Ultima Online's Originality
Over at Life on Aggramar, a World of Warcraft blog, author Delin Quent sings the praises of Ultima Online in a short blog post, praising the game for its originality and unique sandbox gameplay experience.
Pull quote:
Ultima Online was the first MMO that I played way back in 99. The world of Sosaria was a complete sandbox, you could tailor your character to what you wanted and change at anytime. You were not locked into any one ëtemplateí, mage, warrior or healer, you could do any or all at once, only being limited by skill points. The world allowed for player housing, pre-constructed at first and player customizable with later expansions, all one needed to do was find an open spot in the world and lay claim to it.
Do read the whole thing. At the end of the post, he includes what I think is a list of other games — MMORPGs, specifically — that inherited different elements of Ultima Online‘s design and gameplay experience.
It’s not a particularly short list, either. But that should come as no surprise.
This is list is dumb.
Why ?
There’s not a single mention of Star Wars Galaxies, which to this day remains pretty much the only mainstream MMO who followed the UO design philosophy in the last decade.
Agreed. He should be put into the gas chamber. There’s no denying it. 🙂
Yeah, Galaxies is pretty much the closest thing to UO that ever came about.
MUDs and the like did more to spawn the Everquesty MMOs that are all the rage, not so much UO. The most historically important thing about UO is that it proved that MMOs could be a viable business model, not so much the game design. There were other MMOs about at the time (The Realm, Meridian 59, etc), but UO was the first big commercial success in the field.
SWG was pretty much UO2.0 in any case: no wonder since a lot of its dev team came from Ultima Online. Alas its failure pretty much showed there is no room anymore for the “virtual world” approach in MMOs and that people just want more Everquest Clones. Meh.
I think UO was the first MMO in the sense that it was the first trully Massively Multiplayer game. Where games like Meridian 59 could over hundred of players, UO brought thousands of them together and that’s what really changed everything.
I did some research on SWG and it looks like it might have been more successful if the devs hadn’t instituted changes that nullified pre-existing players’ choices. The modifications made to character creation and gameplay pretty much belittled and devalued older players’ hard work.
The ability to modify an MMO on the fly is awesome, but that doesn’t mean that any arbitrary change will be seen as a positive one. They should have thought more about the implications of those changes across their user base before implementing them.