Ultima Online Devs Building Player-Run MMORPG 75
An anonymous reader writes: "A group of former developers for Ultima Online has created a game company called Citadel Studios, and they're working on a new MMORPG called Shards Online. '[CEO Derek] Brinkmann described the game as a player-run MMO, which means at the highest level they can run their own servers and change the settings of that world, altering how long nighttime lasts or how quickly players can gain skills. On the next level down, server administrators can take the form of god characters, who can spawn monsters in the world, create items and launch live events. And in the level below that, players can modify the gameplay code. ... The game is set in a multiverse, where players can travel through different worlds. While all the worlds are unified by the same rule-set, Cotten told Polygon that they are each themed differently, and these themes will offer players a different experience. There's a world inspired by high fantasy. There's a world that is coming out of a steampunk industrial revolution. There's a world that consists of a coliseum in which players can fight each other in player-versus-player battles.'"
Re:a good idea? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't play such an mmo. It sounds like a chaos for gameplay to me....
Sort of like the different forks of NetHack? ;-)
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Kinda sounds like one *I* would play in....
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well that was new... (Score:5, Insightful)
*cough*MUD*cough*
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Not so easy, no.
I remember a LPMud server I played on where players undertook quests to get a certain number of Quest Points and those who got high enough were allowed to get access to the LPMud code. New coders would create areas and/or quests for higher ranking coders to vet and if good would include these areas/quests for regular players to play.
LPMud code is basically object-oriented C code and was usually simple enough for a higher level coder to visually scan for problems/exploits.The better and more
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I though all MMORG were just graphical shells to a MUD?
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I fondly remeber playing SMAUG based muds, and had a blast, as MUDs are far more interactable, and far more flexible and versitile with game play. Even though big MMOs like WoW, have far better content(as far as gameplay is concerned), the type of interactions are far more limited. I think the problem is that level design devs.
Again with SMAUG, the sys admins took the role of immortals and gods, and the administrating of the game became part of
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... I think the problem is th[e] level design devs. ...
Agreed. I've been playing and running RPGs since white box/three book D&D, Traveller and Top Secret in the late '70s and designing card games for over a decade, and played computer games since it was possible. I've always felt that the thing that was really missing from online MMOs was the touch of a good face-to-face game master. I remember one of the D&D RPGs where you controlled a party of 4-6 characters and thought 'THIS is a game that's designed pretty well.' I've gotten some hints of that
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Re:well that was new... (Score:5, Insightful)
The introduction of the later crap -- PvE-only areas,
Actually, a lot of people *like* to enjoy the universe of their choosing without some douche who's spent half a lifetime grinding up to maximum constantly coming around and squashing players they're not involved with just to screw with them. Halo isn't for everyone. I prefer the games where you can flip PvP on and off.
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indeed, and even aside from the griefers, some people just don't want to PVP. It's not why they play games, it's not what they want, they don't even think of competition with other players at all.
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This was one of the things that was interesting about the PvP in Ultima online (and many MUDs) as well, full corpse looting was enabled.
It was pretty hilarious because all the good items were
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The result was that rather than toggling PvP off and going about their business, when people wanted to go out and do stuff without the risk of getting jumped, they just hopped over to the PvM world to do it.
So instead of having one interesting, bustling world where everybody played alongside each other in a manner
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Even in Eve Online, the best modules drop from rare spawns in low-security space, and although players can now research Tech 2 blueprints, the cartels that control the never-ending ones that were given out in the first couple years of the game have such a price advantage that crafting isn't all that satisfying in the game.
And the obvious rebuttal is that these modules are only the "best", if you don't mind losing them over and over. Aside from awesome, status signalling killmails (notices that detail what an enemy loses when you blow them up), player-made is superior because it doesn't bankrupt you when your internet spaceship goes boom.
Second, Tech 2 "original" blueprints (which have two advantages - considerably more efficient use of materials for the single item that they make and they aren't capped as to the amount of
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EA never 'took over' UO - it owned UO from day one. By the time EA disbanded Origin, the PvE-only areas had already been in existence for four years, and the gear-centric grindfest disaster that was AoS had been out for two years. Not to mention 'tinkering with skill balance' had been ongoing from day one. Etc... etc...
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That was my first thought as well. I loved playing and being a wiz on MUDs back in the day. Sounds like a good idea.
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Tron, is that you...?
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Daydream (Score:2)
I remember day-dreaming about an MMO like this ages ago when they were just coming into the mainstream. I was thinking one based on Feist's "Hall of Worlds [wikia.com]" concept. Each player would start on a pre-fabbed world, and after levelling a bit, make their way into the Hall, where they could connect to player-generated worlds which served as dungeons against which to test their skill. After progressing sufficiently, they could gain control of their own world, and create another dungeon to add to the Hall of World
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Reminded me of Second Life too (game aspects of), where you had many people clueless what to do without specific direction, a lack of cohesion of design, and some outright bad decision making that impacted others.
Ohhh... they just invented MultiMUD (Score:5, Insightful)
And allow me to dust off my crystal ball to predict how this is going to run.
- People will flock to the "shards" where they gather xp the fastest, then complain about the lack of content.
- Balance will be completely off whack because you go to shard A, get weapon A1, go to shard B and get armor B1 because the monster that carries said armor is very susceptible to A1 (which does not matter since nothing like it exists in world B), then go to shard C where every monster gives tons and tons of xp and loot but is really hard to kill... unless you have weapon A1 which deals a damage these mobs don't have any resistance to (because it uses a different ruleset) and wear armor B1 that makes you invulnerable against mobs on shard C (because they use a different formula to calculate armor which makes the armor rate on B1 insanely huge against shard C while it would be quite normal for shard B).
- Interesting, well designed worlds filled with lots and lots of detail that will be deserted because the builder also took balance seriously, while the shards with no meaningful texturing where you mow down mobs by the dozen for free loot will be overrun, in turn giving wizzes the message that players don't give a shit about eye candy and just want free stuff, culminating eventually in the black room with rows and rows of defenseless drones dropping the Ultrasuperspecialawesome Sword of Pwnage with a dropchance of 99.9999% (with an error margin of 0.0001 due to a spawning error caused by the amount of mobs dying at the same time).
- Dozens and dozens of "twisty passages, all looking alike" because for some odd reason wizzes love to create mazes about as much as players loathe running through them.
Oh yeah, I'm so looking forward to that again!
Re:Ohhh... they just invented MultiMUD (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly you never played UO. UO, being the first "real" mmo had fixed all of those problems from the start, by having no XP and items that decayed rather quickly. Basically your character had a capped number of skill points and you could lock skills at their current level or turn them up or down. So once you hit the cap, if you wanted to change how you played by, for example, going from Sword fighting to magic... you would set your swords to down, and your magic to up, and then use magic a lot until your magic capped out. This system had it's problems, but none of them were like what you describe above.
The primary problem with this system was that it was skill based, and I mean the skill of the PLAYER. Which a lot of people didn't like because... they weren't very good at it. Move over to an mmo like EQ and WOW and if you've been playing for 2 years, and some noob comes on, it doesn't matter how good they are. You put the time in, you're level 60, you're going to be that much more powerful than them. In UO, if you were good at that sort of thing, you could be just as twinked out as any other player in the game in a matter of weeks or even days. And even if you weren't you could still manage to kill them in PVP if you knew what you were doing.
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> UO, being the first "real" mmo ...
I loved UO as much as any Ultima fan but you need to check your revisionist history
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
> Basically your character had a capped number of skill points
Yeah, "Club 700" was cute in the 2000's -- MMORPG have since moved on, for better or worse.
> This system had it's problems
Calling the grind by any other name is still the grind. (And yes I knew you could GM almost any skill in a few hours with the 8x8 method.)
--
Only Cowards Censor
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Now, UO was a very innovative game for the CRPG genre, but created new problems. It basically invented the 'Grind'.
Grind was around well before UO. Rogue [wikipedia.org] did it in 1980. And grind long predates computer games since it's a common component of many loyalty marketing programs offered by private commerce. From the Wikipedia webpage on loyalty marketing [wikipedia.org]:
Trading stamps
The first trading stamps were introduced in 1891, the Blue Stamp Trading System, where stamps affixed to booklets could be redeemed for store products. The Sperry and Hutchinson Company, started in 1896 in Jackson, Michigan, was the first third-party provider of trading stamps for various companies, including dry goods dealers, gas stations and later supermarkets. S&H Green Stamps, as the company was commonly called, opened its first redemption center in 1897. Customers could take their filled booklets of "green stamps" and redeem them for household products, kitchen items, and personal items. When the G.I.s returned from World War II the trading stamps business took off when numerous third-party companies created their own trading stamp programs to offer to supermarkets and other retailers.
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How did Rogue have grind? You lost everything when you died. I never did beat that damned game, and I've spent more hours in Rogue or it's variants than any other game in history. lol. But that wasn't grind... it was suspense and mystery to me.
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How did Rogue have grind?
[...]
and I've spent more hours in Rogue or it's variants than any other game in history
A lot of hours you say? Grind is not a well-defined term. But for me, I usually consider grind in a computer game to be a repetitive activity that you have to do at a computer just to play the game. For Rogue, that activity is clearing out a level. For a lot of modern MMO games, grind is clobbering mobs, harvesting resources, making things, and running quests - in the corresponding semantics of the game.
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Skill locking didn't enter into things for a few years though, in the good old days you could spend forever GMing your main skills, then walk past somebody
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you go to shard A, get weapon A1, go to shard B and get armor B1 because the monster that carries said armor is very susceptible to A1 [...] , then go to shard C where every monster [...] is really hard to kill... unless you have weapon A1 which deals a damage these mobs don't have any resistance to [...]
Megaman?
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Interesting - sounds about like the impact of free trade in the real world. You min-max each step of a supply chain in the country whose laws are most allowing of polluting/exploitation/etc of that process, and sell the product wherever you can get top dollar for it.
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Maybe with the main difference that not only I can op-out of the game whenever I wish so (and hence the game crumbles if it succumbs to this min-max strategy and enough people loathe that), and that the original idea behind the game was that it should be fun to partake in it, rather than just trying to get as much xp/loot/blingbling as possible... though it's hard to tell with contemporary MMOs, I have to admit that.
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I doubt they are doing this, but I had thought up an interesting solution to this a while back.
XP can be treated as a universal currency. All servers are assigned XP points based upon the users % spent on their server. So you have a central authentication system that knows user Z spend 40% of his time this month on server X and 60% of his time on server Y this month. Server X in total is slightly less popular and given its 1000 users and their time spent gets allotted say 4000XP, and Server Y with its more
Re: we are all thinking it (Score:2)
Would the lack of pubic hair be a problem?
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It's not a problem if each server is just it's own persistent world ... let characters from the official servers import into persistent worlds, but not export.
BTDT (Score:1)
So, it's like DikuMUD with graphics. I for one, welcome these ideas from 25 years ago! Combine that with Ultima VII-grade graphics and you have a winner in my book!
So, DayZ? (Score:2)
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Not altruism (Score:1)
Never going to happen ... (Score:2)
Game code will be properly abstracted from engine code and it will be open source? Sure ....
Unless they give true full source code access the best players will be able to do is turn some near irrelevant dials and connect some blocks together to form a "new" quest, just like all these other MMOs which promise players will be able to develop content.
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Depends on how flexible the world-controlling engine code is in relation to the content of the actual game world. I once imagined something like this and as long as enough work is placed on the fundamental mechanics of inter-server operation then I can see it as doable.
Basically they need to have a set of rules with enough variables that can allow for the individual server environment to change sufficiently enough to make the different worlds interesting while still retaining a 'core' code that can handle t
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I was downloading mods on the fly in Unreal a long long time ago, needing add-ons is not a problem (other than security wise, need to use something like NCl or I guess Asm.js ... shudder). Properly abstracting the game code and running it all in script is not a problem either (again, Unreal).
It's just that modern developers seem utterly incapable of proper abstraction and lack the mindset to open source any part of their work ... I seriously doubt anyone working on Shards is any different. They'll give peop
In case you missed it... (Score:4, Interesting)
This has been going on for years already. RunUO [runuo.com].
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And yet utterly devoid of entertainment value.
There's an extremely high barrier to entry for new players. Which client do you install? Which of the 3 or 4 third party assist tools do you need? Where do you download all that?
Even once you get the game client up and running, you end up with choice paralysis trying to find out what server to play.
Picking a server involves shitloads of googling and visiting each of their random websites while they explain mostly i
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Well, what do you expect from a platform that is 15 years old, and poorly maintained at best? I mean, Origin tried to go to a 3D client and then, in the middle of developing it they decided, "this is a waste of time, we're abandoning it." WHAT? I mean it wasn't perfect, but it had potential, so they basically threw years of client development out the window.
And that was by no means meant to target Ultima Online solely, it was more to point out emulation of servers. They have this stuff for other popular
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Oh, one other thing. A high barrier to entry isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Lower the bar too much and you get things like... AOL and Facebook.
Pass.
Of course the subtext is.. (Score:1)
You're in your mom's basement in your mid 30s and you're not getting any.
Shard is for you!
I had an idea similar once (Score:2)
Have a MMORPG that players can host on their own server.
Everyone can host their own server.
There's no rules against hacking cuz you can't stop it anyway
Have a main server which allows people to buy virtual goods.
Allow players to make their own meshes they can sell on the main server's virtual good server, and get a cut.
Matches User Behaviour (Score:1)
I think this idea really matches what I see in a lot of young gamers now. If you've spent any time on Minecraft lately, you'll find a tremendous diversity of play styles and server types. Having a professionally produced, nicely scaling MMORPG that the players can bring their creativity to, could provide a nice market for them.
MO / PW (Score:1)
Too many to count... (Score:1)
Um... so what? UO has been around so long now there's a veritable legion of "former UO developers" out there running around. A quick check of the bios on the company website doesn't raise much confidence that the claim of being a "former UO developer" is worth much - they mostly only worked there for a short time and on one single expansion well into the "let's keep ol' bessie runnin' one more season" phase of UO's life.
Being "invol
reminds me a bit of Piers Anthony's Kilobyte (Score:2)
Oh, wait, FB bought it.
cheap designer handbags http://www.shoesctv.com (Score:1)