I still love the game. But I hate to wear blinders. Off and on over the years, I've blamed a lot of the game's fans for problems with the game and surrounding community. I'm not taking any of that back—some of you are impossible—but in retrospect, I think the biggest problem I've seen in an aging UO is successive game clients that failed to build on and thus appropriately evolve their predecessor.
Nobody was ever hired to come in and, with an expert eye for detail and a devoted attention to the community, analyze the hell out of what the 2D client was and what it was to its players back then. Or at least, you'd have a difficult time convincing anyone of that now.
Ultima Online did not give birth overnight to a playerbase who would never want for change. UO was once a new and shiny game. And it's not the only MMORPG to try on a facelift or three. So how have other games been able to do it, and do it with [mostly] approving playerbases? And then not look back? Everquest. World of Warcraft. City of Heroes. EVE. What gives?
You can't evolve something if you don't have a firm grasp of its DNA. When UO wanted to grow in the graphics or UI department, well, the results speak for themselves, don't they?—they hired some people to come in who had their own ideas ... and not a care in the world for what came before, a world that players—customers—felt invested in. The answer is that UO's various studios jaded the playerbase against such an ideal, and it isn't the playerbase's fault.
Look at all the differences between the Third Dawn client, or any other client, and the original one. They may as well have advertised it by saying, "Have you spent the last four years investing in your characters? Growing attached to the texture of the world? Well, here's something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! You'll like it! Or else!"
An empty threat in the end—"Or else" they'd have wasted a lot of time and money, as it turned out. Am I wrong? No.
And, when it comes to this at least, each iterative studio refused to learn from the mistakes of previous ones.
When Kingdom Reborn and then Stygian Abyss came around, they took thirty years worth of the franchise's bestiaries, threw them on a fire and said, "Meh." As a result, the Enhanced Client is filled with trolls that, I'm guessing, resemble [miniature] Scandinavian mythology rather than Garriott's Sosarian trolls; dragons that suddenly became Eastern-mythologized with the release of the client rather than Garriott's Western-mythologized, Sosarian dragons; Headless monsters with dismembered heads (Sosarian Headless monsters are abominations that come into existence without heads); Ettins that have suddenly shrunk to become the height of humans; the list goes on, and on, and on.
You might think I'm just nerding out here; if so, thanks for proving my point. You know what long-established franchises such as Marvel do to producers and directors who consider their vision more important than the established universe? It's a rhetorical question—no, they don't shower them with gold.
Floors, walls, mountains, prairies, trees ... a devoted artist would have taken all of these things and weighed them with (not against) the world's tile-based nature ... and then used the tools of a new century to express more fully the world's overall texture that was already there; to give us the same world we were already attached to, but do it with greater expression.
It's not impossible; we've seen devoted fans do it right here on the forums, and to [mostly] everyone's satisfactory amazement.
But, despite clue, after clue, after clue, fans have had to contend with producers and artists who just wanted to do their own thing instead of doing UO. Look in the mirror, and please, seriously, ask yourself whether it's any wonder there's been animosity between the two sides over the years.
I love the game. I'm a fan of Broadsword (an honest fan, unfortunately). But I can't defend the game's (at least) four studios ... for just never being willing to listen; never being willing to take a good look at the game that was already there before trying to improve it; and, consequently, for always throwing a whole lot of money into a huge, pointless hole in the shape of an ego.
And I'm not trying to sound petty when I say that it's literally too late now to do anything different without a truck full of cash, and probably a younger, more optimistic fan base; and let's face it, that's unlikely. You could address all of these problems today, but it would be wasted on the jaded, twenty-year-old fan base that you worked so hard to craft.
I'd respect you for trying. Maybe you would, too. But I'm not asking you to do that. I just hope that if you ever get a chance to listen like you should have listened here ... you'll do it. Given all the talents that you do have and that I could have written an even longer, more TL;DR letter about, I bet that'd be one satisfying game.
Nobody was ever hired to come in and, with an expert eye for detail and a devoted attention to the community, analyze the hell out of what the 2D client was and what it was to its players back then. Or at least, you'd have a difficult time convincing anyone of that now.
Ultima Online did not give birth overnight to a playerbase who would never want for change. UO was once a new and shiny game. And it's not the only MMORPG to try on a facelift or three. So how have other games been able to do it, and do it with [mostly] approving playerbases? And then not look back? Everquest. World of Warcraft. City of Heroes. EVE. What gives?
You can't evolve something if you don't have a firm grasp of its DNA. When UO wanted to grow in the graphics or UI department, well, the results speak for themselves, don't they?—they hired some people to come in who had their own ideas ... and not a care in the world for what came before, a world that players—customers—felt invested in. The answer is that UO's various studios jaded the playerbase against such an ideal, and it isn't the playerbase's fault.
Look at all the differences between the Third Dawn client, or any other client, and the original one. They may as well have advertised it by saying, "Have you spent the last four years investing in your characters? Growing attached to the texture of the world? Well, here's something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! You'll like it! Or else!"
An empty threat in the end—"Or else" they'd have wasted a lot of time and money, as it turned out. Am I wrong? No.
And, when it comes to this at least, each iterative studio refused to learn from the mistakes of previous ones.
When Kingdom Reborn and then Stygian Abyss came around, they took thirty years worth of the franchise's bestiaries, threw them on a fire and said, "Meh." As a result, the Enhanced Client is filled with trolls that, I'm guessing, resemble [miniature] Scandinavian mythology rather than Garriott's Sosarian trolls; dragons that suddenly became Eastern-mythologized with the release of the client rather than Garriott's Western-mythologized, Sosarian dragons; Headless monsters with dismembered heads (Sosarian Headless monsters are abominations that come into existence without heads); Ettins that have suddenly shrunk to become the height of humans; the list goes on, and on, and on.
You might think I'm just nerding out here; if so, thanks for proving my point. You know what long-established franchises such as Marvel do to producers and directors who consider their vision more important than the established universe? It's a rhetorical question—no, they don't shower them with gold.
Floors, walls, mountains, prairies, trees ... a devoted artist would have taken all of these things and weighed them with (not against) the world's tile-based nature ... and then used the tools of a new century to express more fully the world's overall texture that was already there; to give us the same world we were already attached to, but do it with greater expression.
It's not impossible; we've seen devoted fans do it right here on the forums, and to [mostly] everyone's satisfactory amazement.
But, despite clue, after clue, after clue, fans have had to contend with producers and artists who just wanted to do their own thing instead of doing UO. Look in the mirror, and please, seriously, ask yourself whether it's any wonder there's been animosity between the two sides over the years.
I love the game. I'm a fan of Broadsword (an honest fan, unfortunately). But I can't defend the game's (at least) four studios ... for just never being willing to listen; never being willing to take a good look at the game that was already there before trying to improve it; and, consequently, for always throwing a whole lot of money into a huge, pointless hole in the shape of an ego.
And I'm not trying to sound petty when I say that it's literally too late now to do anything different without a truck full of cash, and probably a younger, more optimistic fan base; and let's face it, that's unlikely. You could address all of these problems today, but it would be wasted on the jaded, twenty-year-old fan base that you worked so hard to craft.
I'd respect you for trying. Maybe you would, too. But I'm not asking you to do that. I just hope that if you ever get a chance to listen like you should have listened here ... you'll do it. Given all the talents that you do have and that I could have written an even longer, more TL;DR letter about, I bet that'd be one satisfying game.
? You cant even do Exodus in a group without snatching EVERYTHING off the corpse ASAP because it goes public long before you can ID what dropped
. Most everyone I know uses loot scripts (I don't) because it seems the DEVs have forced it upon players
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