Post by Morreion on Jun 16, 2014 15:35:44 GMT -5
Working As Intended: The forgotten fields of Green Acres (Massively)
My first trip to Ultima Online's Green Acres was in 1998. The first guild I'd ever joined had just split up into a bunch of... let's call them "philosophically incompatible" groups, and I was still hanging out with some of the shadier types because I was a clueless teenager in my first MMO and wanted desperately to fit in and hadn't yet figured out where I belonged.
"Hit this rune," my new guild leader commanded. His favorite murderin' weapon was a poisoned warfork. He was not a nice man. "I'm being evicted from my safehouse in Green Acres. Help me move my crap."
Green Acres, I soon learned, was the colloquial name for the bright and green underworld of the game I'd been playing for months, an underworld I didn't know existed. Most players probably never did. I'd bet most of you old school Ultima Online players have never heard of it, and fewer still ever visited. See, the game's playable map was only a small portion of the accessible game world; the undeveloped space was a vast and empty sprawl of green grass that went on for tiles and tiles. That endless plain of isometric grass was Green Acres.
I don't know how the first player got there. Initially, only gamemasters and their ilk should have had access. There were certainly cracks in the seams of the world that allowed players to sneak into (or fall into) other inaccessible locations, like the caves beneath Buccaneer's Den, so that's one possibility. But I suspect a gamemaster or counselor just marked a rune once for his buddy, and that player marked more and spread them around, until every minor crimelord on every server had one and hundreds of players could easily port there.
Minor crimelords like my new guild leader...
I like these 'inside stories' about little-known hidden areas in games. The author makes the point that older games had a lot of personality in this way, newer games, not so much.
My first trip to Ultima Online's Green Acres was in 1998. The first guild I'd ever joined had just split up into a bunch of... let's call them "philosophically incompatible" groups, and I was still hanging out with some of the shadier types because I was a clueless teenager in my first MMO and wanted desperately to fit in and hadn't yet figured out where I belonged.
"Hit this rune," my new guild leader commanded. His favorite murderin' weapon was a poisoned warfork. He was not a nice man. "I'm being evicted from my safehouse in Green Acres. Help me move my crap."
Green Acres, I soon learned, was the colloquial name for the bright and green underworld of the game I'd been playing for months, an underworld I didn't know existed. Most players probably never did. I'd bet most of you old school Ultima Online players have never heard of it, and fewer still ever visited. See, the game's playable map was only a small portion of the accessible game world; the undeveloped space was a vast and empty sprawl of green grass that went on for tiles and tiles. That endless plain of isometric grass was Green Acres.
I don't know how the first player got there. Initially, only gamemasters and their ilk should have had access. There were certainly cracks in the seams of the world that allowed players to sneak into (or fall into) other inaccessible locations, like the caves beneath Buccaneer's Den, so that's one possibility. But I suspect a gamemaster or counselor just marked a rune once for his buddy, and that player marked more and spread them around, until every minor crimelord on every server had one and hundreds of players could easily port there.
Minor crimelords like my new guild leader...
I like these 'inside stories' about little-known hidden areas in games. The author makes the point that older games had a lot of personality in this way, newer games, not so much.
