Like UO?

[Out of Date]

What other games are out there like UO with player housing?

Daggerfall, the old PC game.
You can buy houses there, and it's a really good game all-round.
Lot's of bugs though since it's so old.

Ranting abit after having read the posts above.

Wow - The sole reason it sell so well is because it's bloody easy.
A 6 year old can play the game with little problems, because it's
repetitive in the extreme and you don't really have any choices.
It's 100% itembased so your final goal is to end up just like everyone
else - Same items, same specs same gems and same professions.

It has got a neat physics engine though, if that's what you call it.
Letting you feel very much in controll of your character, making PvP
alot of fun, apart from the fact that it sucks...
Game being so unbalanced in the ways of classes, races and items.


UO was somewhat more challenging. It's not as intuitive and it's BIG.
(with all the customization you can do) Perhaps so much that it
discourages many new players since they can't get their heads 'round it
right away.

UO is fast approaching the same level as wow though. It's been getting
easier and easier, you're more and more limited in the way you customize
your character and the economy is pretty much the same as wow and diablo.

There's been a certain type of people who's been whining and whining about
the game being too difficult and unfair because they don't take the effort of
learning how to play - so the developers respond by making the game easier
and safer - and boring. Eventually most of the players left, even the ones
that kept whining to get the changes, and in desperation the developers are
ruining the game more and more, hoping to suddenly get a rush of new players
instead of listening to the old vet's who actually play the game and know where
they went wrong.

There used to be a time when UO was WAY above any other game, but these
days, I can't recommend it to anyone nomatter how much I'd like my RL
friends to play with me.

 

[Duskofdead]

No other game offers nearly what UO does.

I've looked at and tried out a great many Games......

Truth is that while many of them can definitely outshine UO any day with their graphics ..... often the games are just that..... Pretty pixels..... which does NOT make a game....

The beauty of UO is in the freedom of the game. My son plays Final Fantasy's online game.... and it's much like most of the other games..... It's a level based game..... and like most other games out there.... it's if your are this type of character and your this level then you need this sort of armor..... and if your that type of character at that level you need to get that armor....... to the point where there is ZERO creativity, ZERO variety and everyone is a cookie cutter of everyone else..... and while they may
"claim" that they have customization in truth they do NOT.....

And another thing yes a lot of them have Quests... but that's all the game is... One quest after another.... no real imagination.....

UO's greatest feature is it's freedom..... There is no set template..... there is no set design you must comply with..... there is no need to compete or complete..... the only limitation to UO is your own imagination......

I agree completely with your analysis of most other online games. Although I am prompted to ask, how long have you been playing UO? Because something makes me think you missed the first several years. I left sometime in '00 or '01 and returned just this year. And the degree to which UO has emulated and tried to move more towards being a game similar to Diablo 2 or World of Warcraft in terms of skill specialization and optimal templates and specialized gear, is very, very apparent to me. Maybe it wouldn't be so much to someone who has seen the change happen gradually, or only joined within the last four or five years.

Part of the problem is that when you create too much variety, you basically are introducing a large number of variables. And the more variables there are, the more likely that one particular strategy or recipe will yield optimal results for relatively minimal effort. Let me explain what I mean. One of the most common complaints about real time strategy games is "I wish there had been more factions/races/whatever to choose from and play." You pretty much hear this complaint whether the game in question had 2 or 3 factions to choose from or 20. And what you tend to see is the more factions there are (games like Age of Empires II having like 20), the more similar they are and the fewer real differences there are. And then you might have a game with a small number of factions (say Starcraft or Age of Mythology, each of which have 3 and 4 respectively) where the factions play significantly differently from one another, but of course, there are fewer choices. The reason for this is needing to maintain balance. If there were 20 factions who were all vastly different from each other, I think it likely that the same 2-3 factions would wind up getting used all the time and it might take another year of patches and tweaks (more likely, nerfs, which are never popular) in order to "encourage" use of more of the factions.

You see this in games like WOW, where even within a given class, you basically "can" choose to distribute your talent points (you gain 1 per level which you can use in Diablo 2 style to enhance existing abilities, or gain new abilities, if anyone hasn't played either game, think of it like being able to put a point in your mace fighting skill so that you get a permanent 5 point increase to your mace skill, or another talent might be a permanent 5% damage increase to any fire spell. Some of these can be built on each other like say if you put another talent point in then you have 10% damage bonus to fire spells.) So there is the POTENTIAL for great diversity for each class, each class having three "trees" of talents and thus a huge number of ways they could possibility distribute their 60 or so eventual talent points.

Unfortunately gear is a whole other barrel of enormous diversity, and like UO's gear today, WOW gear heavily builds and alters stats and skills. So no matter how hard they try (which comes in the form of constant new gear additions, constant tweaks to existing gear and skills, and constant nerf rounds to various classes or class builds), patterns always emerge where a particular combination of talents and gear perform best, and at any given time you can pretty much find one such build for each class which outperforms every other possible build for that class.

That's why, to make a very long story short, wide variety is not always a good thing. It's much better to focus on balance and the best way to do that is keep the scope of things small -- think UO around the T2A era and before, where weapons and armor were very basic, and any magical enhancements on them were very specific and relatively minor in effect. You wouldn't have a plain broadsword vs. a broadsword with +10 to stats, +30% leech, +8 damage, +11% mana regen, etc. etc. etc. The more you add gear like that the more you throw an absolute bucket of monkey wrenches into any sort of class/possible build balance and freedom, because you shift the game towards being more gear based and someone who has the "ideal" distribution of skills and the "ideal" gear will always be able to outperform someone who chose a more original character build or gear setup.

Unfortunately, the "wild and enormous" magical bonuses on gear has become pretty much MMO standard now and has been worked into the general design of MMO's as one of the ways you can provide players with constant, never ending means of character progression and thus, a constant, never-ending reason to keep playing the game.

TBH I was really disappointed coming back and seeing this had been done to gear in UO in an enormous way. NOT worrying about having godly gear was one of the ways UO had distinguished itself as better and unique than most of the MMO's that came later.

 

[Assia Penryn]

As far as rp goes, I love the idea of DF's as far as towns that can be overthrown... however as a gamer with a rl, I would hope there is some sort of management system they have in place. Otherwise I imagine its gonna be like the sigil raids we have now in UO even with NPC guard systems.

Wait until everyone is asleep... sneak.. sneak... sneak... pillage, burn...

 

[Duskofdead]

PvP has to be relatively balanced enough to the point where players who AREN'T hardcore, day and night, live-by-PvP PVP players will be able to fight off, or re-take cities if necessary though.

If PvP is too imbalanced in favor of players who do nothing but PvP, then what will happen is when a city gets taken over, everyone will just up and go somewhere else. And no one will be able to organize any sort of defense or re-takeover. Anyone who was around the old undead town attacks when the guards went down and the PK's arrived should know what I'm talking about. Yes, players could band together and stop them. But most players didn't. They just went to another city to bank instead.