One of my favorite "UO was a real world" stories is that when they launched the game animals were to reproduce and prey on each other. The designers hadn't accounted for the fact the players would simply kill everything in site and suddenly they had a world without animals.
It is also only game, that when randomly meeting some people from old game days you still have urge to talk about thing that happen in game 15 years ago, trading stories and jokes.
It is the only game that you play with people and where the people you play with are the most important element of the game that creates the game itself. In other mmorpgs you just play around hordes of people that you don't really care about: you just click and click and click.
I disagree on it being the only game. There are people I played EQ with from 10 years ago who I am still in touch with and would consider friends, and we spent a lot of time in the game talking about just about everything.
I also had the same experience with people in quake that I played with - I am sure if I caught up with some of the guys from the swedish QWCTF scene back in the day we would have a bunch of things to talk about, same with the community around the webgame Utopia.
I think it depends on how much time you put into the game and how engaged you are with it. Communities can develop around all types of games, but I agree that UO was a very engaging game and I still remember the people I played UO with 17 years later, even though I am not in touch with them anymore.
It is hard to explain this, you might have community outside the game, but UO is probably only game when you have community inside the game. You really have neighbours ingame, you meet them often, maybe some other guy you see on market from here and there will steal something from you.
I still remember one guy, which I considered to be my friend, to betray the city, making the portal that leads to small house full of PK, quite a few people get killed and robed out of equipment that you need to spend weeks of full time dungeon going to get to. There was greed, noble characters and also evil ones. You lost your precious equipment forever easily, you build ingame friendships and hatred by seeing same people every day.
There was also another guy, who by playing his role pretend to be mentally ill, but was actually using greed of other players to steal out of them. Just by talking, little bit of using known bugs (for hiding his name), using different clothes and stuff like that. He wrote it up when he did his act and it can be great book, but it actually happened in game and you were part of it.
These stories are 12 years old, tell me about your frags ;)
I played a similar game. Originally released as Subspace in 1997 as a MMO asteroid-type game by Virgin Interactive Entertainment. VIE later abandoned server hosting duties but server software was available so the game became player ran on community servers. Eventually the client needed to be replaced due to cheating, which was done by a player named Priit Kasesalu, known for Kazaa. Years later the server software was also replaced by the community as well.
The game split game types into "zones" that were 24/7. The zone I played, and eventually became a "sysop" of, would regularly have only 40-80 people tops at any given time. Maybe 500 unique people. Not sure exact numbers because we didn't track stats like that.
Anyways, can totally resonate with playing with the game group of people every day for months or years. I had an arch-nemesis who, while we were cordial, always ended up playing league matches against each other. The rivalry was fierce but so was the friendship.
The game has been Steam Greenlit after many years of problems (copyright issues with original company, no source code for client, etc) and is about to make its debut:
My brother still plays Subspace and he was on the beta in '96. Something about that game brings out the meanest streak in humanity, though. The comments are often hilarious, you can almost hear the other guy snap his keyboard in rage.
Great, balanced mechanics, though perhaps that's changed. I'm thinking of the old Chaos and Capture the Flag zones. Can still hear the sound effects as I'm typing this.
I'm glad someone replied who recognized the game. I started in around ~2001 when its spiritual successor game (SOE Cosmic Rift) went pay-to-pay and killed off its dedicated beta player base.
I login every so often to check my ?messages and see if any old friends are online. The zone I eventually sysoped in is dead these days but the community is still strong.
The game honestly started my programming and tech career with things like bot and zone/squad website dev. I plan to check in tomorrow for the Steam launch.
> "you can almost hear the other guy snap his keyboard in rage."
This made me chuckle as it 100% spot on.
Do you know your brothers alias or would you be willing to ask him if he was ever involved in SS[*] RedStar or knew me? (game alias same as hn account)
I think I have stories from all my games. Utopia - plotting against the 4-500 people strong enemy alliance by building a network of 2-300 loosely connect people with various interests, balancing various alliances and allegiances, trading together a team of 25 dedicated team mates, racing for the top but being pulled down by trying to manipulate one alliance too many. And doing it again next 2 month round.
EQ - pulling all PoF bosses without touching any trash mobs, swimming through lava with a one hit kill boss behind me to save time, spending 3-4 hours with 70 other people to clear council of rathe, progressing from killing dragons in the ice zone to clearing plane of time, aoe kiting an entire zone... (Eq bard is still the best designed class I saw in any game)
UO - getting an order for 200 suits of coloured ore, working to complete it like mad for 2 weeks and being robbed by a bug in the new stealth feature just before completing the sale... Hitting GM smithing, buying a tower with 3 friends, exploiting blade spirits for resists forever... First time buying a house (just north of Minoc)
QWCTF - first time winning a clan game by timing quads perfectly on e1m2 for a full map (I could still run that map in my sleep), taking on and beating a clan miles better than us by playing from the same room, playing a match entirely with the boom stick in a clan game and still typing kills, the feeling of flying into a base with perfect grapple moves despite two guards with ro and str/res runes, the feeling of bouncing along on the long stretches of e4m3 with floor grapple speed jumps...
All of that more than 10 years ago and still vivid memories for me.
QWCTF - Capten, Foureau, TwinTurbo, Pimp all the other Synergy and Lords guys, Nii! (We were the worst and nicest), Skalman and many more...
Utopia - All the Malaysians from HaLL, the swedes from AV, The mishmash that was PAX, all us monkeys, the hasbeens in Mordor who you still couldn't mess with, the annoying Absalom guys, the other random alliances that formed and broke up.
EQ - all the dawnraiders I played with, the dream team with Zohran, Ashigaru, Filroden, Stragen, Veggi, Ganewate and his brother, Graouwl, Qujam, Stamford and their team and way too many more to mention..
UO - all the smiths in Brittania, including the UBB guild led by Ulysses... Min, and the other independents, Ethereal and his two crazy Canadian sidekicks in our guild, the two Danish pks (dog something?) and so on...
All those games are filled with memories of both events and people.
This. The fact that you literally had to build communities... I would meet neighbors, get along, not get along. There would be people where if you see them, you immediately run into your house, lock the doors, and just have to wait it out. Probably safer not to try returning to your house or use a alternate "safety" rout.
What is different on UO is that you spend the "quality time" with other players: things like go fishing, decorating home or walking around woods, especially on RP servers you act and talk as a character, which makes a lot of difference to IMs somewhere else and talking about IRL stuff.
I have that same experience from WOW, in particular in the larger, pre-LFR raids. There was definitely a sense of teamwork and community that went into succeeding in those, and stories/inside jokes/etc. from those days still get referenced.
I have to disagree. I don't play online games myself, but the people I know who are active players certainly seem to consider the interaction between players the main part. They even choose the game to play based on what their clan/guild/whatever is playing.
UO is the game people play to interact with those who are not in their clan/guild/whatever. UO is the game where people role-play as blacksmiths and merchants, selling their wares and services to total strangers, decorating their homes and outfitting them with "rune libraries" to make them more appealing to customers and generate foot traffic.
When I walk around a player-built town in UO it feels lived in, something I have never been able to say about any other MMO I've ever played. In this regard, UO is more like Minecraft than (World of) Warcraft.
What I mean is that UO (at RP servers) is more like mass theatre. You actually play the character, you meet others, you go fishing, steal eggs from neighbours farm. Went on walk and get stopped by PK, killed and robbed together. It is very different experience, very unique to UO.
Not only that, but so did monsters. And monsters had to eat.
At one point in beta, enough of the wildlife had been killed, and enough of the middle-difficulty monsters had been killed, and there was a bug where town guards didn't work quite right .... and a dragon strolled down the streets of Trinsic, leaving a trail of bodies behind it.
I remember the days of beta where the guards only had 100HP and could be killed by monsters or regular players. In specific I remember finding a blade spirits scroll and casting it (when scrolls could be cast by anyone) on the border of Vesper towards Cove. Many many guards and players died quickly. I managed to escape and hide until it went away.
I then took a dead guard's plate, cape and halberd equipped it. Looking exactly like an NPC guard I wandered around the city tricking other players. You could enter combat stance and everyone would flee.
Funny to think I can still vividly remember this 18-19 years later but can hardly remember the plot of many of the recent AAA titles.
> Funny to think I can still vividly remember this 18-19 years later but can hardly remember the plot of many of the recent AAA titles.
Might also be age related ;).
Joke aside, I recently spent some time partially replaying the two games I most vividly remember (Baldurs Gate II, FF7 PC version), and it's by far not as memorable now as it was back then. And I haven't played at all the last 12-15 years, so it's not that I got used to different types of games.
I collect old games on GOG.com and from humble bundles that I owned in the past, or remember wanting to play but never got a chance to. Rarely do I actually have the time to play them, and rarer still do they capture that same feeling. I still collect them though, as it makes me feel good to think at some point I'll end up with a bunch of free time and a bunch of games to play, even if when I'm honest with myself I don't see that happening any time soon. Just knowing it's there ready for me if I want is a good feeling (if it was cheap enough, so I don't feel guilty).
I think the age thing is relevant, but more as "everyone has a few early experiences they anchor and way future experiences against". I'll always compare games to pirates, UO, EQ, privateer, d2 and qwctf because they were my seminal games in various categories. Other people will have other games they measure against, whether that be wow, Starcraft, cs, myth, monkey island, syndicate, fallout or whatever you first were captured by.
