Post by Morreion on Nov 29, 2017 8:40:12 GMT -5
Ultima Online’s influence (Raph Koster's Website)
MMOs have become so cookie-cutter it's refreshing to look back when they were unique worlds. Some of the features in UO have yet to be repeated.
The world was also varied in behavior. The “resource system” has been written about extensively, and didn’t survive to launch. But the underlying data for it remained, and served as the basis for all sorts of simulation. Every patch of water was something you could fish in. You could shear the wool off of sheep, and it grew back. You had to rotate through stands of lumber, as you exhausted the harvestable wood. Name your cow Millie, milk her, then when you chose, slaughter her, and you got meat filets – “filet of Millie.” You could take that to make a steak or a meat pie. “A meat pie of Millie.” For a brief period, you could do that with the meat from another player. Scissors cut cloth. Knives could whittle wood. Looms made cloth, if you had the flax or the wool. Just about everything was craftable — a current list for blacksmiths is pages long.
You could create a microphone crystal, and link it to a speaker crystal, and use it to provide loudspeakers for an event. A chain of explosive potions would set of a chain reaction, like a fuse burning down. You could drop things on the ground, and spell out words, or leave a lure of stuff for creatures or animals to pick up. Monsters looted you, if they were victorious. Even when they spoke gibberish, they did so by listening for words you said, and repeated them back to you, which tricked many a player into thinking there was a real language to learn.
The simulation ran deep in UO, so much so that even when the main simulation was turned off, the game still ran as a giant simulated fantasy world. When you look at a typical house screenshot, realize that everything in that house was interactive to some degree, even if it was minor. You pretty much have to come forward in time to Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft to find something comparable in a major game.
The simulation ran deep in UO, so much so that even when the main simulation was turned off, the game still ran as a giant simulated fantasy world. When you look at a typical house screenshot, realize that everything in that house was interactive to some degree, even if it was minor. You pretty much have to come forward in time to Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft to find something comparable in a major game.
Don’t underestimate what seems like a trivial thing. Dye tubs existed in the world, which spawned with random hues. Dye tubs could be copied. Players could find objects that spawned in the world with rare colors, copy them to a dye tub, and then dye clothes with that rare color, cornering the market on a specific shade of green. There was an economy just for colors in Ultima Online. This led to lily-white wedding dresses, guilds that color-coordinated their uniforms, a pimp named Fly Guy on the docks with a purple feathered hat, and much more. When a bug in the system created “true black” as a hue (a palette with only #000000 black in it) it instantly became a highly coveted color that led to mass murder and economic mayhem. Eventually, I applied colors to metallic ores, and this led to a whole metal quality system as well. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the simple hues system enabled enormous amounts of player dynamics that frankly, still aren’t seen in most MMOs today.
Shopkeepers in UO launched with fluctuating prices and inventory based on local supply and demand. And supplies certainly did fluctuate! Early on there was a failed closed economy, but even with the more typical faucet-drain economy that UO moved to, there was enough there to basically create the market for eBayed virtual goods, as well as constantly changing prices within the game itself. This player-driven economy saw players set themselves up as commercial kingpins, not just as combatants.
Of course, players could just hire an NPC and set it their house, stock it with goods, set prices, and hang a sign out front (yes, you could actually hang a sign… there were about twenty to choose from, and you could select a name for the shop). Players built their small commercial empires this way.
And that variety in play was everywhere. Bards whose music calmed angry monsters. Fishermen who pulled up messages in bottles, eventually with treasure maps inside. (When you got to the destination, the game spawned an entire encounter for you; this concept, called a “dynamic point of interest,” allowed the creation of entire orc camps, buildings and all, on the fly, then cleaned up later, leading to a more dynamic encounter map in general). Blacksmiths whose mark on a sword was a big deal, and whose popular smithies would have lines of people outside, because they were the only one that players trusted to repair their sword adequately. Mages could learn spells and inscribe them on scrolls and sell them to others. Museums of “recall runes” existed – teleportation depots, basically, where runes with far flung locations encoded into them sat on display for mages to come to and open mystical gates to other locales.
Of course, players could just hire an NPC and set it their house, stock it with goods, set prices, and hang a sign out front (yes, you could actually hang a sign… there were about twenty to choose from, and you could select a name for the shop). Players built their small commercial empires this way.
And that variety in play was everywhere. Bards whose music calmed angry monsters. Fishermen who pulled up messages in bottles, eventually with treasure maps inside. (When you got to the destination, the game spawned an entire encounter for you; this concept, called a “dynamic point of interest,” allowed the creation of entire orc camps, buildings and all, on the fly, then cleaned up later, leading to a more dynamic encounter map in general). Blacksmiths whose mark on a sword was a big deal, and whose popular smithies would have lines of people outside, because they were the only one that players trusted to repair their sword adequately. Mages could learn spells and inscribe them on scrolls and sell them to others. Museums of “recall runes” existed – teleportation depots, basically, where runes with far flung locations encoded into them sat on display for mages to come to and open mystical gates to other locales.
MMOs have become so cookie-cutter it's refreshing to look back when they were unique worlds. Some of the features in UO have yet to be repeated.