Question from someone who has never played.

[The_Nameless_One]

Im doing a bit of research for a podcast. My question is.


How did UO tell its story prior to Trammel?
To give a few examples...


DAOC's story was told through quests and RvR. Also the world had a bit to do. Major landmarks, gods, and classes.

EQ was mostly through quests.

WoW... well there are scattered books here and there for you to read.


If UO was told mostly through quests, then how did those quests work? Was it the standard go here, kill X, report back? or was it more?


What made UO great?
Compare and contrast to other MMOs. (keep the WOW comparisons to a minimum, thats too easy.)

And, what rulesets would you like to see brought back to MMOs?

 

[Cear Dallben Dragon]

What made uo great. Its hard to say in one year. however Ultima does have excellent books around in shelves across the land. i would recomment reading My Story. Virtue. and a politic call to anarchy. and all of the rest of them. Trammel was greated with a badass spell using vitrue words of power and the badass magic of lord brittish. it was made to keep Minax at bay in Fel and create peace. For more knowledge..... Come to atlantic. and read our librarys and visit our museums. Roleplayers are a huge source of history as well. the zog cabal is also a huge part of Ultima lore. and was before trammel and current in game fiction. not my guild mind you. we just RP the Cabal on atlantic.

keep in mind shards are very different and all have their own corse of history.

here are some links and my icq: 149992929

http://ds180.net/hansonian/

http://town.uo.com/bnn/

http://uo.stratics.com/secrets/bio/b_zogcabal.shtml

 

[Maplestone]

My (very limited) experience with that era was that UO's story was simply that it existed.

There was no grand objective, no goal - you simply explored. It was simply a world that existed and the stories emerged from what people did and where they chose to explore. I don't even remember having read any of the ingame books at the time ... but I remember exploring for interesting landmarks, learning where the bridges and caves were, discovering what combinations of tools would do what, dreaming of a boat while earning one gold piece at a time by catching, cutting up and selling fish (my character was a simple shoreline fisherman with just enough combat skills to hold his own against an orc, dreaming of being able to afford cloth to cut his own clothing). The story was just that you had a character, a map and a rich landscape of actions to explore. In that early era, nothing else was required.

To me, UO was at its strongest when it's simply a whole lot of tools and a sprawling map of unexplored lands.

edit: most people "knew" the UO world/story from the single-player games ... which many of us who play now only barely played if at all ... I had only played a little U7 but still recognized a few things

 

[Pawain]

I never played any Ultima games. The book that came with the game had stories in it.