How would you simplify UO?

[RavenWinterHawk]

What would you do to simply the game of UO?

Maybe formulas
Maybe actions
Maybe sequences

Whatever? How would you simplify the game.

This is a brainstorm exercise. Not no the idea sucks.

First I would get rid of the 6 types of resists and simplify the formula.
Any armour piece or piece of jewelry can have up to 100 AR rating.
For a person, putting on jewelry armor, carry a weapon and what have you the maximium is 1000.

All damage would be dealt with this equation.

I mean why have all this stuff really if we use consecrete weapon 8 or 10 times.

Wouldnt it be simplier to just toss on your items and see you have an armor rating of 798/1000.


When buying armour you dont have to subtract ER and add the FR and see if you PR changes. No the other PR.

Simplify it.

THEN you could use Energy Resist, Physical Resist, Poison Resist, Cold Resist and Fire Resist in this fashion.

BENEFITS and PENALTIES to the different armor types. Now youre adding depth and simplifying.

Wood armour might have ER benefit but suffers from fire.
Plate might have a FR and PR resist but energy might be a bit of a quirk
Leater helps with CR but is week with physical harm.
Scale armour who knows.

Now consecrete goes to the above. Casting and weapon selection is based on what the guy is actually wearing. Everyone isnt wearing the same stuff. What Samuari or Leather.

 

[love2winalot]

I would have someone go to each item/creature/weapon/ect in the game, and to each web site that has info on those things, and consolidate all into, "1" area. No more asking, What is this, or how do i use that, and getting answers, go to this site, no wait this other site is better, or wait, that site info was outdated, go here instead.

imhop, Going to 1 site for info is a lot simpler than going to 5 sites for info.

 

[Sarphus]

I wouldn't.

I like game systems that have an easy entry point, but grow into something very complex and interesting. I like using math to dissassemble systems and figure them out.

I like figuring things out in general.

For example, I think Pokemon is a very well designed game. It's very easy to learn how to play, but the actual game systems are very complicated when you get to "high lvl" tournament pokemon. I know it's supposed to be a kids game, but there are actually very high lvl tournaments where people go through all sorts of rituals to breed the right moves onto a pokemon with the right personality and the right starting stats, etc. Trust me, it's far very complicated (I simplified it to explain how beautiful it is).

When you start out in pokemon, the game is very simple to understand. In a nutshell, it's a glorified version of rock paper scissors. Then you learn more and more about how various moves can be chained with each other and used across pokemon, etc. Eventually, you delve into a depth of strategy that is very complicated and interesting.

That being said, the entry-point to UO could use some work. It's a hard game to get started on. It was very hard to figure out when I started UO, but I started when UO started, so everyone was a newbie with me. It's different now, so I would say that UO needs to have an easy starting point to get people up to speed with a very basic level of understanding of the game and gradually work them into the more complex nature of how the various systems work. I would fix the entry point issue by making KR a viable client and greatly enhancing the official documentation of the game.

 

[MYUO]

I agree the armor resists are a nightmare for most of the players - it forces players to do too much un-necessary calculations without providing any entertainment value. I am all for diversification but this is too much.

When it is so hard to put a set of high quality equipments together, ppl will do what ever they can to resist any changes that will make them going through the process again. That is why balancing and changingg game mechanism have been so difficult.

The first thing I would do is to make the increment of each resists at 5 instead of the current 1. That will make assembling a set of armor much easier. Meanwhile, I would also make the increment of SDI, LRC, DI, Hit Leeches, Hit spells, Hit Lower Defense/Attack, luck, Reflect Physical, and some other mods on weapons, armors and jewlries at 5. These changes should be very easy to make but they will greatly simplify a major part of the game play - the assemblying of equipment for pvp and pvm.

Next, I would provide player with a menu showing all the stats, mods and their caps in a single dynamic gump that updates itself in real time. This function is necessary for both 2D and KR.

Finally, I would push for the in-game organizers like jewlry box, armor/weapon chest etc that can sort the mods for the players. The organizers don't have to reduce the item count as BOD books, but they have to be highly flexible and exploit proof.

Making the 3 changes above will be the first step, but they alone will make the game much more enjoyable for both vets and new players.

 

[Black Sun]

The only thing I would do would be to re-vert the armor and weapons to remove all this % and other modifiers nonsense. Lets to back to might, power, vanq etc. Life was so much simpler before I had to take 10 minutes to decide if a weapon was good enough to use or not. Same thing with armor. No modifiers, let's go back to dex penalties and AR ratings. It was so much easier. Do you want a high AR and low dex (plate) or high dex, and low AR (leather)? I'm all for keeping in some of the other modifiers, spell chanelling, MR, LRC, slayers, etc. But the elemental resists/damges are just annoying. I want to relax and play a game, not do math.

 

[Gildar]

I wouldn't simplify it, persay. I'd make the complications that come with item properties less important, however, so casual players can still fight most things without needing to understand item properties (but would have an easier time if they understood it and obtained the best of the best suits).

 

[Sarphus]

...
Next, I would provide player with a menu showing all the stats, mods and their caps in a single dynamic gump that updates itself in real time. This function is necessary for both 2D and KR.

Finally, I would push for the in-game organizers like jewlry box, armor/weapon chest etc that can sort the mods for the players. The organizers don't have to reduce the item count as BOD books, but they have to be highly flexible and exploit proof.

Making the 3 changes above will be the first step, but they alone will make the game much more enjoyable for both vets and new players.

I thought it worth mentioning that your second suggestion can already be done with KR. If KR performed better as a game client, this issue would be nullified. I love using KR to build suits btw. It's even easier than using a spreadsheet

On point 3... I agree completely. There needs to be a searchable jewlery box and possibly some kind of interface to dump all jewlery from one container into a jewlery box (rather than dragging each piece of jewlery into the box individually). Going through a collection of jewlery to find the right ring or bracelet for a suit is really annoying. You could probably write a custom KR mod to do this, but it would be pretty involved. That reminds me... I was going to do that.

 

[Loqucious]

This is a great question that I have been considering for a long time. I think the game was much more creative when it was more simple. People's imaginations had to be much greater when the game was simple.

Now, can we make the game more simple? Yes, but we would need a specific shard dedicated to it. Here goes.....................retro shard.

 

[phantus]

A status screen that added up the stats and mods for a suit so people who think adding to 100 is too difficult.

Each mod would have a detailed description when you mouse over it telling it's use and effect.

Simple enough?

 

[Eslake]

My first step to simplifying the game would be to cut out the math!
No more elemental resistances (restore Magic Resist).

Items should have only 1 property (if any) and there should only be 7 properties!!

Absorption
Anger
Attribute Bonus
Elemental Absorption
Hit Chance
Skill%(not+)
Night Sight

Absorption
Suits of armor should reduce damage. period. Leather should reduce/absorb 1 point.
Up the scale to Plate - a full suit of which should absorb 6.
This means that any damage the character would take is absolutely reduced by that much.
Mixed sets would use the average of pieces' value (rounded down)
(studded 30% med reduction, plate nulifies it)
Accompanying this would of course be the return of the Dexterity Penalty for armor types. 0 for leather, up to 30 for Plate. (don't freak out yet, see Anger below)

Anger
Why is it we have no means of keeping a creature mad at the tank who is whacking it with a soul seeker rather than the mage who is casting fireballs?
Anger would only appear on armors above leather, have a value from 5-15 and cap at 75%. It would incline a creature to attack the wearer over any other potential target.
(yes!! with Plate armor and anger, we could finally TANK for our groups!)

Attribute Bonus
Simple enough. A piece could have 1-7 bonus to any of the 3 attributes. Capped at 15/attribute. (not counting spells, potions, petals..)

Elemental Absorption
Similar to the Absorption factor of armor types. Artifacts/items which currently have unusually high resists to a specific element would be converted to an absorption factor (1-3) to a specific type of damage.
Brightsights for example would give a +2 fire absorption.
(capped at 5, and only 1 elemental absorption can effect a character at a time)

Hit Chance
A raw % increase to hit chance regardless of weapon type. A single piece caps at 10%, and the character cap is 25%

Skill%
Bonus by items should not allow a character to do something they cannot do without it. The bonuses should simply make them more successful at it.
Replace +15 jewlery etc with +15% modifiers like the crafting talismans have right now.

Night Sight
Since we can't all be elves or mages.


Durability - Integrity
Not a character-effecting property, just for items themselves.
Durability % (at the top) now indicates how resistant an item is to damage.
Durability ##/## (at the bottom) tells how much health the item has.

Remove Elemental resists and restore Spell Resistance to being Resistance to. (wow) Spells! Items don't have elementals resists any more, so the MATERIAL an item is made of should automatically determine it's Durability %.

So replace Durability % with Integrity. A numeric value indicating how many times the item can be fortified with PoF. (the number decreases with each use)


It isn't as complicated as it looks at first glance. This would be the entire properties system for all items, so I think it is extremely simplified.

It would restore crafters (limited PoF uses), nerf several gimplates without actually nerfing any skill (eliminating +skill items), and give us a reason to chose armor other than barbed-kit crafted leathers.

And we've been asking for a way to actively Tank creatures since I started Pre-Ren, this would give us that.

 

[Connor_Graham]

Huh? Very little of that made any sense.

 

[MYUO]

I thought it worth mentioning that your second suggestion can already be done with KR. If KR performed better as a game client, this issue would be nullified. I love using KR to build suits btw. It's even easier than using a spreadsheet

On point 3... I agree completely. There needs to be a searchable jewlery box and possibly some kind of interface to dump all jewlery from one container into a jewlery box (rather than dragging each piece of jewlery into the box individually). Going through a collection of jewlery to find the right ring or bracelet for a suit is really annoying. You could probably write a custom KR mod to do this, but it would be pretty involved. That reminds me... I was going to do that.

I heard about the gump in KR but never tried it. The long list of KR bugs makes me reluctant to spend time to learn it in depth and later get totally changed. Still, I should at least start the learning process.

Back to the topic, I don't know why they have "time and bandwith" to develop cocoa seeds but no time to develop jewlry box. The box may be more difficult to code, but it will provide great benefit to vast number of players on daily game play and trading, just like what BOD book did to the runic system.

UO can't compete against other games on the amount of new contents because of its limited budget. However, if it is made intelligently simple with great depth, less bugs and exploits, and good customer service, it will have plenty of fans. Apple only has 5% market share in PC and a couple new products each year. Yet, it has an army of diehard fans and a market cap ($140 billon) equal to HP ($105billion) and Dell ($35billion) combined!

 

[Coppelia]

I would remove that useless elemental resist system. It works in Diablo II because it's been integrated from the start, but in UO it has no sense.
Back to physical and magical damage/resistance would simplify a lot of things. It would clean item properties.

Also I would remove a lot of weapons and the special moves with them. Both in order to simplify the balance and to clean the loot tables. The number of version of a part of equipment push the devs to make mobs drop quantities of loot in order to have a chance to get the one you need.

I would remove some item properties and for the remaining I would put a few degrees of power. For example, instead of having Luck from 1 to 100, you would have something like 25, 50, 75 and 100. That would allow to use adjectives around the weapon name if you choose the option.

I would remove currency from the inventory and make it a variable associated to the character. It wouldn't weigh anything.

And with all those things I'd make mobs drop less and only items of a power in a narrow fork around the power of the mobs.