A bit more back story on UO, ported from my comment in the Nomic thread.
UO was divided into Trammel (safe from PvP) and Felucca (not), and some servers only had Fel. Originally, there was only Fel, and Trammel was made to entice more players who might not want such a cutthroat environment.
In Fel as soon as you left a city you were more or less fair game to die from an extremely hostile environment. PC Gamer (If I recall) described the learning curve of UO as "A frozen wall of acid." Brutal, but very exciting. A wild west MMO.
(In Fel) UO was a rare RPG where anyone could kill anyone, for any reason, but with the repercussion that they would be branded a "Bad person" (visible with a gray or red name instead of blue). Stealing from good people corpses also did this. Anyone can attack and kill bad persons, and if you killed even more people you were a murderer and it took a very long time to return to normal.
This Blue/Gray/Red name system created a sort of cautiousness among travelers. Being near a pack of "blue" people might be safe, since any person that tried to steal or kill would turn gray and they'd immediately kill him.
Unless of course, all those blue-named people were conspiring, and you are the target.
You want to use super awesome powerful gear? None of this sissy MMO stuff. Die and you lose it, and your enemy (or his enemy!) gets the spoils. An insurance system was added later (2005ish?) where you could pay a certain amount per item to not lose it, probably also as an attempt to make the game less harsh.
The problem I have with a lot of MMOs is that the power of your character is simply how much time you sink into the game. Essentially, MMOs are games that reward wasting time.
UO had so much more than that. UO was a game where treachery and sneakiness really paid off, if you wanted them to. Lots of ways to nearly instantly kill or entrap people lead to a lot of very exciting plots where guilds might be laden with spies. Absolutely nothing like the ridiculously limited PvP found in games like WoW.
In a lot of ways it was the Diplomacy (diplomatic back-stabbing board game) of MMOs. And it was great.
EVE online strongly shares in all of your mentioned characteristics, with the exception that even in their version of "trammel" you can die, but whoever attacks you will get destroyed by NPCs after a small delay.
A fun game aswel, chock-a-block full of backstabbing and intrigue. But definitely brutal as hell.
Many of these mechanics weren't in there during alpha/beta/launch, but came shortly after. But the essential part that was always in there is 'you will die, and get looted' which never happens in modern games.
In the MMORPG area there is today Darkfall which is kind of a spiritual successor to UO in many regards (full loot, anyone can kill you outside cities and so on) but in first and third person 3D. The original game had its issues though and is closed down since mid November because of the release of the now much hyped sequel Darkfall: Unholy Wars (a.k.a Darkfall 2.0), coincidentally coming out on Wednesday next week. It was also greentlit on steam in record time (like within 24h) so there's definitely craving for games like this out there.
Thank you. I was unaware of this. Darkfall did indeed conceptually pick up UO, but the times I tried it it was absolutely terrible (buggy, empty feeling world, terrible launch management by the developer/publisher) and I kinda wish it hadn't used the first person perspective. A neat idea- just terribly implementation by a pretty bad company.
As a game developer, I'd explain this as follows: the whole gaming industry has been following the same path towards casualness. Arrows in FPS games telling you where to go, auto adjusting difficulty, forgiving aiming, tons of quick save checkpoints, the list goes on.
The majority of players prefer these be in place - otherwise, why keep doing it? But there's still a significant segment of the market that pines for the day when games really kicked you in the ass.
So enter DayZ, and some psycho player with an Axe chases you while playing a creepy loop of a seven year old girl singing, and exploits bugs to kill you completely unfairly, there's a small but significant number of players that will fall in love with a game like that.
But you're not going to convert even a large share of Black Ops 2 players with that experience. It would be like making every car an Ariel Atom.
I'm interested in how the hardcore-casual Black Ops 2 market (if we can call it that) was created. It didn't seem by mistake. I remember essentially seeing its rise around the release of the Xbox and Halo. Suddenly real multiplayer FPS gaming was available on a console, but lots of stuff changed too. It wasn't the multiplayer of QuakeWorld. It was something different.
On the other hand, a lot of games now are large and diverse with hours worth of content/art, instead of 5 minutes of content constant replayed for hours until the button patterns are memorized.
Gran Turismo (first version, on Playstation one) was hard. It was good, but it was hard.
Later versions (GT4 especially) were much easier, with many more races and tracks and cars. But is it more fun? Is it fun for advanced players to grind through easy races? (even with weird features to increase difficulty and earnings from races?)
DayZ, yes. The problem however is that its so unbalanced that it destroys the game for so many. I've played it a reasonable amount and actually uninstalled it for now. Some day. Just not now.
Minecraft, no. The majority of Minecraft players have actually never been ganked. It happens, but it isn't a critical part of the game. I've played 50+ hours of Minecraft MP and never been ganked. Fell in lava, but never ganked.
It happens in Eve. Undocking in Eve is permission to be destroyed. One of the first things you learn in Eve is to not fly a ship you can't afford to lose.
Good to know. I've tried Eve a few times but never got past the introduction tutorials really. It always seemed conceptually amazing, and also really deep (or overly complex, depending how you look at it).
Die and you lose it, and your enemy (or his enemy!) gets the spoils.
Which creates incentives to cause player deaths. As they say, it's all about what you incentivize.
An insurance system was added later (2005ish?) where you could pay a certain amount per item to not lose it, probably also as an attempt to make the game less harsh.
A band aid.
The problem I have with a lot of MMOs is that the power of your character is simply how much time you sink into the game. Essentially, MMOs are games that reward wasting time.
Most MMOs are structurally the same as resort casinos. There's pretty scenery and distraction which all serves to dress up the primary mechanism of addiction through variable schedule of reward.
Someone should make an MMO where your power is related to what you build, how smart you can work, and how cost effectively you fight. How about a space MMO with a procedurally generated universe of billions of worlds? Allow macro-mining and even provide players an API to write their own scripts. (All in-game resource limited, of course.) Building infrastructure (warp gates) would allow you to exploit resources more efficiently and to charge others a small toll, just like building a railroad would. Server-side execution would allow scripts to have DRM that actually works, so players could license scripts to one another for a fee. I would also have all ship designs be originated by players and licensed. A given design would "auto-nerf" through stat decay over 8 months or so, so there would be an in-game industry of creating new designs and licensing them.
PvP would be entirely be RTS-mode through drone ships purchased by a player or through a mercenary-hire mechanism which lets players participate in RTS battles in hero-class ships. (Which can either be provided by the mercenary or the employer.) Targeting would be done by the computer, with an API provided for players to write their own targeting algorithms. Tactics would depend on dodging and optimal positioning for the given weapon.
Sort of. The curve maxed out way faster than modern MMOs. Getting all GM (grandmaster) levels in your main skills took way shorter than, say, what ever absurd level you can get to on WOW after the 10th expansion.
The game even had an inbuilt macro system that wasn't super sophisticated but it wasn't considered "hacking" an you could max out the easier skills that way.
So in some sense, the devs actually tried to get rid of the grind element. In any case, it definitely was not institutionalized. You could gain skill in fencing by killing monsters OR by dueling friends. There definitely was not a "kill 6 monsters and return the belts for a cool prize" style stuff. So in some sense, it was a bit like you would have liked, just not as all-out.
The thing is that the better players were people who understood how game mechanics worked, and they were older and more mentally capable than I was at 14. So they understood how to make "builds" and how to strategize, while my efforts were based on trial and error, and thus getting to a good build took the better part of a year than a month.
> The curve maxed out way faster than modern MMOs. Getting all GM (grandmaster) levels in your main skills took way shorter than, say, what ever absurd level you can get to on WOW after the 10th expansion.
I would have player character "skills" be a significant but not a dominating factor. Basically, PC "skills" would be automatically learned over time and would be a way to reward players for sticking around. Instead, I would base things more on economic power and kill record. A player can gain more power economically by exploiting a large sector of space, establishing bases, designing/licensing mining/security drones, and building products for players. However, this means they would be mainly playing in the RTS/4X part of the game. The action oriented part would be based on kill record, which would be the ratio of total PC ship value you help destroy over the value of the ships you are destroyed in. Having a high kill record gains "fame" which results in direct monetary rewards and access to (expensive) special items. Something along the lines of players 1 standard deviation above the average kill ratio would randomly receive money for "sponsorships" or be given prototype items to test whenever they are in a winning battle. I would also have another metric of "reputation" which is more based on participation, but which results in lesser rewards.
Another thing I would try out would be to simply grant NPC "followers" to players with a certain level of fame who have stuck around long enough.
When Trammel was launched, I quickly fled to Siege Perilous - the newly created veteran server. Having completely immune, trash-talking hoards take over normal servers took all fun out of the game. Siege was much closer to the original wild west ideal, where you had to answer for your behavior. In general, it was much more mature in interaction... With a few exceptions.
UO was divided into Trammel (safe from PvP) and Felucca (not), and some servers only had Fel. Originally, there was only Fel, and Trammel was made to entice more players who might not want such a cutthroat environment.
In Fel as soon as you left a city you were more or less fair game to die from an extremely hostile environment. PC Gamer (If I recall) described the learning curve of UO as "A frozen wall of acid." Brutal, but very exciting. A wild west MMO.
(In Fel) UO was a rare RPG where anyone could kill anyone, for any reason, but with the repercussion that they would be branded a "Bad person" (visible with a gray or red name instead of blue). Stealing from good people corpses also did this. Anyone can attack and kill bad persons, and if you killed even more people you were a murderer and it took a very long time to return to normal.
This Blue/Gray/Red name system created a sort of cautiousness among travelers. Being near a pack of "blue" people might be safe, since any person that tried to steal or kill would turn gray and they'd immediately kill him.
Unless of course, all those blue-named people were conspiring, and you are the target.
You want to use super awesome powerful gear? None of this sissy MMO stuff. Die and you lose it, and your enemy (or his enemy!) gets the spoils. An insurance system was added later (2005ish?) where you could pay a certain amount per item to not lose it, probably also as an attempt to make the game less harsh.
The problem I have with a lot of MMOs is that the power of your character is simply how much time you sink into the game. Essentially, MMOs are games that reward wasting time.
UO had so much more than that. UO was a game where treachery and sneakiness really paid off, if you wanted them to. Lots of ways to nearly instantly kill or entrap people lead to a lot of very exciting plots where guilds might be laden with spies. Absolutely nothing like the ridiculously limited PvP found in games like WoW.
In a lot of ways it was the Diplomacy (diplomatic back-stabbing board game) of MMOs. And it was great.
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For more also see outworlder's excellent comment in the Nomic thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890513
The criticisms of UO wiki page is also a very good read, especially the housing and economy sections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Ultima_Online