Linkrealms
This post is about Linkrealms. In the end, anyway. Time for another anecdote, which I have told some of before.
There were always questions about what to do with Ultima Online after it launched. EA was moderately baffled by the project, and the lawsuit didn’t help. People had figured out the network protocol, they had figured out the asset file format, they had figured out the map format… it wasn’t long until there were people making better tools for UO data than we had in-house.
The most notable of these was probably UOAssist, which prompted the creation of a program called “UOPro” for tools that we approved for usage and didnt’ consider exploits… as I recall, the UOPro program didn’t last very long. My favorite, though, was the one that let you edit hues, the palette files that were used to tint clothing and monsters — our in-house tool for that was so terrible that we promptly stopped using it and used the fan-created one instead.
At the same time, we were talking a lot about ways in which players could affect the world more. Vendors had just recently gone in; there was talk of letting players place quest NPCs and build their own quests (something which I think went in eventually… gosh, my memory of these days is getting hazy).
Anyway, I came up with a crazy idea.
How about we release a binary of the server, and full docs on Wombat, the scripting language. Sure, the hue tool is nicer than what we have, but we do have nicer map edit tools and stuff than third parties do now. Let people buy a license to run UO elsewhere. But make it so that you cannot connect to these servers directly. Instead, you have to come through an official OSI server. People who run servers can place red moongates (the moongates that in the Ultima fiction meant travel between parallel universes) on the official map. These moongates would reconnect your client to the player-run world. And we can do a unidirectional copy of their character, so they can visit these worlds without losing anything — they just can’t bring anything back.
The date was 1998. Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights didn’t exist yet (it came out in 2002).
Well, it never happened — all the questions about control, brand identity, etc, got in the way. What if someone makes a world that features XXX content? Or racism? Or… you get the idea.
Instead, the UO gray shard phenomenon happened. I don’t think people realize that to this day, UO emulators are one of the most popular “mud” platforms in the world, with free shards in aggregate racking up thousands if not tens of thousands in concurrency every day. The server emulators at this point are hosted on SourceForge, open source, GPLed, etc. And to come full circle, the latest update for UOAssist came out just a few days ago (!).
So along comes LinkRealms, the ostensible subject of this post. Boy, does the camera angle look like UO. 🙂 And what is it? A classless MMORPG where users can effectively add their own zones to make a giant patchwork quilt of a world. It looks interesting — I’ll be curious to see how they handle the issues that scuttled the original idea.
15 Responses to “Linkrealms”
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Random comments:
1) The reason that paradigm shifts happen (including changing of the guard) is because those who control the old paradigm have a mental block that prevents them from adapting to the new paradigm. Back to the dinosaur analogy you often use.
2) You’re also implicitly saying that LinkRealms is 10 years behind the times, since UO already has a strong un-official set of worlds around, as well as NWN, NWN2, etc.
No, I don’t think they are behind the times. I actually think that UO shards ended up following a model more like mud codebases, and NWN a model more like lots of other game creation systems. LinkRealms seems more like Furcadia, if anything — a world I consider way ahead of its time.
Progress means doing things that were thought of but never done before. Or maybe that’s experimentation. Resurrection? 😉
The whole aspect of moving game-oriented characters between worlds is “new” (in that it’s probably been done in a MUD but not in a MMO… except for kind-of Ryzom). I assume that at least one MUD tried this; Any historical wisdom?
Everything has been thought of before, most of it has been done too, and most of what has been done has been forgotten.
[…] lost contact with in the last few years.As serendipity would have it, it also got mention today on Raph Koster’s blog. He points out, in particular, the Ultima Online parallels (and, obviously, inspirations). And he […]
Zen!
A rock guitarist said to me that everything has been played before.
Then I picked up my guitar and played.
And he changed his mind.
Trip Hawkins patented that long ago.
When I used UOAssist it was officially considered cheating. 😛
But everyone used it anyway. Just thought about that situation while reading the recent cheating post Raph wrote.
Not really my area, this whole thing, but one thing does strike me. Comic Sans. Not quite medieval but it certainly transported me back.
Raph, great blog by the way. I just keep an ignorant eye on the whole virtual worlds/gaming thing, it’s not what I do, but you post loads of stimulating stuff so I keep on reading what I only dimly understand as there’s always something I can glean from it. Love your music too, right up my street. Keep it coming.
i used to play UO back in the days of t2a up shortly after the release of 3d (when i lost access to a way pay for my account). think i was 18 years old at the time. it didnt take too long for me and my friend to discover “sphereserver” and try to make our own version of UO. we never did get it up, but i really enjoyed getting my hands inside the game and learn how to turn some of the gears, so to speak.
I actually ran the first “publicly available” player run shard and I spent a lot of time talking to Chris Yates and Starr Long about how we could possibly co-exist back in those early stages. Frankly I’m surprised I didn’t get sued off the face of the planet (Starr told me at one point that was a possibility we came very close to but some sane conversation apparently prevented that from happening (I think I have Starr and Chris to thank for that :)).
I had suggested to Chris that we look at some sort of licensing program or something for the official server and scripting engine and a couple of my dev team guys suggested the portal between shards type of deal and the possibilities that hit the white board back then were so huge. It would be quite interesting if we could have hit some sort of agreement back then – just imagine an open source repository of wombat scripts in an age now where the UO dev team is running leaner and leaner – could have made a big impact on how bright the future of the game could be.
It’s amazing now to think of RyNet Worlds (the shard we ran) and how its initial version all you could do was login and walk around with some additional limited functionality. You look at RunUO now and the toolset you can use to get down and dirty with the client files and it is just amazing. When I visited OSI and saw some of the tools that the team was using there I can say honestly that the stuff out in open source to the community today is just as capable or more in some instances.
What if I guess… The result today is that we have quite a few interesting player run shards and options for those people who truly feel they need the “uo classic” experience.
ive played on a free server that claims to keep close to the OSI version and honestly, i dont think i like where they took it. for some reason i just cant bring myself to believe ninjas and samurais would be fighting in the streets of britain.
off-topic:
occasionally, i read stories about historic events in the gaming industry and wish i could have been or could be a part of it. after reading your’s, RJO, it’s rekindled my desire to apply with bioware despite the fact im too poor to make the trip for an interview.
I signed up for the beta I think its a great idea I hope they let me in. Yeah UO emulators are all over man. Was talking to my friend that worked on UO and he was telling me about how widespread they are. Its good in a way it allows next gen players to experience the original UO before UO:KR. It sucks in the other waY, because EA does not get money from them and plus, that is less subscribers showing up on mmorpg charts. Thus, when publishers look at the charts they dont see how successful Sandbox MMOs are because they cannot fully account for all the players.
EVE Online is the only really legit indicator perhaps and even that is skewed by these Time codes….
Can’t someone make a 2.5D overhead client that doesn’t look like complete ass? UO:KR sucks, and Linkrealms looks like it could have been current about 2 years before UO. UO’s original graphics are still the best in the genre. Well-defined, crisp, colorful (but not too much so), simple, and it’s really easy to tell what’s going on. The guy saying “Oh please” in the screenshot… what the hell is he supposed to be?
UO was way ahead of it’s time. It’s still about 5 steps ahead of any MMO coming out now, the only thing that holds it back is it’s outdated graphics. I have yet to see any MMO even IN DEVELOPMENT that looks like it can hold a candle to what UO let us do. Didn’t ANYONE in a position of power appreciate what UO could have been? Can’t they devote some time and energy to making a UO-ish game that actually looks half decent?
Mythos looks good, but lacks any of UO’s depth. Where are we supposed to go for a decent game? Back to the gray shards? Ugh.
[…] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/RaphsWebsite/~3/202915067/https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/12/19/linkrealms/This post is about Linkrealms. In the end, anyway. Time for another anecdote, which I have told some of before. […]