Commentary

Restoration of New Magincia, Upcoming Additions to UO

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A lot has been happening in the world of Sosaria over the past 5 days, so let’s quickly catch up. First off, over at UOHerald.com there are some conceptual drawings of upcoming items that are being added to UO.

These include Goblin and Llama topiaries, along with gargoyle statues.

There is also more information about the distilleries that are being added, that were recently mentioned in the producer’s update:

Due to sometimes less than legal history of distributing liquor throughout the U.S., we have brought a small element into the design of the distillery. There will be one component in its crafting that will require … shall we say a thief’s touch in order to acquire it.

That component will be in lesser supply throughout the world. So keep a thief friend close when the distillery becomes available this Spring.

I’ve got to say that I’m worried about whatever this component will be. It would not go over well to have a system that interests a lot of people and then have some component be in short supply and unavailable to many people. Some on Stratics and elsewhere are bringing up the specter of the Academic Bookcase and that’s a valid concern.

There are systems and deco items in UO that would be used a lot more and by a lot more people if they weren’t such a pain to either acquire or maintain. The Academic Bookcase is one, hitching posts are another. For the love of UO, don’t implement a new system that interests everybody and then make it off-limits to many of those that are interested.

The Future of UO – April 2011 Edition

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First off, there will be spoilers, but not to the point of me digging around in client patches. Any spoilers you see below were mentioned in the Producer’s Letter.

I’m saving my thoughts about New Magincia for another post, but so far I’m impressed with what I’m seeing on my shard. I really thought it would turn into Luna 2, and I can’t apologize enough for thinking that. I’m planning on trips to all of the shards in coming weeks, but from my own and from a few others, I can say that many people moved to New Magincia with the intent of actually living there. I want to talk about other things though.

When Calvin Crowner posted his Producer’s Letter last week, it gave us a good idea of what to expect over the coming year from UO. I’m going to kind of post my thoughts in the order of the producer’s letter.

Vendor Bazaar
I won’t spoil it too much, but you can dig through the UO Journal archives or just search UO Journal for “vendor bazaar” and you’ll see plenty, but at this point I’m wanting to know how many and where they will be. From what has been said and what has been seen within the client files, I think it’s going to be an interesting system. I wonder how it will play out with people who have bought homes in what people thought would be a vendor-heavy area, who are deliberately resisting putting vendors out.

In the producer’s letter, it was mentioned that a “core feature that will fill out the bazaar will allow players to buy and sell commodities” which leaves me to wonder if the vendor bazaars will not be full vendors, but instead will only be able to sell certain goods – commodities such as reagents, lumber, ingots, and perhaps the various imbuing ingredients. That might just mean no rares, no weapons, or anything of that nature, just things that can fit in the commodity deeds. That strikes me as very interesting. It could very well turn New Magincia into a shipping or a manufacturing hub of sorts, while staying away from the tackiness/gaudiness of Luna. It might also keep runaway prices from happening, like what you see in Luna, since the market would be focused on one type of good – commodities. With a lot of people participating, you might see a race to the bottom of sorts.

Read more

Ultima Online as an RPG

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Ultima Online really does get mentioned a lot more than people think. There is an article up on Gamasutra, “RPGs and Suckage” and it looks at things that define RPGs.

Some of the defining characteristics that are mentioned include Loot, XP, Classes, Story, Acting, Turn-based Battles, Party, Lone Hero, and Exploration, the writer assigning loot, story, party, and exploration to UO. I would toss in “lone hero” though as plenty of people do a lot of soloing within UO and always have from the day UO went live, but within the context of the article, it probably wouldn’t fit.

UO’s level-less system, which has always been one of the strongest things going for UO, is mentioned:

First, there’s experience points and levels. This can’t be the defining characteristic, as plenty of RPG’s do without them – Shadowrun and Ultima Online being great examples. As for story, Dungons & Dragons can be run as a mechanics-only hack n’ slash campaign, and procedural games like Nethack have little to no author-imposed narrative whatsoever.

Read: Gamasutra

Things That Need to be Addressed – The April Edition

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As we are wrapping up the major story arc and resettling of New Magincia, I think it’s time we start looking ahead ahead. I will be addressing New Magincia here shortly, but I just want to congratulate the UO developers and UO players, because so far I’m not seeing anything like a Luna 2, at least on my home shard. I’m seeing and hearing from players and guilds who are very pleased with their New Magincia plots and this bodes well. It goes against what I believed initially, that it would become a Luna 2. It’s my goal to post a state of UO and where UO has been and where it’s going, every few months, and this ties into that – these are things I’d like to hear from the devs.

Looking ahead. Things that need to be addressed.

First off, No more House of Commons chats to get important information out, because the last one turned into a “House of Can We or Can We Not Tell Them That” and everything that we learned could have been summed up in a much better format, such as a post on UO Herald. It was very frustrating for a lot of us to watch it. If you’re going to have a video chat like that, then be willing to talk about anything that’s brought up. It sounded like you guys were talking about a top secret game that hadn’t been released yet and you didn’t want the competition knowing. UO is a 14 year old game. Many of us who are still around have been around since the beginning or nearly the beginning, and didn’t deserve that.

Be up front with us, because when you all finish the graphics, new player experience, and quest updates, and try and make a push for new players, current UO players are going to be your front line, we’re going to be out there selling UO just as hard, if not harder, than you all, from trying to bring in new players to bringing in friends who have long since left. EA certainly will benefit financially from new players, but we as UO players will benefit even more from new players.

On to the things that need to be addressed.

1) Talk to us about the graphics update. It’s been over a month since the plan for it was finished. This doesn’t need to be another one of those video things that gets dragged out. It’s done according to a Facebook post, so talk to us about it. We’ve been through two graphics updates already and neither held, I think we need to hear more about this one, and especially need to know it’s going to stick.

2) The Enhanced Client. I don’t know what happened in the past few patches, but it’s becoming unplayable for me, and I’m not alone. It’s crashing way too often in PvP and in heavily populated areas such as Luna and Zento. There are so many little things that need to be fixed and improved before you try to bring in new players. I’m in the process of building/remodeling three houses next to each other, and so the shortcomings in the house customization and decorating areas are very apparent to me, whether it’s the missing teleporter tiles or having things fall through floors into secure chests below, or not being able to place house add-ons because a house add-on on a lower floor is interfering because the add-on I’m trying to place thinks it’s on my floor. There are so many good things about the EC, but these little things really destroy it for a lot of people.

3) New Player Experience. I don’t know that it needs to be discussed all that much at this point in time, since to me the graphics and EC are a larger priority – without the graphics, there won’t be new players for the new player experience. If you have anything new, that would be cool to hear about.

4) New questing system. Like the New Player Experience, I don’t know that it needs to be discussed all that much at this point in time, for the same reasons. If you have anything you’d like to share, great.

5) New Booster Pack or Mini-Booster Pack. I think most of us know what’s in it – two new housing tile sets, something with the virtues, or the virtue banners, brewing, and the vendor bazaar in New Magincia. Personally I think the graphics update and Enhanced Client are more important than this and I hope that this doesn’t delay the graphics update, work on the EC, or anything else that you are working that will help bring new players in. The booster concept is nice since it’s utilizing already existing areas, and I know it brings money in, but UO could bring in a lot more money with new players. Please get this out of the way and out to us and then let’s move on to the major stuff like the graphics update.

6) UOGameCodes.com. There are a lot of things in the store that would sell a lot more if the prices were dropped. Start with Stygian Abyss, and move on to the items. You don’t need to drop prices on game time or transfer tokens, but some things like name changes could benefit from a price drop, as well as some of the in-game items. Now the Britannian Ship is, in my eyes, a nice bargain, and I would leave that, but some of the other things, I could see myself spending $40 or more if some prices came down.

7) In-game communications. Having seen the New Magincia lottery notification system in action, I want to see this expanded. I thought it was very well done, and I think it would be a very positive thing if it was broadened to allow players to communicate with one another. Solid in-game communication is important in all modern MMORPGs and UO should be no different. It would be wonderful to have such a system, whether it be notices sent out from a guild to guild members, or orders given to a craftsman or craftswoman for certain items that they would like to be made, or orders placed with miners or lumberjacks. We should not have to rely on a haphazard system of ICQ, email, IRC, the in-game mailboxes, and bulletin boards.

Things that need to be addressed, but probably won’t be addressed.

8) The Ultima IV stuff that is floating around. This I don’t expect any answer on since it’s in a different group, but I’d just like to say that if EA BioWare throws some resources into this project and doesn’t with UO, it would bother a lot of us. There is no reason why UO and the Ultima IV stuff should not compliment each other. This isn’t Lords of Ultima that really has nothing to do with Ultima other than a few placenames.

9) Griefing. I’ve said a lot about this, but I’ve seen it in action, and I would like to hear that something is being done.

10) Scripting. Update: I came off very strongly and accusatory and I apologize. I think the best thing is to just refer you to the relevant Stratics threads where people discuss these scripting issues and wait and see if anything came out of this past weekend. The incident(s) this past weekend have apparently been reported by those who witnessed it, but here are the Stratics threads:
* “Pacific Scripters” concerns scripting that was caught by several UO players on Pacific, Lake Superior, and other shards, from scripters buying up tickets in the New Magincia lottery, across many shards.
* There was another thread posted a few days after that thread and that thread may have been deleted or removed from public view by Stratics moderators. I was never able to see that thread, just this snippet that was cached in Google
* Issues brought up in that thread, have also been brought up before on Stratics such as in this thread from earlier in March.

11) General Chat. I’ve saved this one for second to last. I’ve seen a lot worse in other games, but I’ve heard, and I want to stress that I’ve not seen it first hand, that players have been jailed by GMs for swearing in GC. I see swearing everyday in GC, usually from the same group of people. It does not bother me, and I just figured most people have their filters on that don’t want to see it. If it’s actually a problem, then it needs to be consistently enforced or at least addressed. It doesn’t do anybody any good to see things that are accepted on one shard get you jailed on another. If it’s just urban legends and nobody is getting jailed, then address them and end the rumors.

12) UO Herald. I’ve saved this one for last, because I believe the handful of people that are responsible for it are also responsible for Dark Age of Camelot and Warhamer: Age of Reckonning and I have a lot of sympathy for them, but I just want to remind people that something needs to be done from the point of view of new players. If everything happens the way I believe and hope it will happen, such as new graphics, new player experience, and everything else, this is final link in the chain. You can’t put all of that effort into attracting new players and then leave them with UOHerald.com. Bring back UO.com, and put some effort into it. You can’t push new players off on third party websites, the vast majority of MMORPGs do not do that, even the smaller ones. Offer to hire JC the Build who runs UOGuide.com and turn him loose on UO.com.

What did I leave out?

Hermes will shoot me for this, but I’m leaving out Stygian Abyss. I think things are being done with it, and I’d rather be surprised a little bit.

I’m also leaving out the Return to Britannia campaign for returning players, but I will keep bringing it up, just like I did, I think it needs to be brought back and made permanent – offer a free month to anybody who hasn’t had an active account in at least a year, and don’t limit it to just certain times of the year, make it ongoing. I think it could be a very valuable tool in bringing back players in addition to new players.

I’ve also left out your favorite issue. Yes, you, the person who is reading this. If you want me to mention it, then send us a note.

April Fools is Not Always Funny When it Comes to UO

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So on April Fool’s day, I assembled a Ultima Online Spring Producer’s Letter. I thought the fact that it was tagged “April Fools” and that the link at the top linked to the UOHerald.com April Fools joke was a give-away, but some people got pretty deep into it. A lot of it was a rehash of speculation I’ve made on UO in recent months, and a lot of it was things that I think EA and BioWare could easily address, but choose not to.

Wow. That’s the only way to describe some of the emails I received. I had people angry at getting their hopes up. I had people who understood the sarcastic angle I was going for. I had mixed reactions in between. It actually hasn’t been online all that long. I originally published it in the afternoon, but then quickly pulled it, although some people using RSS saw it and one even asked me about. I reposted it in the evening. The reason was simple – I didn’t want it being passed around BioWare Mythic on a Friday afternoon, because I’m sure it would not go over well with them, and I wanted a chance to explain why I did it.

I’m happy to say that most people saw it for what it was, a bit of a poke at how UO has been treated all these years, but satire doesn’t always go over well.

This is not an apology though. Far from it, I want to be very clear about why I did it, because I don’t want it being dismissed as an April Fools stunt. I wanted to draw attention to a few things.

It was not a callout to Calvin Crowner, the current UO producer. Although it may seem like it, that was not my intention. Most of how UO is treated as a game, and we as players, has to do with decisions made by people who are way above the UO devs and producer.

I’m not going to let Cal off the hook though. What prompted me to write it was the Notes from the Head Hamster entry on UO Herald. I know Cal was trying to lighten the mood and have some fun with how we, as players, sometimes see things.

Now while the April Fool letter was not a callout, you can take everything from here on out as a callout. Cal spent probably 10-20 minutes throwing that Hamster thing together. Many of us sat through the very short video and then the video House of Commons not long after that. Some of us even read the Facebook entry about the graphics update. We got very short clues in a very disjointed manner from all of that, and people are still confused. You basically gave us the future of UO, but it was done in a very unorganized and secretive manner. We all wondered what was cut out of the video, what the whispering was about in the House of Commons, why the video and audio were cut at one point.

Let me change gears for a moment and point readers to two links:
* Community Update for March (Warhammer)
* DAoC Spring Producer’s Letter

Those are from BioWare Mythic games – sister games to UO. Both of those are fairly short – having played and followed both games for a while, I’ve seen longer producer’s letters from both, such as the January Warhammer Producer’s Letter. They talk about things that are going to be happening to their respective games – some of those things, they get into discussions of things that might not happen for six months, in others they talk about what recently happened.

Part of my point in yesterday’s April Fools letter was this: UO’s sister games that are probably fairly close in subscription numbers to Ultima Online have producers and teams that keep the players informed about the future of their respective games, including things are pretty far down the road. With Ultima Online, we are giving a video that was cut to pieces and then a House of Commons where UO was treated like a top-secret project that nobody can talk about even though it’s 13 years old and is not exactly a threat to any other MMOs.

The UO producer has 10-20 minutes to throw together an April Fool’s prank, but not 10-20 minutes to give us a clear outline of where UO is going? We don’t get clear and concise discussions and statements from the devs, we get chopped up videos, House of Commons where they have to figure out what they can and cannot say on the fly, Facebook comments, and the occasional post on Stratics. Everything that we learned from the video, from the House of Commons, and from Facebook and occasional comments on Stratics could easily be summed up in a producer’s letter that would take no more than half an hour to write. Meanwhile, fellow BioWare Mythic games Warhammer and Camelot are able to keep their players informed not only about the here and now, but about the future of their respective games, and they aren’t doing so in some kind of disjointed confused video or House of Commons which really should be renamed “House of Can We Tell Them That?”

Cal, if you wanted a good April Fool’s joke, you could have given us a clear and brief summary of the graphics, quest, and new player updates, and where the future of UO really lies.

Most of us would have stared at our screens in shock and disbelief.