Blast from the Past – the Making of UO

Ultima Online gets mentioned quite often by the gaming media, sometimes in the past tense, sometimes in the tradition of “wouldn’t it be nice if somebody did this like it was done in UO”.

Last week, MMORPG ran a two-part article:
Ultima Online: The Making of a Classic Part 1
Ultima Online: The Making of a Classic Part 2

For those of you who have been following UO for a long time, there won’t be any major revelations, although a lot of nostalgic feelings, as well as a mention of the sequels or successors, depending on your view of Ultima X: Odyssey:

The publisher would try a number of times to push out a sequel to their MMORPG, the closest attempts being Ultima Worlds Online: Origin, a time-hopping overhaul of its predecessor with elements of high fantasy and steam punk. The other near-miss was Ultima X: Odyssey – part sequel to the main series, and part successor to UO. This game was completed enough to show at e3 (our own coverage from 2004 makes for an interesting read) but as EA finally closed Origin Systems and relocated the staff to the Bay Area in San Francisco, most developers opted not to move away from Texas, and EA finally decided to cancel the project rather than bring in new staff. An awkward way to bring to an end the, once, biggest RPG-series gaming had seen.

Development of Ultima Online would continue, with expansions periodically released, but with the torn focus of a sequel and with the eventual dissolution of its founding studio, UO would never capture the type of audience that it could have if it was handled with a little more foresight.

MMORPG.com goes on to call it the most important title among the online games.

What interested me more than MMORPG.com’s two articles, is a follow-up by Raph Koster, where he he offers a few comments and corrections:

Technically, we didn’t have the engine at the point the article states; the client was basically rewritten in 1995-96. Rick Delashmit had been there for a few months when my wife and I joined the project on Sept 1st 1995; other key early folks such as Scott “Grimli” Phillips and Edmond Meinfelder also joined in August to September of 95.

I have to admit I love the idea of rabbits and deer that level up and can take on what would normally be their “natural” predators in UO:

I think I have told this story before, but the whole “dragons eating deer” example came from the design samples that my wife and I sent in as part of our job applications. We showed up on the first day and were taken aback when we were told that was how the game was going to work… So at least that much of the notion of “what the game was going to be” was set in 1995…

That crazy resource system stuff, particularly some of the AI, did in fact work in the alpha test. It led to rabbits that had levelled up and were capable of taking out wolves — or advanced players. We found this intensely amusing, and quoted Monty Python at each other whenever it came up.

Raph clarified one important bit – UO was not created by a bunch of single-player designers/developers, there was actually a lot of online experience on the team:

This is just not really right. At least on the game dev team. From that September team, Kristen and Rick and I came from DikuMUDs. Edmond came from MUSH and MOO backgrounds. Scott and a tad later Jeff Posey came from LPMUDs. We had Andrew Morris, who was the original lead designer, who was a veteran of U7 and U8. And of course, our first artist, Micael Priest (most famous for his amazing poster art for bands in the 70s) wasn’t an online gamer either.

Later, as the team grew and absorbed a lot of folks from U9 (which was suspended for a while) there were plenty of non-online folks on the team. But the basic premises of UO were definitely set by folks from MUDs.

Digital Memories of Ultima Online Project

Have you heard about the Digital Memories of Ultima Online Project?

I’ll let the mission statement speak for itself:

The purpose of this project is to establish a central repository of images (screen caps) taken by users of Ultima Online while playing UO. The images might be of events, guild meetings or even character paperdolls. The images will be open to public viewing on an online image-sharing service or hosted website.

And a video:

There was an update a few days ago – DMUO – Private folders are now in use, regarding Dropbox as a means of collection, as work is being done to determine the best way to collect and display the information. See the previous article, DMUO Clarification and Evolution for other details.

You can view a roadmap, or mindmap here: DMUO_mindmap_share.png to get a sense of the project.

Links
DMUO Information and Sign-Up

UO and Community Relations, a Primer

This stems from a few conversations I’ve had in the past day or so, and is also a follow-up to an article from a few weeks ago as well as about half a dozen articles I’ve posted over the past year. There is a lot of redundancy here if you follow UO Journal. I’m just going to break down my thoughts on this, for the 15th time in the last year, maybe 20th, who knows.

Hire an actual community representative who can work on UO.com
As many of you know, UO shares a community representative or two with three other games, and possible four other games. The only person we really see doing anything is Kai Schober. You see him updating UOHerald.com with patch notes. If you play Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR), you see him on the official BioWare.com WAR forums interacting with players. If you play Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC), he also posts patch notes on DarkAgeofCamelot.com. Kai also handles community relations stuff for Warhammer: Wrath of Heroes, a spin-off of WAR, and he probably handles some work on the Ultima Forever project. Kai is also in charge of updating the websites for all four games (three MMOs, Wrath of Heroes).

As long as UO is sharing a community representative with three other MMOs and an additional one-two games, I don’t see good things happening on this front. It’s more than a full-time job for just one person, but the one person we have doing this happens to be dealing with communities from other MMOs, each of which deserves their own community relations person. If we are as “widely profitable” as the head of the EA Games Label has claimed, and if the BioWare Mythic Vice President is truly proud of being over the studio that develops UO, this should be a no-brainer.

Why is it that smaller games have dedicated community representatives, but UO, a “widely profitable” game doesn’t? Look, UO Event Moderators are contractors, and there are dozens of them. A dedicated community representative can do more for UO than a few EMs. A lot more. That’s not a dig at EMs either. A community representative could take care of broken link, bringing back UO history, highlighting fan sites, highlighting EM events, etc. If EA/BioWare can spend money on EMs that they don’t even bother highlighting their events on UO Herald, EA/BioWare should be able to hire at least one full-time person.

As long as we only have a part of a person that we share with other MMOs, we’ll never see the kinds of things mentioned below taken care.

Bring UO.com back.
For the majority of UO’s life, and given that the majority of UO players who have left, left long before UOHerald.com, UO.com was the official website. It’s iconic. This is supposed to be happening, but I’ve mentioned this week that I don’t think it can happen before the 15th Anniversary. I hope I’m wrong, but UO is behind WAR when it comes to website priorities.

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UO.com Relaunch Delayed (Probably), Also Broken or Old Links Can be Fixed, it is True!

In the Ultima/UO producer’s letter from a few weeks ago, the following was mentioned: Speaking of the herald, we are planning to relaunch UO.com later this year with an all new look. More details to follow on that in future posts.

First off, many Lizardmen had to die for this information. And by Lizardmen, I mean electrons that light up my computer monitor.

Top Sekrut Information I Have Learned about UO.com: Since the UO Producer’s letter mentioning a desperately needed relaunch of UO.com, I have learned that UO.com’s redesign/relaunch is still behind WAR’s website redesign, which means that UO.com will not be redesigned/relaunched before the 15th Anniversary.

Why do I say UO.com will not be launched before the 15 anniversary of UO? Because I read this WAR thread in the Official BioWare Mythic Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Forums. In it, Kai Schober, BioWare Mythic Community Relations Person, who covers WAR, DAOC, and UO, although you would only think he covers WAR since those are the only people he interacts with, explained that WAR’s official website relaunch was still ahead of UO.com.

For those not familiar with the epic saga that is the official WAR website redesign and relaunch, it’s been talked about, hinted at, even had official mockups posted to the official WAR forums on BioWare.com. FOR OVER 6 MONTHS! And now, according to Kai Schober, the official WAR website redesign and relaunch has not only been delayed yet again, to add insult to injury, Kai has confirmed within the thread that WAR’s website relaunch is still ahead of UO’s website relaunch. And Dark Age of Camelot’s redesign and relaunch took equally as long, and was even delayed because the person doing it had problems with a Drupal upgrade or something.

Keep in mind that Kai Schober is in charge of the BioWare Mythic websites. He was in charge of the DAOC redesign and relaunch. He is in charge of Warhammer Online’s redesign, and given that he said UO.com is behind WAR’s relaunch, I have no reason to doubt him, and I believe that he’s also in charge of the UO.com relaunch.

Look at a calendar.

It’s February, 2012.

UO’s 15th Anniversary is in September of 2012. SEVEN MONTHS FROM NOW.

Given that after six months of work, WarhammerOnline.com’s relaunch has been postponed again, and given that it took at least six months of work to get to the point where WarhammerOnline.com could be postponed, well you do the math.

It’s not hard to see that UO.com will not be relaunched before the 15th Anniversary. How embarrassing will it be when UO celebrates its 15th Anniversary, and a lot of ex-players come back to look around and see UOHerald.com.

There is a little hope on the broken links front. Remember all of those broken links I dug up for UO people and Kai to look at? Well after many months of being ridiculed on the official Warhammer forums, the reason being that the latest news links were over a year old, Kai went in to WarhammerOnline.com’s front page, removed the dates so people wouldn’t see how outdated they were, and then added some new links to make it appear that somebody gives a shit about Warhammer’s official website. If he can spend 5 minutes doing that on the official WarhammerOnline.com website, I have every confidence that he can do the same for all of the broken links on UOHerald.com sometime in the next seven months. He will find the 15 minutes he needs to fix those links on UOHerald.com!

Obligatory He-Man video to cheer you up!

By the Power of Grayskull, Real BioWare Mythic MMORPG Producer Letters!

Note: The original title to this article was going to be “BioWare Mythic MMORPG Shits Out One and a Half Producer’s Letter” but some people are offended by the word “shit” so I refrained from using that title. Below is an explanation of the new title.

So UO had a producer’s letter a few weeks ago. Of course, the only thing that was new in that letter was the resurrection token which brings together the gender, race, and name tokens, and mention of a few things announced last year that could all be rolled out together in a single publish.

But let’s shift gears for a few moments and talk about Warhammer: Age of Reckoning or WAR as it’s commonly referred to, as well as Dark Age of Camelot, or DAOC, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. You can read the BioWare Mythic producers letters that were published two days ago:

Letter from the Producer – DAOC

Letter from the Producer – WAR

All I’m going to say is that UO deserves producer’s letters that at least provide actual mentions of things really happening, that are being developed or in the design stages, that tell us the actual status of things that are extremely important to UO’s future, and that give us a reason to think that things for UO might start looking up.

I’ve provided a list of things that would be nice to see in a producer’s letter, but I’ll give a few hints:
1) High Resolution Artwork Update. Talk to us about, show some concept art. UO used to not be shy about showing concept art to the paying customers.
2) Talk about the other Ultima game(s) under your control (give me credit for trying)
3) Talk about where you want UO to be a year from now.
4) Talk about what you are going to do in order to see UO arrive at where you want UO to be a year from now.

A producer’s letter should lay out the plans for a game, talk about things in development, and not be a retelling of past producer’s letters. It definitely should not be so vague as to leave people with the impression that there isn’t much of a plan beyond the 15th Anniversary.

This SWTOR pseudo-producer’s letter is the kind of thing we need to see for UO.