A Very Old Ultima Online Ad - SV Please Take Note

[finegamingconnoisseur]

This was purportedly an ad for UO from way back in 1998, some of us were probably not even born at that time. But something about the ad caught my eye, how the narrator framed the whole concept of what UO was.

It talked about a world of player interaction, creativity, relationships, emotions, legacies and lasting effects of one's actions on the world and other players. Nothing about quests, raids, achievements, loot or levels.

I decided to post this video in the hopes that Henrik and team SV will see the wonder and magic of UO and what it represented. I am hoping that Mortal Online 2 could someday recapture that lofty grand vision that UO was.

Have a listen:

 

[Ulysses]

I find the ad pretty cringe. Not really the best example to follow.

 

[finegamingconnoisseur]

I find the ad pretty cringe. Not really the best example to follow.

By today's standards it may be. But keep in mind that this was back in the day when not many people have played, let alone know, what an mmorpg is even. An Internet connection was still a relatively new household item, running on 5-6 kilobytes per second.

 

[Ulysses]

By today's standards it may be. But keep in mind that this was back in the day when not many people have played, let alone know, what an mmorpg is even. An Internet connection was still a relatively new household item, running on 5-6 kilobytes per second.

Good point sir. But since gaming in both the past and present are different, different elements should be emphasised regarding the wonder and magic of the MO experience. One good example would be how every corner of the world play under the one server or the game's violent realism and immersion (excluding floating npcs).

 

[finegamingconnoisseur]

Yeah I think that even pre-dates the original Everquest. People were still using floppy drives on their PC's when UO came out lol..

It was an interesting time for the PC for sure, I saw computers having a 3.5 inch floppy drive, a hard disk drive around 200 mb, and an 8x speed CD drive.

 

[Ulysses]

It was an interesting time for the PC for sure, I saw computers having a 3.5 inch floppy drive, a hard disk drive around 200 mb, and an 8x speed CD drive.

Good old runescape days when we were kids

 

[Emdash]

This was purportedly an ad for UO from way back in 1998, some of us were probably not even born at that time. But something about the ad caught my eye, how the narrator framed the whole concept of what UO was.

It talked about a world of player interaction, creativity, relationships, emotions, legacies and lasting effects of one's actions on the world and other players. Nothing about quests, raids, achievements, loot or levels.

I decided to post this video in the hopes that Henrik and team SV will see the wonder and magic of UO and what it represented. I am hoping that Mortal Online 2 could someday recapture that lofty grand vision that UO was.

Have a listen:

the problem is that they would have to go backwards to get there. The game has become something different than a sandbox world. Of course, we all want this, and even the people that are entrenched in the game as is and can't imagine it being different want it, but it's not going to happen. I suggest taking the game as it is. It's just griefy to try to encourage SV to do this or that.

 

[finegamingconnoisseur]

the problem is that they would have to go backwards to get there. The game has become something different than a sandbox world. Of course, we all want this, and even the people that are entrenched in the game as is and can't imagine it being different want it, but it's not going to happen. I suggest taking the game as it is. It's just griefy to try to encourage SV to do this or that.

It may look that way, but all SV really needs to do is add a whole bunch of social and 'life' features such as tabletop games, musicianship, town message boards, more world interactivity like in Ultima 7: The Black Gate. The players will do the rest and make MO2 that little closer to what UO could have been had it stayed the course.

 

[Gnidex]

Contrary to MO2 the people behind UO were actually competent and understood what made the game special.

You can't just whip up some assets into a barebones version of something that could be an MMO and then run it like a private server and expect success.

 

[Emdash]

It may look that way, but all SV really needs to do is add a whole bunch of social and 'life' features such as tabletop games, musicianship, town message boards, more world interactivity like in Ultima 7: The Black Gate. The players will do the rest and make MO2 that little closer to what UO could have been had it stayed the course.

I already talked about social roles, both in the society thread and then the more simple "Myrland needs a King" thread. The second time, it was almost well received. Still don't think it's happening.

I really think there need to be mechanics beyond just players doing what they do. Message boards are cool, for sure, but they need an actual society and possibly factions.

The game will probably not be what I wanna play unless they change core things, as I said, but I certainly understand how to give the game more staying power. It does need to give more life sim stuff, but the life stuff needs to be balanced with opening up more combat or antagonistic (thievery) content. E.g. remove a lot of the mega powerful guards. They need to find a way to reward people for hanging around town and then give people reason to 'grief' those people. There need to be different dynamics. It would not be hard to program, but the problem is getting people to believe that it's right and trusting the players to step into those roles. Still, if you reward them... and titles are generally desirable.

You should be able to play MO and never leave town. Or travel from town to town, never going to dungeons or whatever. You CAN play that way, but it's not optimal. There should be those options as well. Adding games and stuff is cool, but it's not gonna accomplish much. It's just gonna give bored people ( no pun ) something to do in between the game as it is.

 

[Emdash]

Contrary to MO2 the people behind UO were actually competent and understood what made the game special.

You can't just whip up some assets into a barebones version of something that could be an MMO and then run it like a private server and expect success.

also since I'm here responding in another thread, I will respond to this!

There is absolutely nothing in the game engine that is making the game imbalanced. I was looking at the renown EA announcement and they said they wanted the game to not be cluttered by a bunch of possibly broken systems. That was the beauty of MO1. It had systems, but none of them were oppressive. Even TC kinda threw it off. The MMO / Open World Survival theme of MO was what made it magical, and it could have been polished to be more like a real world. It was doing well at times in MO1. Not so much MO2.

Assets, whatever, shit doesn't matter. I'm playing Pax and that's all assets. All they had to do was not fuck up the game. They wanted to add more and more shit, and now we are here. It has nothing to do with the tools they had to work with, though (but porting to UE5 was a mistake, even with the money.) What they had done from MO1--> MO2 UE4 was pretty special. Unfort, they added a bunch of bullshit like ping normalization and broken systems.

 

[Gnidex]

also since I'm here responding in another thread, I will respond to this!

There is absolutely nothing in the game engine that is making the game imbalanced. I was looking at the renown EA announcement and they said they wanted the game to not be cluttered by a bunch of possibly broken systems. That was the beauty of MO1. It had systems, but none of them were oppressive. Even TC kinda threw it off. The MMO / Open World Survival theme of MO was what made it magical, and it could have been polished to be more like a real world. It was doing well at times in MO1. Not so much MO2.

Assets, whatever, shit doesn't matter. I'm playing Pax and that's all assets. All they had to do was not fuck up the game. They wanted to add more and more shit, and now we are here. It has nothing to do with the tools they had to work with, though (but porting to UE5 was a mistake, even with the money.) What they had done from MO1--> MO2 UE4 was pretty special. Unfort, they added a bunch of bullshit like ping normalization and broken systems.

Was it really that special?

At it's best it's mediocre game with full loot being it's only saving grace. The rest that is either copied over from better MMO's like UO in the skill and build system or just doesn't work and/or is pure tedium like TC.

 

[Emdash]

Was it really that special?

At it's best it's mediocre game with full loot being it's only saving grace. The rest that is either copied over from better MMO's like UO in the skill and build system or just doesn't work and/or is pure tedium like TC.

it's the only game I ever subbed to, as I have said multiple times, so take that as you will. I'd say YES it was special. There was a time when being ahead of the curve like say with cooking or breeding gave you access to things that most people didn't have. It wasn't a grind thing, it was being able to grab certain things and make use of them.

It was just fun to mess with things. Like breeding Lyks. Some people were like oh my Lyk is infinite stam, but that shit was very slow. Then you had lyks that were slow in 2nd speed, but could burst ridiculous speeds, plus they could go straight up mountains haha and jump. Sure, the same was true for horses, but Lyks could do more, imo. Bull horses were stupid, too, esp after they nerfed Lyks. Shit was imbalanced at a certain point, and it didn't really 'get there,' but there is no reason why they had to do a huge turn as MO2 started. I feel like you guys might've forgotten about MO1.

I am not even a super vet. I just came into the game and was like oh I can do this, I can do this. I think I came in like right after Lyks were introduced. Did cooking, did lyks, did molvas. Was super fun.

The pvp was laggy and the game didn't run so great on my cpu, so I didn't have many great memories of pvp, but I got OK at MA. haha. I think TC's implementation in MO1 was actually a step back. As I've said, I am against free placement in an MMO. Somebody had posted that MO is a survival type MMO, and those 'roots' were part of the magic of MO.

Yes, it was pretty special. It was infuriating with some of the bugs, but they fixed a lot of the bugs before they brought them back for UE5 hehh. They redid the whole world (and made it less interesting, sadly.) It fixed all of the terrain glitches, or mostly. Then we had massive shit talking and forum pvp, politics, a world where you'd care about what was happening. I didn't play UO, so I can't comment on that, but yeah it was something that made me care about this genre of games.

I just wish they would have listened to me or some other people. They blew it. Just like once everyone gets max on mastery, the pop is gonna drop off. They didn't want people to rage quit, but that is part of the game. Getting sieged out, getting camped out, that was part of it that made it special.

MO2 was cool for awhile when I thought it was going to follow MO1, but they started neutering it. What MO2 is is no representation of what MO1 was.