DMUO: The Digital Memories of Ultima Online Project
Deckard at UO Journal has a short report up concerning a new project being launched by Raven of Minoc, one of the more well-known members of the Ultima Online fan community.
Digital Memories of Ultima Online, as Raven describes it, intends to:
establish a central repository of images (screen caps) taken by users of Ultima Online while playing UO. The images might be of events, guild meetings or even character paperdolls.The images will be open to public viewing on an online image-sharing service or hosted website.
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The project will be implemented in two phases.
Phase I: Since the early stages of the project may explore different tools and methods to accomplish the project goals, early participants must have enthusiasm for the project and a willingness to try new things. Some ideas that are used in the early project stages may be dropped later and early participants should be open to change and sharing their own ideas and feedback.
Phase II: Implementation. When the project has settled on the best tools to use, the next phase is to open the project to all who wish to participate. By this time a standard set of guidelines and a FAQ should be developed that will allow participants clearly understand the mechanics and goals of the project. Early participants can now promote the DMUO project to their friends to encourage participation by a large group of people.
Raven has also put up a short video introducing the project concept:
Digital Memories of Ultima Online
If any of you Dragons and Dragonettes would be interested in participating in this project, you can sign up to assist at Raven’s site. I’m sure Raven would also be open to people signing up to help set up the DMUO site and/or help settle on an image hosting and display framework.
For my own (and I’ll email Raven later to say as much directly), I’d be happy to offer a subdomain here at Aiera, free of charge, which could be used as the final home of the DMUO project. It is, I think, high time that the two rather disparate sides of Ultima fandom found ways to draw closer together again, and this would be an excellent stepping stone toward that goal.
Plus, let’s face it: most of us here are kind of big fans of archives full of Ultima history, of basically any kind.
I’m really happy to see the recent articles about UO here. Though I’ve never played it, I deeply respect the philosophy behind it and consider the game to be the ultimate conclusion of the Ultima single-player series.
“It is, I think, high time that the two rather disparate sides of Ultima fandom found ways to draw closer together again, and this would be an excellent stepping stone toward that goal.”
I couldn’t agree more with the first half of that sentence. I don’t know what aspect(s) of UO exactly the single player fans abhor so deeply that a rift was formed (lack of directed story, player-killing, visuals drifting too far from traditional Ultima canon due to player generated content, maybe?), but in light of modern advances in gameplay and technology I think those differences could be solved through a harmonic reinvisioning of both ideals in a single game entity. I don’t think they have to be exclusive to each other.
In any case, this sounds like a great idea but I strongly feel that a story should be attached to each image (or series of images), to give proper context and emotional significance.
I’ve read countless stories of UO players in various situations which have been more real and compelling than anything I’ve heard described of any other game, modern or old. Whatever UO’s faults, it was as real to many of its players as your first time playing D&D. I think it’s important to remember, acknowledge and accept this, whatever the game’s faults.
Any Ultima fan that has a problem with Aiera covering UO needs to grow the fuck up. And if he can’t do that and chooses to leave the website instead, then good riddance. UO is the most successful game in the series as well as a important part of Ultima’s history, and most of the UO criticism coming from Ultima fans has been rather immature and fanboyish.
Not invalid points, Dere…but has anyone raised an objection to the UO coverage? I don’t see anything resembling that in recent comments.
The “vibe” I’ve gotten is that UO fans and Ultima single-player fans are generally two different types of gamers. I think it’s more disinterest than real animosity. More like, “Get the fuck out of here, because I’m not interested in that sort of thing.”
A while back we had a discussion about story in games, and it surprised me to hear comments saying things like (paraphrasing), “I slog through the gameplay to get to the next cutscene, which is my reward.” WtF said in another discussion (paraphrasing) that he didn’t want to have to deal with random assholes messing with him when trying to play through missions for the story (the new Star Wars MMO).
I think it may all come down to the pacing of the game and the expected rewards. You can’t pause the game to sort your inventory in an MMO; it is real-time and you’re not the king of the castle. You can’t really have epic cut scenes because again, it’s not all about you.
I see the value of both systems, but I think the traditional single-player formula is outdated and primitive, no different than the cut-scenes between static levels in Ninja Gai Den for the NES. The idea of emergent story created naturally by real player interactions is the successor to this, but so far it hasn’t lived up to it’s full potential.
Imagine if there was a main bad guy, let’s say Mondain, who you had to kill to save the land from tyranny, but it wasn’t scripted. Some player had fought tooth and nail to rise to that position and commanded armies of real players. He anointed himself King and bred monsters to unleash upon opposing forces to spare his armies the perils of combat. It’s a single player story, but it’s real because some crazy player was ambitious and skilled enough to pull it off using the same mechanics and opportunities afforded to every other player.
I think that’s where the future lies, where the single-player experience and the UO-style experience can exist together taking the best of both worlds.
The idea of emergent story created naturally by real player interactions is the successor to this, but so far it hasn’t lived up to it’s full potential.
Imagine if there was a main bad guy, let’s say Mondain, who you had to kill to save the land from tyranny, but it wasn’t scripted. Some player had fought tooth and nail to rise to that position and commanded armies of real players. He anointed himself King and bred monsters to unleash upon opposing forces to spare his armies the perils of combat. It’s a single player story, but it’s real because some crazy player was ambitious and skilled enough to pull it off using the same mechanics and opportunities afforded to every other player.
I think that’s where the future lies, where the single-player experience and the UO-style experience can exist together taking the best of both worlds.
That would be so awesome. A whole new level of emersiveness, with a massive return.
Of course, both of those players (Mondain and the Stranger) would invariably be those same random idiots that ruin the fun in WtF’s Old Republic games…
I really liked UO, and I played until around early 2000. I had a great time, and what made the game for me was the open endedness, the dealing with other people, asshole or not, and the way the whole world fit together.
There were a number of pretty good ways of dealing with assholes in-game, and in the early days, the solution was a crossbow bolt through their skull. Later, when that option was no longer available, “ignore” worked quite well.
I’m always curious what’s new in UO, although I don’t intend to go back, I have good memories of the game.
I’m over simplifying it, but this is what’s planned for this year:
High resolution artwork update – for those people who have displays larger than 1024×768 😉 It was originally going to be high resolution versions of the existing artwork, but there were some changes made and it sounds like it will be not just higher resolution, but better looking. A lot of work has been done on this already, and some of it was released – namely terrain tiles, but the terrain art may change, since the current Ultima franchise producer wants better looking artwork, not just higher resolution.
Some kind of major story arc leading into the 15th Anniversary in September. Parts of it are in play.
A major relaunch of UO.com as the official website, with a better design than UOHerald.com. I am very skeptical of this as the person in charge hasn’t even been able to implement the WarhammerOnline.com relaunch. UO.com relaunch is behind that in priorities.
Overhaul of the dungeons – a couple have already been done.
There were two things announced last year that seemed to have disappeared. One was an overhaul of events/quests. This might be in play though, with the dungeon overhauls and the story arc.
The other is a revised new player experience. Nothing has been said about this for a long time. New players in UO can have a tough time unless they find an experience player willing to help them.
I do want to say that I believe the current team wants to get UO back into a position to grow, to bring back older players who have left as well as newer players. The artwork was a definite problem – newer MMO players are going to dismiss UO at one glance with the current artwork.
The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a visible commitment to UO from BioWare.
There are badly broken links and areas of the official website, UOHerald.com, that players have complained about going back to at least 2010, and there are other simple things. If they won’t or can’t fix the simple things, I question if they have the resources to fully carry out the larger things.
There is also a problem of players who want UO to remain in 1999. I won’t even get into that group. They are a large reason why I don’t actively participate in some of the UO forums.
@Deckard:
I think it’s extremely interesting, and odd, that any real effort at all is being put into transforming or updating UO. As it sounds from your description however there may be more wishes (or bullshit) than long nights of brilliant work.
While creating a new MMO risks losing much of the old player base to the new game and spending a lot of money and manpower in the process, continually modifying an existing game too heavily risks alienating your existing player base for the chance of acquiring new players. Even if they still have the source code, there’s only so much you can do with an old engine without basically rewriting the whole thing.
All I can think is that the renewed interest in UO, or the pretense of it, is but one gear in a machine designed to create hype for the Ultima IP in preparation for the release of the secret project. They’re firing arrows before charging.
@Dungy: “There were a number of pretty good ways of dealing with assholes in-game, and in the early days, the solution was a crossbow bolt through their skull. Later, when that option was no longer available, “ignore” worked quite well.”
Funny and true. 🙂
@Browncoat Jayson: “That would be so awesome. A whole new level of emersiveness, with a massive return.”
And a lot less expensive than paying a team of writers, artists, etc., to continually grind out new content until the user base dips below the point of giving a damn. They could then focus more on the gameplay, bug fixing and optimization. They’d become the enablers of story, not the dictators of it.
@ Sanctimonia: “While creating a new MMO risks losing much of the old player base to the new game and spending a lot of money and manpower in the process, continually modifying an existing game too heavily risks alienating your existing player base for the chance of acquiring new players. Even if they still have the source code, there’s only so much you can do with an old engine without basically rewriting the whole thing.”
Actually the “Enhanced Client” is the same engine as Oblivion III and IV, Fallout 3, the Rift MMO, and a slew of other modern games. The only thing holding it back is maintaining the perspective to match the “Classic Client” and art-style, and maintaining two separate clients – the Enhanced Client and Classic Client. I think that development of two clients in parallel ties up resources. It’s not helped by a very vocal group of people who have been against any artwork or client upgrades since the original Third Dawn/3D upgrade in 2001.
You touch on the main problem though: Modify it too much and you risk losing what you already have.
A counter-argument to that was that UO went through a couple of massive changes early in its life that were bigger than anything that could realistically be done to it now, short of turning it into a themepark or removing player housing or moving it to 3D. Both of the most massive changes were, to me, bigger than say moving it to 3D.
First, the PvP population was split up from the non-PvP population. Second, UO was turned into an item-based game.
2012 marks UO’s 15th year. Here in 2012, there are very few MMOs that have such a sandbox-style feel to them, and even fewer that do player housing right. And we come around full circle that with UO being so unique in the MMO industry, you’d think they’d try to build on that and play to its strengths. UO was unique in 1997 when it launched, and it’s still unique in 2012.
Mmmm. Sounds like a nasty situation to be in for sure. Two clients wouldn’t be such a big deal if their underpinnings were analogous, as in the server treating them both identically and each client just rendering the server’s updates as they see fit. A bunch of old die-hards crying about every change and making threats is something I wouldn’t want to have to deal with, and if I did, I would probably tell them to start a freeshard and burn that bridge as I moved the game forward without them.
I think finding a way to merge back the PvP and non PvP shards would be a nice thing to work toward while sprucing up the client graphics.