Ultima Online’s 25th anniversary
Well, twenty-five years is a long time. Half a life, in fact!
Given that I actually started work on UO on September 1st 1995, it’s actually more than half. The fact that the game is still running is a testament to the devoted community and the ongoing maintenance over the years from countless people.
I note a lack of thinkpieces and articles, this time around. The fact of the matter is that the most frequently targeted gamer audience wasn’t born when UO came out. A lot of the folks streaming about games weren’t born yet either.
I saw a post on Reddit yesterday that asked “how come no other MMOs have done open world housing, besides ArcheAge?” Ah well….
In many ways the influence of UO is so pervasive that it isn’t visible. Whether it’s Runescape, Minecraft, Eve, DayZ or Neopets, those younger folks probably played something that was inspired by UO in some fashion, and don’t realize how big a shift from prior games it represented. These days, when people say they are sick of crafting being in everything — it makes me want to apologize a little bit. Won’t apologize for games that let you sit, decorate a house, or go fishing, though.
I’m running low on specific stories about UO and its development, so instead, I’ll just point back at older ones:
First of course, has to be the postmortem we did at GDC for the 20th anniversary:
This postmortem drew pretty heavily on the article “Ultima Online’s Influence,” published on this blog five years ago at the 20th anniversary. If you’re one of those people too young to know why UO mattered, this article is probably the place to start.
That video wasn’t the only time we did a GDC postmortem though! There was another one back at the 15th anniversary in 2012 as well, which is available on the GDCVault. The session was very informal — don’t expect a lot of actually useful development takeaways, five things that went well and five poorly in Gamasutra-approved format, any of that. Instead, it’s mostly war stories and anecdotes.
A thing you cannot see in the vid — when at the very start Starr asks how many people in the room worked on UO, a lot of people in the room stood up. And when asked who played — it was almost everyone. A nice moment.
At the twentieth anniversary, I recommended these articles in a blog post, and I think they’re still the place to go if you want to read more on this site about the game’s development, philosophy, and challenges.
- UO’s resource system parts one, two and three. These describe how the underlying world of UO works — from the “infamous dragon example” that never came to fruition, to how it still underpins crafting and AI.
- A UO postmortem of sorts, which is a written one I did and not the same as either of the above videos
- The evolution of UO’s economy. Every time I turn around on social media, I see another Web3 enthusiast saying that they are drawing all their inspiration for digital economies from their childhood playing Ultima Online. Really not sure that’s the right takeaway…
- Database ‘sharding’ came from UO?
- How UO rares were born
- Random UO anecdote #2, which periodically goes viral on Twitter
- Random UO anecdote #1
- Ultima Online is fifteen, which has a host of stories about the game development.
- The end of the world covers several games, but includes the story of the end of beta.
Since that list was put together, I’d also add “A Brief History of Murder,” which is over at Game Developer. It’s an excerpt from Postmortems, my book that has a bunch more material on the history of UO.
UO when it first came out got a pretty mixed reception. Including picking up the “Coaster of the Year” award (which made more sense when games came on CDs). But it did pick up plenty of awards at the time.
But since then its legacy has gone on to be cemented by being named one of the 100 most important games in history several times over, by both gamer sites like PC Gamer and Polygon, and by big mainstream press like TIME Magazine.
Not too bad, even if all the younger folk aren’t quite sure what it is.
That’s OK. Frankly, my sense is that in many ways, now is actually UO’s time, in that the ideas it represented (and still represents!) are actually everywhere in games. It just took a while for everyone else to catch up. 😉
If you’re one of the oldbies yourself, try reviving your account over at Broadsword Games: they’re giving away a veteran reward for people who have quarter-century-old accounts.
I have some photos that various folks have sent me over the years from the early days. So here’s a few:
These first ones are all from E3 in 1997.
7 Responses to “Ultima Online’s 25th anniversary”
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The irony is that while it pushed online gaming into the mainstream, it was never a mainstream game. That would come with another graphical MUD two years later and UO had to alter its fundamental character in order to survive. It was good that it did.
What puzzles me is that it remains so misunderstood. Attempts to follow in its path have uniformly failed and failed miserably.
No quests, no uber gear, no ludicrous resource nodes, and a simulation-based world more than pure fantasy. Yes, there was magic, but it followed rules and laws as physics does. It was a narrative told by the audience and thus a revolution in video RPG storytelling. The biggest part of that? People needed to rely on each other. The world was dangerous. Character development was a long-term process best done with friends, and there were important non-combat roles people respected.
My personal two top MMOs to date are Multiplayer Battletech on GEnie and Ultima Online. What’s interested me over time is the nature of the designers of each of them.
Kelton Flinn was so appalled by the behavior of players in his pure PvP Air Warrior that he handed it to me to fix and went in a completely different direction. The result stuns me to this day, though its qualities would require too many words for a Blog comment. Neither PvP nor pure PvE, MPBT delivered both great gameplay and an instant sense of belonging to players. Players’ roles changed based on the nature of each player and each player’s story was unique.
Very near a polymath, Kelton was a fine game designer and a thoroughly kind and decent person. As you are, Raph. And thus, UO reflects the deep aspirations of a person who cares, first of all, for people in creating a game world rich in possibilities that trusted players enough to discover them, each in their own way. Each with their own story.
Joined UO around 2000 on my older brothers account. We got the installation cd as a bundle with U9, but we didn’t know what online gaming meant when we bought it
During all these years, I made so many wonderful memories and met friends who I’m still talking to a lot. Countless memories from a time I hardly have memories of, just from in the game, most of them in the long running rp guild Baronship of Cove on Europa
Still have my account which I made when I turned 18, still running. Not daily, but I just do random stuff every now and then
I have been with UO since it was just on boards, then we’re one of the 1000 to play before anyone else did , to me UO has the best community and yes I am still on CC forget that EC version. We have alot of oldbies as you say. I am 50 yrs old now funny I have played have my life. But to me there’s still plenty of room for UO to grow so here’s to another 25 yrs
Best shard now is outlands. There is so much content, its what UO should of been.. But now it is.
Thanks for the post Raph.
This might be a long shot, but do you remember if shards/servers had maximum player limits? Were shard/server populations ever controlled or restricted? I’m just trying to picture how many people it would take to completely fill a UO shard/server back before Trammel and whether or not that ever happened. Thanks!
I waited a month before buying UO to give the devs time to fix the bugs, but I was off by years. At the time UO was drawing players from all over in the gaming world, but I’d say primarily fans of the single player Ultima games, MUDs/D&D, and Diablo. I’ve oft said it’s a gaming experiment that may never be repeated because throwing so many different people with different expectations for the game in to a sandbox is not something that can easily ever happen again. There are reviews now, there is choice, there are pvp switches, item insurance, etc.
I primarily came at UO as a power-gamer and liked that I didn’t need to rely on anyone else to succeed. If you were up to the task you could play original UO (even Siege Perilous with it’s harsher ruleset) as a solo player. This was also true for players who were the opposite of power gamers that just wanted to explore, role play, craft, whatever. I ended up playing in the town of Wind because it was a relatively safe area to fight some high-level monsters and build a character. Because there were often more players who wanted to do this then there was spawn to battle, we co-operated and a group of us eventually formed to guild to help protect Wind from PKs and eventually thieves (who had to build up their magery skill before they could enter)..
Back at the time, the largest online community for UO was the newsgroup and the archives for this still exist in google groups. The newsgroup contains a number of the early stories and debates about the game including the origins of the founding of the Lootless Army. The arguments back and forth with Raph and others regarding the merit of a Pk-switch are classic. I still remember Raph arguing to the group that he didn’t see pk’ing as a problem in the game because when he traveled the world he was never attacked or harassed. It just so happens his game style was traveling the low-level spawn forest areas as a bard.
Shout out to Boris SBR (aka Scott Phillips) if he spots this blog entry. You can see his picture up above as a member of the early dev team. One of funnier things that happened when traveling with him was we were chasing down some thieves or pks (which he wasn’t supposed to be doing) and one of the criminal flagged players ran in to a house for protection. Boris muttered something like … “that’s not supposed to happen”, and the next day it was patched/fixed. And for those wondering, at least to my knowledge, he never did anything to exploit his knowledge of the game or connections. Still, it’s tricky to get devs first hand experience without putting them in a position where they’re tempted to exploit their knowledge. I suppose playing in a minimally equipped/skilled Ranger guild was a fair compromise.
On another note, I don’t believe we can underestimate how much of modern game design is invested in to the graphics engine and art/voice assets. You can’t just decide that clicking a fire and then clicking an arrow is going to make a fire arrow – someone has to create the animation and we expect to see the arrow on fire, maybe even add a spoken line or three. In UO you could do a simple sprite graphic to show the arrow was on fire, or just skip it – nobody would care. The arrow would just do extra damage and the effect could be explained with text: “Your arrow is now on fire”.
oh, and ranma, I believe the shard limit was ~ 5000 players. When a shard filled up, you’d just have to wait to get on – which would happen fairly often in the early days.
I no longer play, but I do remember. Happy 25th to Ultima Online and those who created and played it.
Interesting how Warbirds is left out of these discussions. First to have multiple backbones on a game server. First you have voice coms, yes voip, RogerWilco came out of the code That was put out there. I even remember a visit from the UO team to see how we were running our serve e room. I visited many gaming companies and ran workshops on internet gaming from 1995 to 1998. I wrote the game specs and did hours of research to come up with design specs. I also spent hours promoting the game with TV shows snd magazine covers. Teams from all the gaming companies went to my workshops and lectures. In the end we sold out to Wild Bill, and he broke up The team. And Warbirds still running has been mismanaged ever since. It also seems like there has been a great effort to erase my name from the game. I’m still here though, and in spite of the gaming industry saying I’m the wrong color to be a gaming executive or too old to be in the industry, I still will pursuit my passion as I know this industry will go mainstream and opportunities will open up again.
Robert Gunjam Salinas.