I played UO from the very early days until perhaps a year after Fel/Tram came out. I haven't touched or seen or even heard much about UO since I left 6ish years ago, and got nostalgic for it when I found out it was still active. So I'm back on my 14 day free trial to check things out.
Since so much has changed since I left, and so many new things have been added, and the UI is almost entirely different, in many ways I felt like a total fresh noob starting out again. I'll give a little bit of feedback -- I've only been back in game for two days now but that's long enough to have spent a good bit of time around New Haven. I actually have started using the other major cities again, but I feel this probably wouldn't be representative of a true new player who might not even know how to use the moongate right away.
The beginner quest was okay for super basic stuff. All it really did was teach you to walk, inventory items, and use the new World of Warcraft style action/hotkey bar(It was painfully obvious immediately that UO has heavily incorporated influences from its descendant MMORPG's), and get resurrected after death. I still felt pretty clueless about where I was and what I was supposed to do.
I picked up a few escort quests, but, I would have to agree with what some said in above posts --- descriptions about quest objectives are very, very vague. I got lost many times and couldn't find things, in fact I went around the "central hub" in New Haven at least 10 times trying to find "New Haven Bard" (the NPC asked me to take them there as if it was a shop name, so I was checking sign posts for that shop) and somehow of course that's one building kinda way off to the west from the main part of town and the useless "profession guide" guy standing in town square only tells you about class trainers. Being able to ask the NPC for a little more detail would be nice.
Also, is it my imagination, or did they totally take out NPC interactivity? Didn't NPC's used to react when you used their name, or asked them questions? I can't seem to get anything to work other than "vendor buy/vendor sell." Didn't you used to be able to ask at least basic questions and have NPC's respond? I seem to recall NPC's giving out basic information about what services existed in their town or basic directions if you knew how to ask the questions, but NPC's seem totally lobotomized now. At least in New Haven.
I would agree that there is insufficient information about how to go about building an effective character or progressing efficiently. I'm "experienced enough" in UO to realize, with the many changes taken into consideration, that I haven't a clue how to effectively combine the new skills or what I should be aiming for. I was never really a heavy powergamer but I'm pretty sure any new player would be aggravated to be told, by another player, 2 months down the line, that combining say item ID and tactics and swords and meditation was wasted effort. As for the many new skills -- bushido, ninjitsu, several others I glanced at in the list but haven't a clue what they do --- I have NO IDEA what they're used for, what they are good for, anything. Nor any clue how to get that information from the game itself or NPC's.
I have had a lot of attention lavished on me for having the (young) title on my shard, which apparently is heavily depopulated from when I left -- it was at one time one of the fuller servers after the traditionally packed popular E. Coast pvp/big guild shards. But most of that attention has come in the form of throwing checks, gold and gear at me while people are at the bank, before recalling back to their house or wherever they were farming. No assistance has really been offered in terms of investing time or going out into the wild with me --- nor have I run into any other players who seem anything other than completely established and filthy rich.
After tasting WOW and a few other games in the years I was gone from UO, I have noticed something that I think any level of design or dev attention really can't fix. And that's that, once a game stops getting an influx of truly new players, the system sort of collapses on itself. It's sort of like what happens to any social or public system when new people stop coming in (whether you're talking about investing or social security or healthcare or volunteer museums or whatever), growth stops, the bar for the newcomers gets higher and higher to reach as they are competing with a compact core of established older players, etc. There is no "middle class" or "working class" if you will, there's just a big top heavy elite class that doesn't need to play "the game" anymore outside of farming a few things or PvP'ing for fun. That's just my impression given how completely abandoned the world is.
WOW, despite a bigger subscriber base and much newer age, has also passed the point where a big majority of its new character population are re rolls of older players, and not truly new blood. I noticed before I left (almost a year ago) that zones where you literally rubbed shoulders with other players in the starting areas and moderate-level areas players used as they levelled up, and made friends and found partners and guilds, were now almost empty virtually anytime of day. And the few low levels you would run into would respond to offers to team up with something like "no thanks, I'm just grinding it out till 58 and then going to Outlands and joining my brother's raid guild." There was no real interest in the "pre-endgame" so to speak, once you took the influx of new players out of the equation. Everything is about speeding to the end and only bothering with top tier stuff, because that's all any of the other players are bothering with, and it's where the "game" is.
UO of course is further along this "decay rate" than WOW is, but I see the same basic patterns. And the worse symptom of it (and the most unfixable one by dev attention) is the low active player presence. The Britain bank today looks like the Yew bank did when I left years ago --- in other words, abandoned. Even on a weekend, which was mindblowing to me. Even Luna, which is where everyone told me "everyone goes now", wasn't exactly impressive. I saw maybe 8-10 people there at any given time. It looked like about what you'd expect to see..... at 3am, in like... Moonglow, during UO's first three years or so.
Coming back and seeing this, not gradually, but very abruptly, makes me think that in a way we should all be careful what we wish for. Aside from the controversial debate of splitting Fel and Tram for playstyle purposes, its creation did vastly hasten the accumulation of wealth and people basically acquiring in game all the various virtual items and rewards they could work for, much more easily and much quicker. And now that I see the game is literally chock full of added in new "shinies"... mostly house decorations, I can't help but get the feeling that it's been like a pathetic begging for old players to stay once they didn't have something "meaningful" to work towards anymore. "Please, um, I know you've been a 7xgm for two years already, but , in six months we're adding neon purple tapestries you can hang in your house." Or whatever. I can't see what else a lot of the crap I see choking the wilderness framerate in houses was for other than to bribe longterm players to stay invested. Certainly it added little or nothing to attracting in new players or appealing to young players, who wouldn't be concerned with house deco.
Let me be clear though that I very much dislike a design decision of simply making a progress system never-ending. One of the most aggravating things about WOW is that no matter how hard you work at accomplishing goals, the "finish line" will always be pushed back further -- either by increasing the level cap in an expansion, introducing progressive new tiers of gear which completely outclass everything already in existence, new recipes for crafting professions which capture all of the demand for that profession (and are very hard to get, or very hard to get materials to produce), etc. Essentially the carrot on the stick always stays six inches from your nose. And I see since I left similar paths taken by UO with ways to increase stat caps, skill caps, power scrolls I've been hearing about, and now the Diablo 2/ WOW style gear attributes (when I left gear was simply gear, other than quality level, which was a newish thing).
Lots of levels of gear and rewards seems like a good, fun idea. The problem with it is that six or 12 months into an mmorpg, so many people have reached the highest fifth or so levels of equipment that the earlier four-fifths (i.e. everything a new player can reasonably access, create, find or buy) is rendered useless and has near zero demand. This has chronically undermined crafting professions in every mmorpg I've ever tried, because if there's a potion out there that heals 50 hit points, why are going to buy a potion that heals 25 hit points from a lower level trying to raise his alchemy? There is no incentive whatsoever, especially if the 50 hit point potion is being created in such enormous bulk that it can compete in price with the 25 hit point potion. This in turn leads to all sorts of economic problems I think we all are familiar with--- gold purchasing, account buying, e-baying, because new players "late to the game" (i.e. not in the first or second wave of joiners basically) realize that nothing they can do is profitable or meaningful in game, and so they see little point in playing the game "naturally" because it's not fun, so they try to rush to whatever the end game is... whether it's a max level, a minimum level or skill level to do the highest end activities, PvP, 7xGM, whatever it may be.
I will be honest that I cannot say with any sincerity that I see great hope (especially under EA, to be blunt) for UO to see any sort of renaissance, especially with the issue of its technology being so dated. (Those who have stayed appreciate other aspects of the game besides its cutting edge technology, but someone coming to UO fresh from WOW would honestly not be able to stomach it, I myself even found myself jarred by the blocky, jagged lag and map scrolling as I ran around even on a modern system and broadband connection.) I consider it a wealth of information for future game design, though, and I hope that someone will "fall back" on learning some lessons from UO after the WOW style of MMORPG finally burns itself out. (I consider WOW to have emphasized many of the wrong things, while either minimizing or completely excluding many of the right things -- the design to me is an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude in response to things like powergaming and unfair competition between old and new players within a closed mmorpg environment and rather than trying to restrict many unpleasant, unfun things that arise in mmorpg populations, instead rewarded and encouraged them. It struck me as taking a cynical profit geared mindset of "well we know other mmorpg's couldn't keep players interested forever, so instead of bothering, we'll just give each individual player incentive to play for as long as possible, by finding just the right mix of "you're useless at low levels" and "we'll try to drag out your reaching the endgame, but make it just rewarding enough along the way for you to stay addicted till then." I hope to see, in the future, someone , even if a small startup, returns to the idea of creating a persistent social world mmorpg building upon the lessons of previous ones, without giving in to the temptation to just make a powergrind heaven to milk subscription fees for five years but otherwise not worrying too much about the viability of the game design.
but they vanished one day, for when i woke up in shame they didn't apear there :\ It would be nice if a system like that came back...
