Ultima is space? Awesome.

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humbug

Bummer. Man I loved those old Ultima games. I found them vastly superior to those dumbass Final Fantasy games all the kids were playing later. Too bad Lord British couldn't hang on to his kingdom

Games aside, can we agree that "Lord British" is a really stupid monicker?

kingoomieiii: Games aside, can we agree that "Lord British" is a really stupid monicker?

Yes. Yes we can.

This is great news! Cause I sorta thought Richard Garriott was dead.

/my bad

Ultima Online was some of the best spent hours of my life. What a blast that game was.

Tabula Rasa was not so good.

Treygreen13: Ultima Online was some of the best spent hours of my life. What a blast that game was.

Tabula Rasa was not so good.

I dont think I ever raged harder than I raged getting PK'd in UO, it was really an evolving experience for me. I went from damn near stroke level to taking on a whole new persona and just fighting back with new tactics whenver PK's were mentioned.

/Orclover, sheriff of various dungeons on Sanoma server.
//oh you killed me? congrats you get some throw away weapon and armor and enough regents/pots to kill 2-3 pkers.

IgG4: Ultima is space? Awesome.

The first two games had space elements, yes. Then there was a Martian Dreams. And a downed Kilrathi fighter in a farmer's field in U7. And while not in space, you did travel to different worlds in UUII, to Serpent Isle in U7:SI, Pagan in U8, and you left the planet in the Bob White Plot of U9.

orclover: Treygreen13: Ultima Online was some of the best spent hours of my life. What a blast that game was.

Tabula Rasa was not so good.

I dont think I ever raged harder than I raged getting PK'd in UO, it was really an evolving experience for me. I went from damn near stroke level to taking on a whole new persona and just fighting back with new tactics whenver PK's were mentioned.

/Orclover, sheriff of various dungeons on Sanoma server.
//oh you killed me? congrats you get some throw away weapon and armor and enough regents/pots to kill 2-3 pkers.

I was on Lake Superior myself. But if we were on the same server I imagine I'd be the guy who would be sitting hidden in the dungeon watching people get killed by the PKs, terrified out of my mind.

Now, permit me to go on a bit of a rant here, because I'm just about the biggest Ultima geek there is.

What I loved about the Ultima games -- especially U6 and U7 -- was how richly detailed and varied the worlds were. You can pick up and stash anything. You could talk to anyone. The games were open-ended and nonlinear. Go anywhere, do anything, be all you can be.

But by far, what the games did better than any other RPG was how it addressed morality. The Ultima games, ever Since U4, have ALWAYS been about ethics. Just because you CAN do something (like, say, cast the Armageddon spell) doesn't mean you should. But the game designers give you that option anyway because they want you to make that choice for yourself. That is why you can rob every house, defraud every merchant and ruthlessly kill (nearly) every NPC. But: You can also bake bread with the baker, turn wheat into flour, pick pumpkins, settle civil disputes and relationship issues, and generally be a good samaritan around Britannia. None of these things are integral to the plot but they all define what kind of character you choose to be which is the essence of role-playing.

Instead of having your behavior defined by your alignment like in D&D, your character is defined by his actions -- how he treats others, how he interacts with the game world, and how he solves quests (there is more than one way to solve many of them, not all of which are ethical). You can be an asshole or a thief, a murderous psychopath or a saint. The game world responds positively or negatively to your actions (there are consequences to nearly everything you do).

This is the message Ultima teaches us, and it's something Richard Garriott has felt strongly about ever since parents groups complained that the gameplay of Ultima III (which required killing whole towns full of people over and over again to advance in level, to say nothing of the game's demonic box art) was giving users the wrong impression. That was the impetus that led to the moralistic Ultima IV and the groundbreaking Age of Virtue games that followed.

Now, a couple years ago I was moping around, wishing another Ultima existed, and a friend of mine told me to check out the Elder Scrolls games, because they were "just like Ultima". I'm expecting an open world where the characters are interesting and have their own agendas, and my actions change the -- well, exactly what I described above. So I grabbed a copy of Morrowind and dove right in, and I'll be honest -- it bored me to tears.

Morrowind had the right graphics, the right concept, and even an interesting gameworld and backstory of all the races n such, but it was just so lifeless and hollow. There was literally nothing to do once I maxed out my character. All the NPCs were JRPG stiffs who only served to talk to you, having no lives of their own (and they all looked the same -- no portraits, no personalities, and the same dialogue tree on. every. farking. character). There was no night. The guild quests were boring fetch-me-nots and talk-to-NPCs. I played about halfway through the game before stopping and losing interest. As far as I progressed, it seemed like I wasn't making any difference in the world at all. Only a handful of NPCs acknowledged any progress while the rest ignored my efforts. I didn't really feel like there was any credible danger or threat to what I (or the antagonist) was doing at all, which made the whole game feel very lethargic and slow-paced. And why the hell is there so much god damn loot everywhere? What's the point of four dozen respawning super dark weapons at funky, long-worded temples when I can barely carry anything? .....and why can't I have a party?

Anyways, I declined to check out Oblivion due to my experiences with Morrowind, and everyone has been raving about Skyrim the last couple of weeks, so I have to ask: Is it any better? Is it like Ultima, or is it just another impossibly large gameworld with lifeless characters, too much loot and no point or urgency to the plot? I like non-linearity, but completely blind non-linearity is a problem. There still needs to be some structure -- a REASON for you to want to explore and find things -- to proceed in your quest.

squidgod2000: Know what's sad? Not only do I still have my UO beta CD (lol, they used to mail CDs to testers), I still have the UO lapel pin that came with the collector's edition.

/reads sentence
//god damn I'm pathetic

Its ok bro, its ok. I still have my original Duke Nukem 3d mouse pad and SWGce Pin. And my UO CD's, and my EQ beta CD's. Some day, when were in nursing homes, nurses will run lans everywhere so we can MMO till we die. Course by then MMO's will suck harder than than a $150 a night crackwhore.

UO was my first real online gaming experience. I made my base of operations out of Vesper on the Lake Superior server, iirc. I was a total noob. I made my living by selling fish in the capital city, which involved a terrifying run from Vesper through the wilderness. The roads were beset by PKs, so I eventually came up with the strategy of running stark naked between the to carrying nothing but fish.

The high light of my playing career was when I was duped into buying a pack horse, thinking it was a regular horse. When the server reset I managed to convince a Player Guide into thinking that the server reset caused a bug that changed my horse to a pack horse, and he "reversed" it.

That and I totally stole a house by finding the key randomly. I went to ever door in Vesper trying to unlock doors until I found it.

I think one of the cool things about Ultima Online was the economy.

Since items could be lost forever, there was a constant need for replacement gear. People thought twice about taking their fantastic gear deep into a dungeon because you didn't know if the monsters in the dungeon would kill you, or if some PK would come along and kill you and take your awesome gear. There was a time and a place to use that really cool sword you got as loot, but it was not an every day thing.

So crafters had a market for cheap, effective gear that players were not afraid to lose. You could be a smith and churn out GM Plate Armor and katanas and shields and people would come to you to buy it... instead of using basic items as just a means to develop the skill to develop advanced items. I remember there was a guy who made extremely cheap bows/swords/armor for the Skara Brae Rangers, an Anti-PK guild who prided themselves on being essentially lootless. You'd get a dozen of them running around in what was essentially crap gear not worth looting and just hounding the Murderers who not only had fantastic gear but had serious consequences for dying. And somebody was behind each one of those crap bows and swords - a market for everything.

Of course, resources for making that stuff was not simply handed to the player - getting the wood and ingots and reagents for potions everything else took lumberjacks, and miners clinking away in caves. But the evil people knew this and would be ready to prey on the Miners, who were not skilled in defense. If they could get protection from you, maybe they'd give you a good deal on the stuff they were making. So you've got the population involved in making/buying/defending/collecting/replacing. And you cared who made your crap, and you met your dealer face to face and traded goods, and talked.

Sure, the game had fighting and backstabbing and people being douches, but at least you felt connected to it. If you were an asshole in your dealings, word got around and nobody bought from you. Particularly skilled smiths/tailors/bowyers had their mark on weapons and it meant something to have one of their weapons because everyone knew they were good people.

Anyway, they removed the threat of losing gear and being attacked and the whole thing just went to shiat. And if you went back to that system you'd have people losing their goddamn minds in a modern MMO. But at the time, it was sublime.

MythDragon: CSB:

I started playing on day one, and one of my joys was farking with people.

That was certainly a favorite past time of everyone in UO. I remember some buddies found a little 1x1 square island in the middle of the ocean. They'd pop a gate to it, some noob would wander into the gate to see where it went, and they'd dispel the gate. The guy would literally be trapped in the middle of the ocean. Then they'd Recall to their boat nearby and just sit there, watching him panic. The kind of stuff some sad little gamer would make a thread about and threaten legal action for today. We'd see it on the news, probably. But at the time, it was just something you got used to. Everyone got screwed over. It was a regular thing. And it was so much fun.