UO postmortem from GDC2018

I have posted up a page with the slides from the UO postmortem panel that Richard Garriott, Starr Long, Rich Vogel, and I gave at GDC 2018. We ended up doing the hour long talk, followed by an additional hour and a half (!) of Q&A afterwards. No video is available yet, but I’ll post here once it is — likely not for a few weeks.

One thing that the static images of the slides don’t capture is that the opening had “Stones” playing (the version from the opening screen of UO) and the chest actually animated opening when the crowd shouted that yes, we should log in.

There was a fairly large amount of coverage of the panel, much of it from outlets in Asia. I’ve provided links to the articles I’ve found so far. The most detailed, including some description of the Q&A afterwards, is the one from Massively.

• VentureBeat: EA Hated Ultima Online Until It Didn’t
• Rolling Stone Glixel: Ultima Online Creators Look Back on Revolutionary Game
• MassivelyOP: GDC 2018: Ultima Online post-mortem with Richard Garriott, Starr Long, Raph Koster, and Rich Vogel
• 4Gamer (translated)
• Inven (translated)
• Ars Technica
• Famitsu (translated)
• Mein MMO (translated)

Most of the articles don’t get what we were saying about Kristen quite right — she was basically the other key designer on the team, early on; I was saying she doesn’t get enough credit for that, not that she was uncredited in the manual/game. I’ve written up the story of our job application before here on this blog, so if you want to know more, check out the article I wrote on the occasion of UO’s fifteenth anniversary. The articles also fail to mention Rick Delashmit, whom we mentioned numerous times as the key engineer on the project and who also the key programmer on LegendMUD.

The Q&A was lengthy… one bit not captured by any of the articles was the brief debate between Richard and myself about the feasibility of the virtual ecology that was intended to be in UO. He still warns people away from attempting something similar. I think it’s absolutely doable these days. I told him he had to go check out the AI Summit, and told the crowd, “Tell you what, I’ll do it in my next MMO.” 😉

One item that has gotten some attention on Twitter was our admission that the PK problem and how we handled it was our biggest mistake. This also deserves some clarification.

One reason I personally insisted that we continue trying with design methods to solve the PK problem that revolved around empowering players was because I felt that the support costs of adding PK switches and just pushing all the burdens onto the admins would be cost-prohibitive. I was wrong about that; it turns out it doesn’t get cost-prohibitive until at least an order of magnitude more players than we had.

Business-wise, PKing was unquestionably a mistake. When Trammel went in, the population roughly doubled; our churn rate fell massively. We were losing an extraordinary number of players to the random ganking.

Design-wise, over time solutions have been found to have full PVP in a world without it being a gankfest, though not with all the freedoms of UO… so we weren’t wrong to try, just didn’t get there. e.g. WoW launched with full RvR PvP, for example, and it wasn’t seen as a gankfest the way UO was (I talked about this in the tail end of the SWG postmortem I wrote).

Socially, still feel it was important to try to solve the problem of player vs player aggression, including harassment, by enabling players to self-govern. Instead, the path taken has been to give all power to admins; and over time, larger scale social systems have had admins basically abdicate. This is because costs get higher and it starts to get prohibitive. So today we have all power in the hands of Twitter, but Twitter doesn’t do anything. All power in the hands of Facebook, but Facebook doesn’t care.

This is very different from either empowering players via tools, or engaged admins who work hands on to reduce issues.

So I wish that path of development, figuring out ways to handle the issues in a distributed way, had been pursued more, our Internet today might not be nearly as horrible.