose, etc.

I'm keeping an eye on the likes of Ark, they might be onto something. I still think that good MMORPG games will have to develop a mostly player-based economy if they want to stay relevant long term.

Ultimately players want to interact with other friendly players, but that's impossible because some players will be assholes and will try their hardest to make life miserable for your new players. If your have wide open PvP you have roving gank squads.

edit: tough crowd, I'd be interested in the details of the dissenting opinions

You could build a disposable destroy, which can be a very high damage ship and engage in combat that way. You'd have a very low chance of surviving a particular fight, but you can go out guns blazing as part of a team.

Or you go solo with a small fast ship, tackle a big ship and slowly whittle it down while it can't hit you due to speed.

Maybe you just start mining in deep space or haul goods between a couple points while you chill.

It really is a sandbox game -- the end goal is what you make it to be. I played several years and the big scale politics was more background noise of the game and may as well been NPC's and backstory.

The point being, you can get in there and either solo or grouped begin immediately carving out your niche.

There is no ultimate class. If you want to fly a titan (monstrously large ship), it will not only take years of training your character and insane amounts of in game money/resources, you need fleet support. A lone capital ship without support is a target, not something which rampages through the game on it's own.

In the end it probably comes down to more player skill at a few tasks and good decision making for what to scout/where to go. It will be more about the player getting smarter about the game than training the character itself. You train the character to help accomplish what you want to do as a player. Switching between different tasks can range from a week or two up to months/years to max something out. But a character is typically perfectly capable far quicker than the player is.

UO sucked was amazing but it sucked. I can't recall how many empty dungeons we walked through, only to get to the treasure room filled with gold? No. Filled with other players. All just camping out, waiting for loot to drop. In fact it would be true to say I can only recall such dungeons. And then the Lich would respawn and all the n00bs would shit themselves while someone else killed it, and then everyone frantically trashed the place looking for loot like an FBI raid at the drug dealer's girlfriend's place.

Honestly it was so utterly pointless to try to "play the game" that my friend and I actually indulged (I am ashamed to say) in some naked griefing. Which is to say, the only fun we had was in trying to figure out the games state machines, i.e. to goad people into killing us such that we could get the guards to kill them. How it works: stand outside a town. Be offensive. Wait till someone attacks you. Run into town. Yell "Guards! Guards!". Guard appears and kills aggressor. Take all his stuff. There were various iterations of this that Raph Koster actually wrote up [1], and it was fun. For us. Neither my friend nor I are actually assholes, and only resorted to this because it was literally the only "game" present in the entire system. We'd paid for a game, we rationalized, and by golly we were going to find one. Ok, we probably were just entitled assholes. Perhaps it got better later, but we'd gone by then. [Naked griefing, because every now and again we'd grief a wizard and they'd freeze us in place and then kill us. But we were naked. Didn't even lose a shoe.]

There was also "The Great Unused!" which we had "fun" with for a while. This was an item that was called "Unused", and its icon was a photoshop lens flare. It also weighed 255, the max amount. So you couldn't move if you were carrying it. So my friend and I spent hours standing next to it, picking it up, and then dropping it on the other side, moving it two squares at a time, leapfrogging each other. We could put it on a boat (much to our relief, as we'd been lugging it for an hour by that point) and managed to bring it from a far island back to "town". Where upon, we tried to start a cult to worship "The Great Unused!" People tried to steal it, by picking it up, and we would laugh as they ran in place for an unreasonably long time (some people are just so determined), but eventually they would drop it. It didn't catch on.

Now Raph's first go at Star Wars Galaxies I really enjoyed. I couldn't play very often, and yet I could still be useful, even as my friends leveled far ahead of me. I played a medic, and sometimes my heal would be the thing that saved someone from death and a long walk back. Most MMOs (that I played), once your friends are four levels ahead of you, you don't get any experience points at all if you join their party.

So UO was a great starting point, and very smart, very passionate people have made significantly better games, learning every time.

[1] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180627/320893/A...

https://youtu.be/KFNxJVTJleE

>Checkhov's gun is a dramatic principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed. Elements should not appear to make "false promises" by never coming into play.

If you put it in a game, and we can kill it, then we will kill it because we will assume that there must be some reason for us to kill it, otherwise it would not be here.

Shigeru Miyamoto understands this. In Super Mario 64 there is a star that you "can't" get. You can see that there is no other way to get it other than somehow jumping "really high". There is also an infinite heart to restore health as many times as you need. Why is it here? As you start trying every combination of jump, sometimes you fall far enough to take damage. The heart is there to tell you to keep going! If you do, you get a star, and you learn the wall jump.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun

You may want to check here regarding that particular article/video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18749793

No mans sky is just eye candy. Imagine the benefits of reaching the center of the galaxy and thereby being teleported to a completely different one if you could colonize that new galaxy! You'd have a massive edge over the other empires. The reality is that all universes and planets in no mans sky are functionally the same. You can stop playing as soon as you see your first planet and nobody could claim that you didn't see everything the game had to offer.

EVE is the only current MMO I can think of which realizes that destroying value is also important having a functional economy, and creating those interesting economically-based dynamics

So there is a lot of competition to get a good guild trader, and guilds all bid large sums of gold to try to get a good trader. The winning bid for a trader gets the trader for 1 week, and the gold spent on the winning bid is destroyed. So it turns into a self balancing system, because if there is too much gold in the economy then the guild trader bids go up really high and take lots of gold out of the economy every week. If there is not enough gold in the economy then it isn't viable to make such a large bid on the guild trader, as you won't have any chance of making enough money back to justify the large bid, so bids go down and more money stays in the economy.

It's at this point I'm assuming you're being bitter and trolling.

Sure a better game could come out and the value of items could come down, but that isn't really any different than if people in real life decided they just liked garnets instead of diamonds or whatever. And presumably as Moore's Law slows down, winning games will stay in the front runner position for longer.

From a pension fund's perspective, you're basically just finding something that a small number of people love passionately and then hoping that as more people learn about that thing, the value of everything connected to the ecosystem increases. That doesn't really seem any different than investing in a social network like Facebook or whatever, which clearly pension funds already do (usually by allocating a small portion of their funds into VC, although sometimes directly).

Volatility.

Since I can see it coming, the fact that real-world assets have a non-zero volatility does not mean that the level of volatility in virtual assets isn't a difference in quality and not merely quantity.

What happens to your WoW diamond's investments when the next Wow expansion brings out UltraDiamonds and the latest shiny hot BiggerNumbersThanLastTime weapons and armor can only be bought with those? Again, the fact that this occasionally happens in the real world still has nothing with the routine nature of this sort of thing in the virtual.

Only an idiot would invest in Wow diamonds. Put your money into buying stock in the company running WoW instead.

Well that's the beauty of the blockchain. You just have a contract in place saying that weapons and armor can only get X% more powerful each year, so that way there is a fixed amount of inflation.

Cryptokitties is a testament to how pathetic the blockchain is as a platform for complicated games. The fact that possessing a hash representing the genome of a cat is enough to qualify as a game is laughable. I've played lots of highly simplified games that involved breeding animals and optimizing for specific traits and what cryptokitties offered was just one mechanic in an entire system consisting of dozens of interacting mechanics and MMOs like WOW go way beyond a dozen mechanics.

I don't think anyone is arguing that DLT, as it currently stands, is a complete piece of shit. But that doesn't mean that no progress will be made over the next 30 years. Especially since registering and tracking virtual items is pretty much the perfect use case for DLT.

You're too deep, there isn't any way we can convince you of the foolishness you're spouting.

Is the idea that the company is just doling out items? An artificial scarcity? Doesn't that make the market super untrustworthy if they could flood it at any time? You can't do traditional coin mining as that would remove the effort from the gameplay.

Why is it a problem that university endowments and state pension funds aren't allocating some of their investments into virtual items? It's not.

> I want to invest money into games, but I can't. Other people want to get paid to play games, but they can't. How exactly is that not a real problem?

You can already invest money into games and/or get paid to play games via a variety of methods. It seems like you're shoehorning the blockchain into the equation unnecessarily.

Besides, solution-in-search-of-a-problem doesn't mean you're failing to target real problems. It means you came up with your solution first before analyzing the specific problems you're now trying to apply it to. That's almost always inferior to starting with the problem and then working backwards to craft the perfect bespoke solution.

Almost all of the problems that blockchain obsessives point out are either (a) trivial problems that few people care about, or (b) are better solved without needing a blockchain.

You can. There are several publicly traded publishers and developers.

> Other people want to get paid to play games, but they can't.

They can. Just look at twitch or the pro-gaming scene.

What? You price them the same way you price them in the real world: domain knowledge and data.

EVE in particular has charts that tell you historical transaction amounts and volume.

Currently the incentive structure is to make a gaming offering compelling (addicting?) enough to justify a monthly subscription. If you create a two way value transfer for money/virtual items with legitimate institutions you're going to completely fuck the incentive structure. Imagine what happened with the Diablo real money auction house except now the scalpers are pension and hedge fund managers.

How is that any different than, say, these people looking for diamonds in Crater of Diamonds State Park? I'm linking to this specific guy because he describes it well: "It's a lottery ticket with exercise."

https://youtu.be/YX93NHWfyQw?t=650

Similarly, Facebook decides what content to show you based on what's profitable for investors. But for whatever problems Facebook has, it's still much more widely used than any competitors run by non-profits or whatever.