[squidleon]

This is such a good observation. UO had a real economy and social hierarchy because power wasn't handed to you. You could spend months as a fisherman or tailor and still have a meaningful experience. The gap between a grandmaster swordsman in full plate and a guy selling fish at the Britain bank was enormous, and both of them were having fun.

Modern MMOs are theme parks where everyone gets the same ride (with pay per win). UO was a living world where your role emerged from what you chose to do, not from a quest marker telling you where to go next.

[codezero]

My friends mocked me for spending months as a llama herder, until I could tame dragons and grief people by pulling them through portals.

[DonHopkins]

Oh yeah, you could tame animals to make them your pets.

One Halloween I logged into UO, and my character had been transformed into a deer, as some kind of a sick joke! All my inventory was gone, and all I could do was deer stuff.

Then some bastard came along and TAMED ME. That totally sucked! I had to follow him around obediently all day. I guess I'm lucky he didn't skin me and make me into leather armor.

[eclipticplane]

Core memories of carefully setting my fisherman on a boat with `ezmacro` before I got ready for school. I'd come home to either a boat full of fish (to later cook into fish steaks), or be dead from a player killer who found my boat and killed my macroing guy to try and steal the boat.

[SenHeng]

I always forgot where I parked my boats. Or that I even had one.

[faidit]

I always checked the harbor for unlocked boats and took them on joyrides.

[andrepd]

None of these experiences would be possible in a "WoW clone" MMO. Only with the freedom of an immersive sim can these memorable moments happen.

We could do it in 1999. Why has no one done it again? Why isn't there a BotW-engine MMO?

[prox]

I think Star Citizen might be the closest thing. It’s certainly unparalleled. There is an interesting talk with the techtool guy from last Thursday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmxmkx87qcE

[jghn]

Because this style of game appealed to two clusters of gamers. The first one is small and niche, and thus not profitable. The second one are the griefers who only want to play if they have victims available, which isn't going to happen in a small & niche game.

These kinds of games *do* exist, they're just, well, small & niche as they've learned to either build in protections against griefers and/or stay small enough to not attract notice. If you find yourself in the first cluster and not the second, you may want to check out the latest project from Raph Koster, aka Designer Dragon from UO. [1]

[1] https://starsreach.com

[jghn]

> UO had a real economy

Sort of. They disabled big parts of the "real economy" in beta. Turned out that players didn't like it that NPC shopkeepers kept standard working hours and didn't want to buy their 5000 skullcaps from their skill grinding.

Likewise they even more quickly got rid of the real ecology feature, both because it was computationally intensive but also because players would strip mine the ecology.

[chongli]

They disabled NPC participation in the real economy. This gave way to the real player economy which took place in player-run shops built inside player-owned and customized housing.

Players didn't buy those 5000 junk skullcaps either. They wanted stuff that was actually valuable, which meant those practice items were recycled or thrown in the trash.

I remember when the UO team added trash barrels and created the "Clean up Brittania" event. The game's servers were struggling to deal with large numbers of these junk objects that people littered on the ground so the devs decided to enlist the players' help cleaning it up, just like a real-life public park cleanup project! Players got rewarded special items based on the amount of junk they cleaned up.

[jghn]

Right. On my server I actually had one of those larger 2-room houses right at the crossroads as a vendor shop, so am familiar with what was there.

But that's what I meant by "sort of", as it wasn't the pure simulation that was originally promised. Another example was that all the early dupe bugs created a real need for serious gold sinks that weren't planned into the original design.

Even WoW had a player economy via the auction house, and that's about as dumbed down as an MMO gets. Though I agree that the evolution of the player run markets, plus the eventual vendor support added by DD & crew were cool.

[haolez]

If starting from scratch, what would an MMO need to replicate that?

I've experienced it first hand, but I can't grasp why it worked well like it did.

[codezero]

I say this unironically, but a lot of bugs. The bugs are what made UO fun, and the team often treated the bugs as features because the community demanded it. The most famous example (I think) is the "true black" dye. Another bug I ran into was when a certain shade of brown hair got turned "true white," I was able to petition a game master to let me keep my true white hair after the bug was fixed because I made it part of my "persona" at the time.

Also there was a whole niche industry of collecting non-droppable items which spawned in the game world but were not fixed on the map (we think they were added post map creation), so they could be "pick pocketed" off the surfaces they were on and taken back to your home every wipe. There was a huge rush after servers came back on after a wipe for folks to go find the most rare items to stock up their towers and keeps.

[eclipticplane]

UO came out when I was in high school. I would time my morning routines around the server reboot to grab those special items, some of which didn't respawn during routine reboots.

The bugs were part of the game culture. The first time that you learned that items in the bottom right corner of your first house -- because they could be stolen through a bug even if your house was locked -- was something everyone jointly went through.

UO also had maybe the closest thing to a true player economy than any game. There was a legitimate path to making money (and having fun) to just mining ore and selling ingots. You would sell your iron bars in an unattended vendor to other players at your own price. Those bars would get bought by a blacksmith player to produce armor that they sold to other players... who would buy it to go adventuring in the dungeons.

[mwigdahl]

How does the economy compare with the structures in EVE Online?

[eclipticplane]

It was smaller scale and simpler, easy to understand without spreadsheets. Even a middle school student could understand their slice of the economy.

[shiftpgdn]

I still think 90% of what made UO unique is the fact there was no Google or central repository of expert knowledge. Yes, UOStratics existed, but it wasn't perfect. A lot of the fun was in the fact basically nobody knew the BEST way to play, and therefore everyone was just doing whatever they thought was fun.

[NoOn3]

If someone create a new MMORPG in which rules changes a little every day or several days in unpredictable manner then no one will be knowing the BEST way to play or at least harder to find the BEST way. But maybe there will be no balance.

[JoshTriplett]

I don't think that would work: either the rules change little enough that you can still document meta-strategies, or the rules change too much and players can't learn them either.

[jghn]

I remember spending so much time every patch day with other people on my server where we just tried out different combinations of spells, weapons, armor, tactics to see what worked this week.

[vunderba]

You’d need to start with the premise that combat shouldn’t necessarily be the focus of the game. Work on making other aspects (farming, hunting, taming animals, etc) to be equally compelling mechanics.

[mapt]

They're by no means equally compelling. But they are viable ways to generate currency, you progress in them over time as a specialist, they feed back into the player economy performing tasks that other people want performed, and they are, importantly, in the same world, on the same shard. I know not to go near Orc Camp because there's a group of player killers down there, despite the fact that there's a rich Agapite vein running through the mountains near the entrance that I would love to mine and make armor out of. Back to the relative safety of Minoc for me, however crowded. In some timeline two weeks in the future, I band together with a bunch of other players (most of whom just want to farm orcs) to kick them out. Territorial control, even without any formal mechanics of territorial control, is closely correlated with narrative and socialization; I wouldn't have met any of those players if we were all on our own separate instance.

Eve Online accomplished something a little more combat-focused, but similarly diverse in playstyle, mostly by dint of having a single large persistent world-shard with minimal functional instancing.

[haolez]

> having a single large persistent world-shard with minimal functional instancing

What do you mean by this?

[mapt]

The concepts come with the idea of a persistent game map, which is online 23/7 and never wipes.

When UO came out, it had to deal with a large game world that nevertheless would be too small to reasonably hold a number of players that represented financial success. So the game world was duplicated on multiple servers running the same map. A player on Atlantic server could have no interaction with a player on Chesapeake server. If you wanted to play together you needed to make characters on the same server. In-game this was reflected in cosmological lore about the world being some kind of crystal that was shattered into shards. This jargon spread, to some extent, to be a generic terminology in MMORPGs.

I believe UO launched with only three shards, and added a couple dozen at the height of its popularity.

Eve is notoriously a single-shard game, with the player count being accommodated in other ways as the map grows larger and more organized play is added patch to patch, and the actual play changing notably from the era of 5,000 simultaneous online to the era of 50,000 simultaneous online.

Even without deep skill-stat specialization, when your alliance has 500 people it lends itself strongly to role specialization, because an alliance of 500 people is an organization of 500 people, who find different things fun in different contexts, and whose operations have every category of need you would find in a small nation state, from diplomacy to collective resource allocation to logistics to surveying to espionage to military service, recruiting, communications, practice and command.

[throwway120385]

Eve has every player on the same global system, and "shards" only by running the code for a particular system on a particular server. As a result, if you're in Eve Online every other player has some influence on you however minute.

[thewebguyd]

> to be equally compelling mechanics.

I'd go a step further, not just equally compelling, but it'd be interesting to see some games, particularly RPGs, where combat is effectively optional. One of many ways to level up your character and complete the objectives of the game.

There aren't many out there where you could have a complete pacifist playthrough, for example, and if there is, you usually still have to resort to theft, or use of paralyze & calm spells.

In most RPGs your professions (farming, herbalism, mining, etc.) are just secondary skills to help you progress in combat, and all the good stuff comes from killing enemies.

[ajxs]

Unfortunately the missing ingredient to recreating UO is a playerbase that can see the virtual world with innocent eyes. This HN post[1] always comes to mind.

By complete coincidence, yesterday I was just looking at the website for a guild I was in 25 years ago on Oceania [2], which is somehow still online! I had a great time playing UO back then, but I don't think the experience can be recreated today. The people have changed.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33189823 2: http://tdr.iwarp.com/main_nfl.html

[nzeid]

UO didn't have a global concept of a level. You had a maximum number of points per character, which you allocated to skills by doing the corresponding activity. This is how you can skill cap your character without killing monsters or players.

[deadbabe]

It’s largely impossible now, it’s not a technical problem, it’s cultural.

UO forced many different types of players to coexist in the same world that simply do not mix anymore. You had peaceful dungeon crawlers and craftsmen coexisting alongside killers, rapists, thieves (wild that stealing items from other players inventory was actually a thing, probably unheard of in today’s MMOs).

The friction between these different types of players is where the magic happened, it’s what created real conflict and higher stakes in the world. When you stepped out of your house, there was always a risk that killers could be lurking ready to murder you and loot your house dry. And if you forget to lock the door, someone passing by will clean your house out for anything valuable.

In a way, old school UO was a true Middle Ages type MMO, everything since then has only grown more civilized, more enshittified. People don’t want to pay for a world that doesn’t give a shit if they have a bad experience. The truth is though there was no “bad experience”, it was all just an experience.

[codezero]

Oh boy, you reminded me of the tag teamers where a pick pocket would steal your bag of runes (that you use to teleport to safety), then attack you while you try to fumble a teleport back home, only to find you can't locate your bag of runes.

The defense to this was to carry dozens upon dozens of nested bags, because each bag opening could trip the pick pocket detection.

Also the defense to your home was to literally circle it in tents/buildings creating an empty courtyard that you could only teleport into with a rune you kept safely in your bank box. There were some warping bugs that would allow you into a courtyard though, or even through the front door (circle of visibility bug, as well as floor tile warping).

[knicholes]

Stealing black pearl was great because it prevented recall AND energy bolt!

[jghn]

don't forget that Corp Por was not always the dominant combat spell. For instance there was the An Mani era of combat, and while i don't remember their names bot lightning bolt and meteor swarm were the dominant combat spell for a while as well

[knicholes]

Por Ort Grav, of course! Never saw meteor swarm being used.

[stackghost]

>The truth is though there was no “bad experience”, it was all just an experience.

I mean there absolutely were bad experiences. Griefing drove lots of players away, which is why they implemented Trammel.

[mapt]

You approach that from a game design perspective to reduce the reward and set bounds on how much fun a player is allowed to destroy maliciously and what kind of counterplay is available, but if you completely eliminate it the world loses a lot of its drama. Conflict drives narrative.

[jghn]

I know Raph Koster has spent a lot of time since he designed UO thinking about this problem. I haven't looked at his current project but am curious to what extent he's licked this issue.

[deadbabe]

Grief is a natural consequence of player freedom, but it’s not worth giving up that freedom for some safety.

[Barrin92]

turns out it is for a lot of players which is why the kind of game is extinct. Just like in the real world, there's a fine line between risk and adventure and walking into something that looks like Liu Cixin's the Dark Forest.

You want enough friction to generate interesting interactions, you don't want so much freedom that the worst exploiters start to crowd out every honest player, because then, just like in a rundown lawless neighborhood, you're getting a lesson in the broken window theory and you're only left with the scammers.

[jghn]

That's great until a game designer discovers that grief chases away the majority of players, and the griefers themselves will leave if they have no one to grief.

So from a philosophical perspective sure you're right. But from a dollars and cents perspective it's just good business to find ways to legislate griefing out of games. And that's why the market moved the direction it did.

[JoshTriplett]

There are games that managed to allow PvP while also having places players can be safe, whether axiomatically, or by having enough players interested in providing protection that there are safe locations you can count on not being attacked because anyone trying will be quickly caught.

[pjc50]

Players don't want to be continually victimized. That game design drives away all but a tiny minority of players.

[haolez]

These are the words and thoughts that I couldn't organize myself. Thank you for that. Fully agree.

[tagami]

"bank guards vendor buy"

[NDizzle]

Well, it was kind of the only game in town. Sure, you had Dark Sun Online and Meridian 59, but in 96/97 you were playing UO if you liked the idea of online worlds.

I think the barrier to entry is the equivalent of several complete, fun, balanced single player games operating together in balanced harmony. Not impossible, but highly improbable.

[haolez]

Btw, I've never met a player of Meridian 59, but seeing YouTube videos about it, it might have been popular in my community if we had access to it at the time. Looks super interesting, although it didn't age well, of course.

[jghn]

A big cluster of my in game UO friends had come from playing together on M59. Just like we view UO to have been ahead of its time, the stories they told me made it feel ahead of its time back then. It wasn't *that* different from the MUDs of the day, but more video gamey, which was a big step up

[NDizzle]

Really. I wonder if there are any historical videos about it. I have stories, but they are mostly exploit stories…

[havblue]

Is scarcity part of it? Making sure there are some jobs people have to do that don't involve combat but still drive the in-game economy?

[haolez]

I think a component of it is a zero sum model. Like, not everybody can be incredibly successful. Not sure how to implement this, though.

[jghn]

The big problem that UO ran into was that it turned out the people who liked what UO was is a pretty niche audience. In a lot of ways Everquest was a direct rejection of the features that folks like me think of as the golden years.

But to answer your question, there are three different clusters but contradictory sets of answers. And this was the problem.

1) It was a sandbox game developed with a focus on recreate a living world. A real ecology, real economy, skill based character system instead of classes where your skills tracked what you actually did, a focus on all sorts of roles - part of the original pitch was players could be the town blacksmith or whatever. I knew someone who spent several months playing an interior decorator for instance. Some people, such as myself, were attracted to this.

2) The same freedoms from #1 attracted PvP style gamers, especially from the then nascent FPS style games. Griefing, rampant slaughter, that sort of thing.

3) It also attracted PvE players who weren't at all interested in a realistic world and demanded the sort of conveniences we see in modern MMOs: mobs pinned to locations, predictable drops, predictable quest lines, instancing, optional PVP, etc.

You'll note that most of the people you see reminiscing online are from groups #1 and #2. Group #3 by and large hated the game and left as soon as they could. And your typical group #1 player eventually got annoyed at group #2 and just left altogether.

It's a hard problem to recreate UO because of this tension. Without allowing group #2 to exist you don't have the same environment. But by allowing group #2 to exist, they'll eventually take over and chase away everyone else.

At the end of the day, UO was a game that was simply a moment in time that can never be recreated. Too much of what made it great was due to the fact that it was a new thing.

[andrepd]

UO and Star Wars Galaxies were both MMOs with that experience you describe, and I really can't think of any others. For my money the only ones to truly live to the promise of a virtual persistent alternate world.

WoW in 2004 truly scorched the field; after that MMO became synonymous with WoW clone. The same action bar, the same pov, the same control, the same short "kill 10 kobolds" quests with an exclamation mark, the same progression...

I was big into MMOs a long time ago. But I never imagined that 22 years after WoW the field still wouldn't have produced another gem in the level of UO or SWG.

[idiotsecant]

UO only had this experience because there was nothing else like it, exactly. PVE and PVP players and casual and sweaty tryhard and everyone was in one world, and the game actually forced interaction between those players, often to the detriment of one party. People say they want experiences like that, but they don't. They want a walled garden that isn't too hard and will give them new shoulder pads for spending 2.5 hours grinding after work.

UO was the last MMO that made the mistake of trying to be a world for everyone to live in.

[mbonnet]

This is why I enjoyed EVE Online. You had to earn it, and if you lost it, that was that.