Tag: ultima-online

I’ve got a long video covering Ultima Online releasing on Massively OP today. I’m essentially touring all my favorite places and activities in the game while discussing the game’s development history as a lesson in sandbox design. It’s one of my favorite soapboxes. And making the video was so much fun that I thought I’d go back through my video files…

Here’s how to tell whether you’re an old-school MMORPG player: Tell me what character archetypes make up the holy trinity, that fabled core combination of classes that makes or breaks a dungeon group. If you said tank, healer, and damage, you’re adorable and I love having you as a fellow player and you’re half right, but no. That trinity, what…

Karen Bryan, Massively’s wonderfully level-headed guild and family columnist, recently wrote about the problem of absent guild leaders in modern MMOs. I certainly have no plans to quibble with her conclusion; she is absolutely correct when she says that modern MMOs have created complicated systems of ranks and privileges and achievements for guilds without also creating effective tools for dealing…

Last Sunday, I partied with colleagues Eliot and Matt in Allods Online, which refused to cooperate with our simple desire to group. We were complaining over Skype about petty annoyances like not being able to team up on the newbie island and having to roll off for dropped quest items when in Allods’ defense I argued how much better it…

Beau Hindman, a Massively writer who is as zany as he is endearing, long ago penned an opinion piece titled The road (much) less traveled. In it, he argued that MMOs ought to give players strong, palpable reasons to travel and explore the amazing worlds we so often take for granted in our rush to what is so frequently a…

When Tiny Speck announced that it was closing its weird and beautiful browser MMO, Glitch, studio founder Stuart Butterfield famously blamed it at least in part on the game’s lack of guidance — there just wasn’t enough hand-holding. “A lot of people were just like, ‘I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do,’” he lamented. “Some people took…

I want to go home again, and I’m not alone. When Ultima Online launched in 1997, its housing system was both wonderful and terrible, like much of the rest of the game. If your keys were stolen or lost, your house was compromised forever. Homes didn’t decay if abandoned, so they took up space and prevented others from placing, and…

Ultima Online wasn’t the greatest game of all time, and it’s not even my favorite, but because it was first, and because it’s so old, it’s had a long period of time to make mistakes and learn from them (or not). And because it’s a sandbox, it’s made those mistakes across a broad spectrum of MMO design, rather than being…

Ever hear the phrase “common sense isn’t very common”? It’s true. Arguments from common sense are logical fallacies because there’s really no such thing. We’re all terribly susceptible to the idea that the things we find obvious are obvious to our peers. After all, what sort of horrible person wouldn’t agree with me on something so basic and simple? If…

Anyone who knows me knows I love sandboxes. There’s something about an interactive simulation that’s a lot more engaging and replayable than yet another scripted themepark. And one of the best aspects of the best sandboxes is a strong player economy. The economy game is basically PvP for smart people. No — observant people. It’s as much about anticipation and…