How Gamers Killed Ultima Online's Virtual Ecology | War Stories | Ars Technica
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ธ.ค. 2017
- When creating Ultima Online, Richard Garriott had grand dreams. Richard and Starr Long planned on implementing a virtual ecology into their massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It was an ambitious system, one that would have cows that graze and predators that eat herbivores. However, once the game went live a small problem had arisen...
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How Gamers Killed Ultima Online's Virtual Ecology | War Stories | Ars Technica - บันเทิง
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The best thing about multiplayer is other people.
The worst thing about multiplayer is other people.
the thing about multiplayer is other people
Mink Tanker
TIL why I dont like mmos
Every revolution has a fatal weakness (and strength), and it's exactly six letters long. *People.* It's people that kill a revolution, every time.--Spider Jerusalem
"hell is other people"
Vox populi, vox diaboli
"Can we get some B-roll footage of you around the house?"
"Sure let me grab my wolf pipe"
As someone who did this for a living, that's exactly how this goes down. haha
That's probably about the most mundane object Garriott owns.
I'm more excited about what he'll be doing in the next transition than the topic itself lol
You'd think they would've mentioned that his collar was askew.
Is anyone really surprised when he's been growing his rat tail for that long...and braids it!?!? 😂😂🤣
So you took into account herbivores acting like herbivores, and carnivores acting like carnivores, but you failed to account for humans acting like humans...
Actually they didn't make the herbivores act like herbivores or the carnivores act like carnivores. Ever see a rabbit bolt when you get near it? That's a survival reflex so that it can run away and thus avoid predation. Carnivores often have a hard time catching prey.
@@GeorgeMonet and anyways, Humans don't actually act like that. And add on the fact that in actuality it would take a while to find anything to hunt on a real word environment.
@@slayerslayer7623 I'd disagree with the statement that humans do not act like that. Sure these days we kill less animals "in the wild" but if you look at how many "domesticated" animals we slaughter every single day ... we actually kill way more now than we used to. Humans are humans after all.
@@MaFd0n we put them into farms, we don't hunt them in the wild. Nowadays we "hunt" sustainably. Back then, it was hard to find meat, so it would be almost impossible to destroy the ecosystem.
I feel like some comments overlook and trying to delve too much into @Luis's comment. Yes, there are nuance like a rabbit running away from carnivore or hunter but that wasn't the actual point and to further argue it would be arguing semantics.
It was basically a simplification of a food chain pyramid where predators go for preys and preys feed upon vegetation and the like, with humans being a outside factor that can either or go for both predators and preys. Which in the case of the devs of Ultima was the idea (though they leaned more on having players prefer more valuable reward).
-Wants to simulate the Dungeons and Dragons experience.
-Forgets that every party goes full on murderhobo by the end
By the end?! session one our paladin was walking all over town with severed heads trying to identify them...
@Wrong Profile Well, it also doesn't help that the mediums are different, too. Table top games appear to me to be more involved than most video games are. With the former you really have to think about what you want to do in a medium that is only limited by the imagination of its participants, while the latter is constrained by what the developers could put into it. If there is only a handful of linear paths you can trod upon to reach a goal, it should not be surprising people will opt for either the easiest or the most optimal paths.
In this case, players just go around killing stuff to reach a good level. Not much else you can do unless you decide to ask an older player for help instead, which is not something you want to do if you wish to play solo. I seriously doubt a lack of deep thought is to blame for all this. If there is something out there that is easily exploitable for selfish gain you bet humanity will figure out a way to abuse it in the most depraved manner possible. I'd rather those people turn to killing digital animals than run around murdering real ones. Also, those animals were little better than slow moving targets for mobs of players to kill the virtual ecology underneath them be damned.
I wouldn't want to blame past or present generations for all of society's woes either. It isn't fair to blame those who grew up in a time of moral decay for lack of deep introspection. I'd rather pin the blame on individuals who set the wheel in motion for this sort of thing to happen. Come to think of it, I'm not surprised the mad pursuit of profit would gradually instill a desire for instant gratification some time down the road. This is just a more humorous manifestation of that.
@Wrong Profile OK Boomer
Summary: Design your game assuming every single player is a psychopathic murder hobo
XD
true hhahahahahahah
Since most games do not have player housing, that is true, you are a hobo in almost all MMO's.
Zamolxes77 Even when an MMO has player housing, ie RuneScape, you still become a psychopathic murder hobo. Sure you have a house, but you still choose to be a hobo.
I'm always surprised to learn that people in eg Skyrim do things like killing the shop owner and take his stuff, which doesn't even occur to me.
@@xyhmo I think it's just power gaming. I used to do it all the time in Fallout 1 & 2, at least for the first couple of towns. You stop killing shop owners by the time you get to New Reno coz that town is filled with Mafia & Yakuza who will F you up.
I've played DAoC for 18 years and never got my best friend to play because he was still shell-shocked from playing UO as a simple lumberjack chopping down trees to make furniture and being griefed by some player who stole all his furniture and burned down his house and killed his character.
Wow what a weakling . Get PTSD from the sounds of beeping because you think your bomb collar is gonna go off
Haha. Yeah it was really rough back in those days. A run from Brit to Trinsic was nerve wracking. Everyone complained about Tram but I never did. The game was playable after they created it. It was one non stop gank before.
Considering you couldn't burn a person's house down, I'd say he was freaked out over nothing. I was probably that griefer.
yeah i don't remember houses burning . i do remember if a house was built too close to water you could park a boat next to it and walk off a high point of the boat onto the roof of the house , log out then back in again , and you'd be in the house :)
I can remember being chased by geared out players non-stop everytime I left town. Getting killed and for what, a bunch low level noob gear. I didn't play another MMO for like 15 years cause of it. I think I didn't know there were non-PvP shards unless that came later on.
Alright I'm gonna toss my $.0.02 in here and remind Mr. Garriot that new players had such abysmal skills and stats that they had no choice but to kill the harmless critters until their stats went up. UO didn't care whether you were striking an Ogre Lord or that rabbit; they both had a chance to give you a skill gain. They also did it for their professions. Cooks needed the meat for cooking; fletchers needed the arrows for archery; and leatherworkers needed the hides.
I think they honestly expected that people would be more focused on exploring the world and cooperative roleplaying instead of grinding their stats. In single player games players tend to try to get as far as possible while avoiding to do the same thing multiple times - so seeing people grinding for hours must have weird behavior to observe at the time.
@@dirkmaes3786 That's a good point. As the first MP UO game to come out, the players were going to act in a way they hadn't before.
You got 50 in your primary stat, which was plenty enough to use any profession, too bad most people put it tinto larceny VENDOR BUY BANK GUARDS!!!!
i remember trapping a cow in my house with a barricade of boxes so it couldn't get at me , then writing a macro to go hit the cow a few times , then move into a corner for 5 minutes so the cow and i could recover , then do it again .
let this run all night and wake up with 100 fighting skill . or if it didn't work correctly being dead with a cow running around in my house !
I remember when i started out, I found an area in one of the towns that kept spawning fish on the shore near the pier. I litterally spent an entire day running back and forth filling my inventory with all this free fish and running across town to sell it because that was easier than anything else I had found at the time to make money lol.
One of the problems here is that there was only a single visible way to interact with the animals- to kill them. This system is cool to create, and to watch as something that you created. But it is a system that occurs without player interaction- and often, at a rate that players would never be able to even notice it because they just passed the area by while going on a quest. So to the players, the animals were "things to easily kill for cheap rewards while going to other places". that is their only niche in the player's experience.
I have the same problem with wildlife in Breath of the wild- that fox is cute, but the only way I can interact with it is to murder it for meat. Otherwise, it is no different from the rock on the side of the road (correction- that rock might be part of a puzzle, and thus would have more value than a noninteractable bunny.)
If you want players to interact with a system in a specific way, then give them incentives. Give pet the bunny quests, give quests to protect bunnies from wolves. Give them an area where the effects of the system are obvious- such as a follow up quest to the protect quest, where the bunnies have over populated and eaten everything.
Have the bunnies lead you to carrots. If you follow a bunny instead of killing it, the game will recognize that you've started following, and it will spawn a temporary one-time high yield food patch in some random spot not too far away but well outside the draw distance. If you can follow the bunny without spooking it until you get to that patch, you can harvest the patch, or even find a burrow of bunnies. Do the same with predators to have them lead you to their prey. Or their dens. Offer food to befriend animals that will follow you for a while until they get hungry. Prey will warn you to incoming dangers by standing and giving alert calls and running, predators will help you attack...
The thing UO failed at was assuming the map and its scale were viable. The game has a map, but that world map is supposed to represent an entire WORLD of critters. Billions of rabbits, breeding like crazy. The one that you found and killed is meaningless, and you won't draw all the rabbits there actually are in the world, there'd be no room on the map. It should be an encounter. Rolled from an encounter table. On a fuzzy timer that drops an encounter in your lap every so many miles or so many minutes. If you have good perception, and your encounter rolls a bunny, you see a bunny. If you don't have good perception, you don't see the bunny. If you don't see the wolf, the wolf might see you. Get surprise attacked.
Meat is murder.
Tasty, tasty murder.
William Barnes ooh, I like this...
No, you could tame them. Then order them to attack other pc or npc's
@@williambarnes5023 Sound like Minecraft and dolphins. Actually, Minecraft did the same thing with all animals. Gave you a reason to farm them, keep them as pets, interact with them... Pretty good system now that I think of it that way.
My brother and I played UO back when it was first released and early on the game was complete insanity.
How so?
Well, what MMO lets you kill NPCs, chop them up, harvest their organs (each organ was named and you could pick up each individually) and then EAT the dead NPC? Seriously, early on we could cook and eat NPCs we killed. Technically, you could kill, chop up, cook, and eat real players too, but it was easier and more efficient to kill NPCs because they had the AI of a blueberry muffin.
I remember players being really annoyed when Origin (that's the company, not EA's Steam-like digital platform) patched the game and no longer allowed using NPCs as "walking meals." To be fair, Origin's reasoning was that killing and eating NPCs negatively affected the in-game economy as players needed to eat, so cooking food (one of the non-combat professions was cook or chef) for yourself or selling it was considered relatively important.
BTW, remember the organs I mentioned earlier? My brother had inventory bags for each organ in his bank. There were bags that contained lungs, hearts, livers, intestines, etc. Why? Hell if I know, my brother was insane. He used to wear yellow robes and walk around proclaiming that the "Cheeseman is our savior" or some such nonsense while pickpocketing people. He wrote an entire book in-game about it. Yes, you could literally write in books, which was neat, but only crazy people actually put the time into writing anything lengthy.
My brother spent most of UO as a thief, which meant half the time he was dead (and thus respawned in plain, ugly gray robes after wandering around as a ghost) due to people screaming "BUY THE BANK GUARDS!" This was a macro people created to do everything important in a town while providing the greatest amount of security from people who'd attack or attempt to rob them.
He was also rich. He earned his fortune by stealing books from Lord British's library and then selling them to vendors. Yeah, that actually worked and made gold fast.
We have a lot of good memories of UO. Of course, we're remembering the fun stuff, not the servers crapping out (and losing sometimes hours of work) or rampant lag or people being complete a-holes just because they could. Regardless, Origin really misunderstood its player base and naively thought the best of people.
Now that's what I call gaming.
I remember i used to have a mage and play in a group with 2 guys, one was 18, one was 12 .. the 18 year old always said how much more mature he was than the 12 year old .. then resumed running around shouting CHOO CHOO IM A TRAIN over and over, drove me frickin nuts and the mature bit cracked the 12 year old up but to this day if i ever have to pick 1 game or gaming memory .. it's always UO
HAIL CHEESEMAN.
Yes, you could literally write in books, which was neat, but only crazy people actually put the time into writing anything lengthy.
You say this. But I can't help but chuckle that you've left us quite a "lengthy" comment here. (Not said as an insult just a bit of fun)
I also have alot of warm and fuzzy memories about UO and have a tendency to compare every mmo to UO. But there were ALOT of irritating issues as well. But over all, I loved UO, like a crazy, but sexy, ex girlfriend.
I actually played the original game. The players weren’t the problem. The issue at hand was the incentives.
First, your armor would decay with fights. The easiest and quickest way to replenish was by killing deer for leather. There is a reason part of the map was named hind valley.
Second, if you are killing something that levels your skills at the same time as replenishing then that is a huge win. In other games you got basic xp. In UO there were skills you would level by doing them. Lumberjack, tailor, miner, parry, sword were some examples. If I farmed something that accomplished two things or more at once then I was making the best use of my time.
Third, the original UO was PVP with corpse looting. You would almost always be better off to wear cheap farmable armor that is easy to replenish. That created a huge market for GM armor. More on GM armor later.
People that didn’t farm for resources would shop for gear. The only time people wore the best gear was in town near the bank, so you didn’t need more than one set of rare mined GM valorite armor. Plus, if you were capped on say tailoring, then you could make grandmaster gear with slightly better stats. People would look for that gear vs non grandmaster gear. In order to be a grandmaster, you spent countless hours farming and crafting the same gear until you got enough skill points which at that time was 100.
Regarding skills, you could craft armor and see no skill gain. At higher levels, you might need days of working skills to see a single .1 gain.
I don’t blame the players for killing everything. I blame the game for creating a system designed to cause that behavior and later complaining about it.
He is still correct tho when looking at the whole picture. The truth is that players gravitate more toward destruction. That's why pvp has become more popular than any other online mode. Just look at No Man's Sky. The game is not by any means a pvp game, it's barely an online game; it has no incentive whatsoever in killing another player yet from the very first day there were incidents where people went pvp, ruining another player's game because it was "fun". All in all, whether a game has rules or is well designed to prevent abuse, people, if they find a way, will ultimately follow their basic instincts. Frankly, there's nothing wrong with that but it becomes a problem when people start trolling and ruining other people's game. ^^
I agree that players in that world gravitated toward destruction. After all, the original box advertised someone with a sword and shield fighting a dragon.
The thing with UO is that there were no quests, character types, or professions. There were no rewards beyond killing or harvesting something. You were dropped into a world that you yourself decided who you were and what you would do. A true sandbox mmo.
Previous Ultima’s played on the ideal of an “avatar” that would bring balance or make things right through the virtues. The method for doing that in those games was to level your skills and kill things.
For the game, there were four methods of survival. First was to kill things or other players for gold and sell the resources to procure equipment. The second method was to just farm resources such as wood or ore to sell. The third was to kill things and players for gold and resources and use a different character you created to do the crafting work. We called them “mules”. The fourth method was to harvest non combat obtained resources such as wood or ore to craft and sell.
The fourth was the original pvp target. Player killers, PKs, or reds would would wait for them to harvest resources and attack before they could be put in a chest or bank. I knew about them because my original guild would hunt player killers for fun.
What am I getting at? Yes, people played the game to kill other things, but UO originally set that exact world up. They could have just as easily made it worthless to kill deer. Provide no resources of value for highly skilled characters. They didn’t do that. I could get the same leather from a deer that I could from a bear with less risk of death from player killers that pop up from no where. It took them years to dream up the idea to “mirror the original world to create a second version of the same land that was pve only on the same server.
So, on the original land, do you think people played there? No, they didn’t. It was exactly the same minus cosmetic changes but empty. People stayed in the pve only lands. Play styles dramatically changed after that.
I am not trying to defend players choosing pvp or pve. What I am saying is if he wanted the virtual eco system to work then they might have thought real world economics and people’s tendencies through first before releasing. Also, most people I have played with over the years don’t play subscription based fighting games online to craft and nothing else. That group is a very small segment of the industry.
Good point....INCENTIVES MATTER!!
Dugunthi , yes there were player killers at the very beginning. PKs could make a very lucrative living of killing others and looting their corpses. The world was setup for player justice. The idea was that the players would manage things. It was flawed. Players that wanted to play supposedly as good would hunt the PKs or guard their friends while mining or hunting, but that can get boring fast.
If they wanted to discourage player killers then they would have made it pve with no corpse looting which they did years later, but only in the choice of living in the old lands or the new. Guess where everyone played?
They made the choice to set the world up with a thieving skill that was normally only used on other players at banks.
What I am getting is they wanted to put real world eco system in play without any deterrents. There was no deterrent for killing others beyond players taking up the mantle of police. A PK would use a maxed out character with cheap armor and target someone mid battle or while they are harvesting. It was one of a handful of ways to make a living in game.
I am not saying what they did was correct even though I have very fond memories of the game. I will say this though, they didn’t have things thought out and used the players as an experiment.
This is what I thought when I watched it. As an example, in wow you can kill squirrels, rabbits, rats etc. However you don't get any xp or loot from it. Sure, people might kill one occasionally when they get bored or are messing around, but in general nobody can be bothered running around hunting them to extinction when there's nothing to gain from it.
The young whippersnappers he was referring to were blizzard. They solved a lot of these problems (and arguably created a whole load more, but that's another story entirely).
"just the fact that it's fun to kill would have been enough for them to eradicate all life on the surface"
*accidentally describes humanity*
*smokes hash from the skull of a dead wolf*
>Lectures gamers for killing animals.
>Takes a bong hit from a real wolf skull.
Pretty sure that is a Fox he is smoking
@@garywhitehouse9682 that's wolf, buddy. And that was a bit shocking. Not exactly respectful, so to speak, to the animal itself. Such an odd thing to own...
@@JohnDoe-dj3lw exactly, the wolf pipe prevents me from liking this video, it's disgusting. I'm not disliking it, though.
came here to say this
I recall something similar happening when they tested Fable. The dev's didn't anticipate that players would massacre everyone in the capitol in order to buy up all the property. That's why your weapons are taken when you're in town.
As an ecologist AND an alpha and beta tester for Ultima Online back in the day, I can tell you that UO's virtual ecology had a very simple and fundamental problem: the world was simply way, way, way too small for the number of super predators (players) that existed. As in 100 to 1000 times more super predators than would be workable. Also, UO didn't really operate off of a proper logistical growth model or optimal foraging theories either, so animals didn't really rebound as you would expect them to in the real world.
A virtual ecology is very plausible and possible for an MMO. The issue is that you need a big world in relation to the number of players that you have.
Wakfu is another MMO that handled the ecology pretty well, but the game isn't very well known sadly.
And you need to set rules or create a system that gives benefits to protecting the animals
Check out “Sword of the Avatar”
or educate the players on it or its importance. In this case it was just kind of for show. Once they spoke about it I knew the issue would be players didn't even know it existed. Pretty hilarious things we know now, listening to the pioneers who had to learn the hard way. Today it's pretty obvious if you made an MMO players would just murder everything in site for loot, xp, or just because it was nearby and they wanted to see it dead.
The Noob Game Developer agreed but I think the bigger challenge is that this would have to scale dynamically based on sever/player load, with maybe seasonal and real time day and night cycles added. Then maybe due to those things the wildlife could respond in kind with the dynamic weather and scale much like in real life.
Animals don’t run in front of cars or buildings. But stay away, wait till night, or migrate based on seasons and livable eco-systems around lakes, and other vegetation.
This can all be done now really but the main issue is the cost in hardware and time to do it which sadly most if not all companies could care less about doing. I mean the basic mmo model is nearly dead now in favor of fast returns in micro transactions.
But I do give credit that UO was way ahead of its time esp with the limitations it had in the ways of computer hardware and internet speeds on dialup. There’s no way they could have met those player demands at the time but I think if the times were a bit different than it would have been easily done.
I mean they did a lot with what they had and were all willing to do it right. Goes a long way from what we have now
"We assumed..." 🙈
If tabletop RPG thaught me anything is that you NEVER assume your player's actions based on logic, NEVER
The players reacted logically, the animals were the things behaving illogically.
Sounds like they're blaming the players for their own design mistakes. First of all 'the players' aren't one entity. There is no incentive for player x not to kill a rabbit to generate a larger creature if another player is going to come along and kill it anyways. It's totally rational to kill the rabbit and get what value you can rather than nothing.
At best, assume the limits on their actions based upon the limits of actions per turn/clicks per second.
And even then, you are being a bit naive.
If you do, you NEED a contingency for when your players break such assumptions. Automatic-punishment from "displeased gods", automatically spawning more things once the threshold of extant things is intolerably low.
Killing too many herbivores in a short span of time would make the gods strike you down for disrupting the balance of nature.
@@Arigator2 And this line of thinking is how we all end up in square d of the prisoner's dilemma. I'm not saying your reasoning is wrong, mind you, but there are other lines of reasoning that are also not wrong.
5:22 "The gym of immortality."
The dark wizard had to remain swole to be undefeatable.
LMAOO
psssst its GEM not GYM :)
@@Tintamar5678 You see that thing blinking in low orbit? It's the joke based on the weird pronunciation. :)
@@BeeWaifu ah gotcha, yeah does sound like he says gym when I re-watch that part.
@@Tintamar5678 There ya go.
Game designer: Look at this virtual rabbit!
Player: Cool! Can I do anything with it?
Game designer: Well, you can kill it. Doing so is quick, easy, and gives you rewards, and I've implemented well-known systems to make killing it entertaining and compelling.
Player: Cool! What else can I do?
Game designer: ...
Player: ...
Game designer: ...
Player: *kills rabbit*
Game designer: o:
They had confused game design for interior design.
I mean to be fair this represents a pretty accurate simulation of real life
This guy knows how God feels.
There was one event where Lord British was talking to everyone across all of the "shards" and someone ran up and cast a fire wall underneath him. Despite being nearly invulnerable, the fire wall and the lag killed him. That person was perma-banned afterwards, but remains a legend.
Almost half of this story is fake and Richard Garriot doesn't even know how the code in his own game works. And now he steals from his customers in his new failed game.
Brian, actually that was in Beta and LB forgot to tag himself as invulnerable in the last town he was touring.
AMpufnstuf - thats because LB is not a coder but a designer.
God doesn't feel, it just knows and understands, it doesn't judge. :)
From a player perspective,
Ultima Online had a virtual ecology however it was not the one the Developers intended....
The ecology system worked- however it was a online Prison Planet ecology, but was player based, not non player based like the developers wanted.
Basically it worked like the following:
There were natural resources, players would gather them (meat, ore, wood, herbs).
New players would gather these, to raise stats, veteran players would be hidden nearby and would rob and or kill you for said resources- in doing so they would be attackable by other players without a karma penalty for a short time. Even more veteran players would be hidden nearby waiting to kill the robbers, because they would incur no morale penalties for doing so, gaining the resources the robbers gained. Then, even more veteran players were often the worst of the lot, as they were not interested in intervening to stop people from killing or robbing you as they do not gain resources that way, but rather had to wait to kill the karma-penaltyless robber/killer characters.
The end result was a new player population performing mostly mundane tasks to level up skills, with a hidden lower population class that would rob and or kill them, and a third even more hidden even more lower population class that would kill the robbers to gain the resources.
Ultima Online was a prison ecology.
*Screams in terror and confusion
I had 5 characters - all with multiple GM skills. A GM Tinker Who never left the house. A GM Carpenter. A GM Alchemist and of course a GM Mage, Fisherman and Tailor. The GM carpenter would make boxes and chests. The GM alchemist would make Purple Explosion Potions. The GM Tinker would trap the boxes and chests. Then I’d log on with a mule character (forget which one) - but he wasn’t “red” and I’d pick up the trapped chests and head out to a dungeon or popular spawn area and either drop my trapped chest or wait for someone to kill something and drop a trapped box inside the corpse. The double GM potion/trap killed almost anyone the instant they opened it. I heard a lot of “OoOoOooo” as I looted their corpses.
Other times, I’d hide in a city beside the bank and “snoop” in someone’s backpack waiting for them to take their house key from their bank account. As soon as it appeared, I’d steal it and then drop it into my opened bank. The guards would teleport in and kill me almost instantly - but not before I had their key in bank. I’d log back on, meet up with a couple friends and then we’d go loot the house!
@@Tenly2009 Sounds about right for UO.
Sounds crazy.... I would like to see somethin like this in a new game
I've seen enough "Inside Prison" documentaries on TH-cam that it saddens me to know these kind of humans exist while playing video games too. What the hell kind of species are we?
"As soon as the humans got on, they killed everything" - True in this game, true in real life.
One of the morbidly fascinating things about introducing new people to table top roleplaying - given a bit of power and freedom, so many, many players just want to murder rampage.
@@kingofthehamsters Like in D&D the dungeon master made the error of explaining to my friends that although not as powerful as the main characters in the story, their characters were more powerful than the average citizen or guard...
Yawn
that's an exact quote from God. lol
@@gonzalovargas5961 I'm definitely guilty of that. When I first tried D&D long ago, I was getting ready for the quest at some merchant, asked about prices, then asked the DM "What's stopping me from just robbing the place?" Then I robbed the place.
The game revolved around killing to progress, what did you expect?
This here... No one mentions that because it was a skill based game.. You would only advance the more you used said skill.
Yup, I was looking for this. Killing the rabbits and deer wasn't about fun, it was about improving your combat skills. If you wanted to improve swordsmanship, that meant swinging a sword at things - _a lot._ You didn't even get an indicator of how close you were. You could have a swordsmanship of 99.9% for months before you got that last 0.1% to make you a grandmaster, and you'd never know when it was about to happen. So, you slaughtered everything in the hopes of seeing that sweet blue text.
So like real life. Want to open up a new part of the tech tree? Time to burn down entire forests and dump cadmium in the ocean.
@@manictiger i am not sure what you're referencing here.
@UC_risUvfW3oPWpViy2rc7pg ah, learning from our mistakes then. I love it when we see something bad happen and learn something from it, silver linings.
Good thing the ocean is an incredibly effective diffuser of toxins, bad thing that too many people realize this.
Is nobody gonna talk about the taxidermy pipe?
I had some questions....but I'm not sure I want the answers =\
Young wippersnapper
If you can manage a rat-tail like that you can have a taxidermy pipe.
Was going to. By the way, players exterminate everything. By the way, I smoke out of a dead animal's skull. Humans are terrifying.
Lord British has discovered a new way to contract lycanthropy, and to get high while doing it.
Just take the Dwarf Fortress approach and make every animal an unstoppable killing machine
>Giant Sponge Battered Urist McGarriot
>Giant Sponge Battered Urist McGarriot
>Giant Sponge Battered Urist McGarriot
>Giant Sponge Battered Urist McGarriot
>Giant Sponge Battered Urist McGarriot
>Giant Sponge Battered Urist McGarriot
>Urist McGarriot falls unconcious
+KrimsonKyriarch there was a point where the Giant Sponge was an unstoppable killing machine as it had no organs and was therefore impossible to kill, no nervous systems and thus couldn't be incapacitated and was giant therefore even a light shove from it could liquidate a dorf's corpse. Their only upside is that they are almost completely immobile so only really a threat when your dorfs inevitably all run at it like dough through a spaghetti maker.
Changes to combat have made it possible to kill them with blunt weapons, so thats good.
It wouldn't be that big of a problem if they didn't decide to charge in randomly at times, regardless of burrows or station commands : /
It is the rabbit!
HASEnoncorperated Adamantine hammers are the best to pummel Giant Sponges
"Well, you gave me a sword and fire spells, so..."
"But wait, no! You can be anything in this game! How about a baker?"
"Wow, a baker instead of a fire pirate wizard, eh... yeaahhh... Ok, off to kill stuff. "
I had a great time with my Sweeney Todd-themed cook once i realized i could make meat pies out of players' corpses... i asked pks for donations and just amused myself for a while
Ultima Online in its glory years was the best time ive ever had with an online game. Nothing has compared to it since.
The first Everquest was pretty good too
Agreed fully! My friends and I still reminiscence about it. Coming up with ways to slaughter other players, breaking into guild houses, duping guards to PK for you in town, luring entire groups to use your portal stones only to fall into a potion hurling trap filled with my LAN party friends all at the ready - nothing like it since, not close. In WOW I would PK 5 people at once with my warlock dots/pet/fear alone - all good fun true, but never the same as Ultima Online. It was all so fresh and new. Dead player ghost could only ever say "OOooooOooo" and so not fully warn others of impending ambush! Absolute joy. My favorite was a pal and I (playing from the same room) with our characters parked at a cave exit or a long bridge - invisible - encumbered with 5 or so hay bales; plunk them all at once in front of a retreating peep. They only ever saw 1 bale, so they obviously pick it up to leave and suddenly bang, they were themselves became encumbered with even more hay blocking their retreat/exit and ripe for the plucking! The glory days of newb PK'ing. My friend and I came upon this other group of 2 PK's that we just couldn't best; failed traps - ambushes - half dozen or more attempts - the most ultimate life lesson to us 20 something's at that time... they turned out to be 12 & 13 and just plain better PK's - ouch.
Word.
Agreed.
100% truth
Richard Garriot - We made a mistake by not testing out our online game before putting it out on the market.
Bethesda Softworks - Hold my beer.
Bethesda Softworks - What is that "testing" thing you guys keep talking about
Good grief, the whiners can't go anywhere without complaining about that game... it's pathetic. Yes, they should have run tests far longer, but it's not a huge deal. Literally EVERY MMO (76 may not be an MMO but it's the same principle) goes through massive bug fests for the first year or so, no matter how much the game is tested.
Ohh Richard Does it to us to two more times - Tabula Rasa & just recently Shroud of the Avatar.
@@sundogoutpost8633 That's because it's literally IMPOSSIBLE to test MMOs and RPGs (especially of the sandbox variety like the games Bethesda and Lord British make) enough by launch for the game experience to be smooth on day one. Literally EVERY game of this variety has bugs at launch, especially MMOs and online RPGs like UO, SotA and most recently, Fallout 76. People are way too harsh on developers these days, it's ridiculous.
*bohemia interactive
Well it probably would have helped if the herbivores didn't increase your skills.
I remember locking a Stag in my house to spam Anatomy Skill on and letting them hit me for skill increases.
Training Dummies would only get you to 30ish in a skill while animals and monsters had no cap.
Xorn Exactly
Genius. I love this sort of exploit in games.
... are you a Dwarf Fortress player by any chance?
I mean... the whole "locking a Stag in your house" part has me wanting to ask this.
Sorry for the spam... but I'm just trying to imagine what that would like in real life... if in some Suburb somewhere somebody had a wild angry Stag locked in their house--moving around the inside of their house... and they let the Stag attack them.
This is more why I enjoy this nonsense... I imagine how it would appear IRL... and what sort of person you could expect it out of.
Haha, I moved furniture around as it occasionally moved until I got it cornered and wasn't able to roam around.
They were very controlled Stag attacks. I remember the whole ordeal took an hour waiting for it to move in the right directions.
I had a friend who played and would come over to my house and do the same thing.
So you had two players standing around in a house with a Stag trapped behind a buncha stacked up chairs, giggling like idiots because we found easy skill ups.
So, they designed a system that required people to gather resources and earn xp, and provided an easy way for people to get both, and were then surprise when people took advantage of it.
Yeah, when I heard of this, I thought the players were malicious and griefing by destroying the ecology, but by this guy's account it just sounds like the devs put only thought into how the ecology works without any interference and frankly were being dumb as all hell for not expecting players to kill everything they see in a game based around gaining xp and resources by killing things.
If killing animals was required to advance, it would have been caught during in-house testing. Clearly their testers were playing the game differently than most people.
As someone who played this game back in the day extensively, one thing he seems to forget is that the game was extremely grindy. In short, there were balance problems and this was just one of the symptoms of that.
You're right. The players are not necessarily to blame for this. You create a really grindy game and are surprised when the players grind? You have more options and more fun when your character is at a higher skill, especially since player killer's were rampant on this game. And death came at the consequence of losing everything on you and the loss of time to get back to town as a ghost.
So yeah, being low skill wasnt as much fun and you couldn't just really "enjoy the journey".
@@stephenolder4552 As a counterpoint, as someone who's been playing video games for around 35 years and who played UO in 98 and still plays today, I can personally attest that games do NOT become more fun the more powerful you get. In fact, I would argue the opposite.
They should have made "poaching" illegal, and multiple offenders would get a bounty on their heads for other players to collect.
Let the players solve the problem.
GTA V did this to toxic players (players that kill other players for no reason) and it worked really well
ludibrialan exe 😂😂😂😂 you must play with low levels
I imagine vehicles were a big part on why it did not work well.
heard some guys got rich in GTA V by teaming up. one guy kept killing everyone till somene put a bounty on him and his friend killed him to get the bounty.
@GhostHaus literally 0 hours on gta v but sure I have time to come up with ways to make money
If irl animals just slowly walked back and forth all day they'd all be extinct too
Yep, that happened to the dodo
remembers the "Ice Age" movie... "there goes our last female...."..."tai-kwon-dodo's.. attack..."
Dodo actually lived longer than people give them credit for. Lived long enough that what finally brought them to extinction was being hunted by sailors for sport. They lived till about 1662.
And irl humanity is like "hold my beer..."
You know that it's what happened in every islands of the world right? Once roumed by giant land birds and dwarf elephants, they are now all dead...
And this is why I never saw any animals in game. That and constantly being harassed by endless roving bands of OP PKers
But being a PK back in the Fel days was fun. Trammel not so much.
I have so many questions about the things in this guys house.
Dark Star King same bro
He grew up playing D&D and writing videogames at the exact right moment in history to accumulate infinite personal wealth and no responsibilities. Obviously he bought a castle and filled it with weird quest items and secret tunnels. Think of him as an MMO player character who exists in real life.
@@marcforrester7738 this is exactly the way to describe richard garriot. As you listen to him speak, he sometimes even sounds like he views the world as though he's aware he's living in a fantasy world.
I think for a virtual ecology to work, it needs two factors UO lacked. 1. The animals need to MASSIVELY outnumber the players, enough that humans can't get to them all, and 2. The animals need to be a serious pain to hunt down. If you can just wander up to them and one-shot them with a sword, then players will do that, but if they can scurry away into the brush and melee combat is mostly impossible and ranged combat is tricky, then players will just not bother with low value animals because higher value ones are more worth the time. There are plenty of modern games I play where I ignore most of the indigenous animals because they take more time and effort to kill than they're worth.
Also it helps if they're not relied upon so heavily to help you start out. A skill point system like UO had, you basically were pigeon holed into fighting them in order to gain skill points early on. And such advancements were a slow process, so a massacre was the most effective way to grow your combat skills. Also hides were always in demand for leatherworkers, who needed them for much the same reason the fighters needed to murder the animals. Slow skill point gains. lol
Yeah, diminishing returns is really important, hunting a few animals might be useful, but it should pretty quickly cap out how much you can gain by doing so. In an adventure game, players (and crafters) should move out of the "mundane" world pretty quickly, and be ready to fight monsters and craft from _their_ hides, and normal deer and rabbits should be worthless to anyone other than newbs.
Man I would kill for a UO that had this feature. I read about the ecological system in UO and WOW UO was so ahead of it's time.
That's kinda what he was explaining. If there are millions of people playing, you'd have to make 10x more than the rate of players playing at one time. Don't know if you knew this, but technology was pretty limited back then.
Animals don't show up in real life with name tags on them too.
The problem comes down to the basic methodology. Get XP by killing things, get skills by spending XP, etc.
Modern games now include other actions and mechanics to 'gain' experience for things, and one example is 'training' such as sparring without killing, or studying. But for old games, the systems and mechanics are severely limited by what they could utilize at the time.
If players could kill the grass - they will do it too! :-)
But seriosly - if player can kill an animal and get XP, skin and level up some skills - of course they will kill.
What if killing an animal led to not being able to obtain those resources in the future and potentially getting killed/jailed by "town guards" for poaching.
If system was more complex, maybe players will think before killing.
There must be reason NOT to kill.
True, it's Murder O'clock and that NPC looks ready for an axe in the face. If he repeats that wild line one more time, I swear...
One only has to look to Zelda to see the veracity of this statement. "Oh, I can get rupees from grass and pots?" BREAK EVERY POT I SEE AND MOW THE ENTIRETY OF HYRULE FIELD.
I never played UO but I'm guessing you could kill multiple rabbits faster than killing one bear and therefore the risk/reward was out of balance.
As an ex ultima online player - i can vouch for this - ppl tended to KILL everything - but not beacuse it was valuable - but to gain skills - it didnt matter what you were fighting - as long as you WERE fighting smth your skill would raise - beacuse skills raised only via using them - so if you wanted to progress with fighting skills you had to do a lot of fighting - so you picked up ANY fights you could (that you could get away with).
This also meant that ppl with low skills literally had to whack anything they could since only that would give them progress - and probaly wouldnt kill them right on the spot - so low skill ppl would literally run around and slaughter rabbits, birds, pigs and whatever low tier animal they could - beacuse if they went to fight - like wolfs or bears - they would get killed and thus they were getting behind exping due to pause in exping.
You can say that exping was the main reason - the loot was just additional bonus... :L
If you want the player to leave something alone, you can’t give it any value whatsoever.
@@albertnortononymous9020 Won't stop it completed thought, but would definitely help. "Some men just want to watch the world burn."
When I first started playing UO in 98, I had no idea about the skill menu. When I realized you could see your skills it was like a revelation. Back then, you didn't have a ticker that reminded you every time you gained .01 in a skill. In that way it was a purer experience. One that can never be replicated again.
Scrolling through TH-cam I see “ultima online” and my heart skips a beat. Dayum I miss playing that game
Matthew Sheridan 🙏🏽
Go check out Ultima online renaissance...NOT the osi release that came out mind you, the player shard....of all the player shards ive tried over the last 12 years its got the best balance between old and new ruleselts, has done away with age of shadows and beyond feature changes, has a very active player base and is the first time in over a DECADE that ive been eager to log into uo....uorenaissance.com
I promise if you give it a chance you wont regret it.
Check out UO outlands
The problem is obvious. The animals were too easy to kill. Imagine trying to chase down a real rabbit or deer with a sword. You will never catch either one and if by some chance you corner them the deer would actually stand a chance of beating you.
"One moment you are gracefully stalking a deer, the next moment you chase it all across Skyrim like a madman."
ye...a deer will straight up kill a man in real life if it get cornered in...
The rabbit would hide someplace human can't reach if approached by it. That's just game over for stupid biped. The deer will outrun the human short distances but, eventually, human'll get to it, and deer'll be exhausted. Probably FREE KILL for armed human. Still not easy for two-leg scumbag, and would take many hours, or maybe even days...
I don't know if you actually played base UO, but you could get f**ked up by most animals as a starting character. Later on you could mow down most of them sure, but I can remember new people taking a solid 1-2 minutes to kill a giant rat below Brit and even longer to kill something like a Great Hart.
Well, duh. You clearly want 2 swords to hunt deers
Throw one like a javelin and then use the other to defend yourself if it charges. (I'm joking, of course, but if you could get within a stone's throw of the deer you could actually do that if you were skilled)
That system sounds good in a single player survival game, not with a game filled with blood fueled rabbit haters
M
F rabbits in the neck
Some Divinity 2 Easter egg would come in handy here.
Relax it’s a game
Rimworld does a decent city builder version of that. Maybe check it out.
I was so addicted to UO 1997-2001 ...1 year of my life dedicated (lost to?) to digital delights...
I miss the original UO and specifically the graphics and game play. Best online game ever! Thank you
Hei kid wanna try out something just as like UO ... It is free. EVE online you should get the same vibe as soon as you exit the HI security area.... And why are you missing UO graphic's? There is plenty of free shards with the original client support...
I remember when it came out I was so exciting to explore this magical fantastic world and adventure. What I got was massive lag caused by a billion logged in players that continually swept across the landscape killing anything that moved a microsecond after it spawned.
I like the representation of 1995 with a gramophone.
yeah I mean, 20 years, 100 years. It's pretty much the same thing right?
"Back in my day!"
Donkey Kong Country!
I bought my first gramophone in the summer of 95’. Since upgrading to a tape cassette player last year my gramophones been gathering dust in the attic.
@@MrDamo34 You skipped 8-track tapes. Better sound than records but you couldn't rewind them. You had to play the 8-track all the way through. Cassettes were better but they broke...often. CDs were so revolutionary that it was hard to imagine WHAT could ever replace them before completely digital music arrived. I could NEVER have imagined while listening to my CDs in the early 90's that one day I'd be able to carry 1000's of songs IN MY PHONE... especially since cellular phones didn't really exist for the masses in 1990.
Man...I just love this story. I've read it somewhere back in early 2000's and even today it still blows my mind how they were doing this in 1997.
Ultima is such an underappreciated series. People love games like Elder Scrolls and Wicher today, but few knew about how ground breaking Ultima was ever since the very beginning of PC gaming.
It's even wierder to think that what killed this franchise was none other than EA. Yep, EA. Killing developers for the last 20 years.
IT was Origin, EA didn't buy it until later, but wasn't a part of creating it.
No, it was EA. EA adquired Origin and, like what happened with Mass Effect and Bioware, they foced down some decisions that hurted the series in the long run. Like how Ultima 8 and were rushed and released as a buggy unfinishes mess. Remind you of anything? Like....the nearst galaxy from ours? There is even a story about how Garriott called the two of the villains from Ultima VII Elizabeth and Abrahaam to spell EA.
i was playing Ultima when I was in high school on apple2 computers lol Was the same time I learned to play dungeons and dragons.
EA killed it, UO was fine as a core, just needed some tweaks here and there and of course fresh content. What did EA do? Force a perfectly fine 2D game to change to the ugliest crappy 3D game possible...
the sad part is that it could still be the top game of all time, if they would have kept up with modern graphics, and continue to revamp the graphical end, just like wow has done, and even league of legends updates its models every few months.
UO will always be the gold standard of MMOs for me, Richard is a legend.
this was such an awesome video... interesting concept, great shots and story!
5:04 Screw the game ecology, tell me more about this wolf-bong.
Its a coyote, not a wolf. And... Its a giant pipe, not a bong.
Wolf bong.. Coyote pipe... Similar but not the same.
Youre welcome :D
@@parttimecripple don't question him he's clearly some kind of weed scientist
@@evananderson1455 You are technically correct. The best kind of correct.
that name sounds familiar, wolf-bong amadeus
@@jensenraylight8011 There's a famous musician named Wolfgang Amadeus, I think he was named after a wolf-bong
As someone who played UO for years, this virtual ecology was all news to me! Wow! Oh and I wish Ars Technica would have used footage of the classic client instead of the new 3d one.
Yes! Really annoying that they used new UO footage. But to be fair, vintage UO footage is very hard to find. I've been looking forever myself.
You could always make some yourself, by playing UO. There's a free shard called Excelsior that generally has around 150 players or more on at any given moment, and is very much alive and well. Great, friendly community! =)
Had a friend who played a wizard, he hunted ancient black dragons under the litch crypt. Solo. They changed the game mechanics because of him. Lanviirlo.
I remember the virtual ecology was one of the features they touted before and during UO's release, because my reaction at the time was "psh, you'd need some crazy super computer to properly simulate an ecology!" I didn't start playing UO until maybe 6 months into release, so when I saw there was no ecology I just assumed that is was a feature they couldn't implement.
David Beppler no they didn't.
4:01
When God realizes he's accidently left in that darned "Free Will".
Remember to remind to tick off that box when starting a new world
I had a free chance, then I lost it because my own will refuses to see it.
What can I say to that?
Brutal clashes make my computer lag. #NoseBreakers #SaveAnAmputee
I miss so much the magical atmosphere of Ultima Online that no other game has even got close of that..You are a genious, thank you so much for this wonderful game you've created that for me it is far inovated and visionary.
This interview was directed by Wes Anderson
This made me choke on my drink xD
Damn... Honest Trailers just did a Wes Anderson movies video too. It's f'ing hilarious.
I cracked up so hard reading this. I read your comment just as he was smoking the wolf pipe.
The mistake was not considering the Human players as part of the ecology, in the Apex Predator position. Whatever the players were removing from the world, should have been spawning elsewhere and more plentifully. What I remember about that time and playing was Farming (being a Farmer). That Farmers were suppose to find wild livestock (pigs, chickens, cows, goats, & sheep), but couldn't. Because players worked on Combat skills first before Crafting. So even though the player base was told, and the game mechanics were explained to them, they went off and chose the worst leveling path possible.
Calling these players Human is a misnomer. Part of how RPGs operate, as well as many cRPGs results in many PCs being a form of Murder-Hobo. Something that does not work in an environment with a lot of humans. You cannot be a functional human as well as a Murder-Hobo.
So this is why we have the world of RPGs flooded with endless Murder Hobos... and real life having relatively few Murder Hobos compared to people who do not Murder Hobo their way around.
Though, the release of this game was somewhat before a lot of GMs started making stopping Murder Hobos from being the focus of their world building and GM craft... and mostly relied on other players shaming people out of Murder Hoboing. Or just having all games embrace the Murder Hobo life style.
My roomate was a Murder Hobo at one point! But that meant that he would wander the world, and offer to carry things for people. He wouldn't fight, just work as a porter. Then, when they died, he'd take what they had, explaining that it was a shame that they'd died, and that it was ridiculous that they might return from the dead. A horrible flight of fancy, please let the dead rest in peace.
He role played some really terrible people, at different points. :)
ROFL I roleplayed a cannibal at one point, back in the early days when you could get human jerky from cutting up people's corpses. Didn't kill anyone, just cut up found corpses, and hawked the pieces at the brit and vesper bank. Did a whole pseudo-religion thing, and wrote up a ton of "pamphlets". Ahhh, those were the days. .... The days before EA got involved and brought ninjas in to it. F_CK YOU RIGHT IN THE EAR EA! >:( 20 years later and I'm STILL raging. *sigh*
I never played the game, but find this pretty interesting. I think you're onto something, but there should have been a negative consequence for decimating the animal population of an area. Possibly that it would then be more difficult to level up in strength or analogous attribute (think now you have a totally plant based, low protein food supply). Players who were good at balancing the ecology would be able to surpass areas where it was decimated.
there is a part in the video where they clearly said that they accaunted for the player to kill the predators
Richard is hilarious. I’d love to hear additional stories from his time in the industry. This was so good 😂
Like when he got assassinated LOL
Sounds like a scale problem not a balance problem. In addition to thinning the player herd, ramping up the xp gain or nerfing required mats may have helped. (Note I have zero historical knowledge of ultimate and speaking in a vacuum about the concepts). It sounds like the player base was starving for xp and/or just being greedy for wealth tied directly to mat harvesting. Lots of modern games have improved upon the model but it's cool to hear about the origins and history. I would love to play a singleplayer game that was just hunting and harvesting for a town with a built in ecology system like that. The problem is the invasive human locusts riding rough shod over the natural order. Emergent dynamics are always fun to watch like this and some of the antics player get to on EVE.
welp. As someone who played Ultima Online when it first launched, I have to say that once again, Richard Garriott is wrong. See, the players knew about the virtual ecology because he and the other Ultima Online developers told us about it, right as the game launched. The mechanic that he forgets about, however, is that we had to find and fight weak enemies to begin leveling up our skills, and brother, there were a LOT of new players trying to level up our skills from 20 or 30 to 100, and the best way to start that was to go through and Tyrannid-style exterminate every animal you saw. Not to mention that if you wanted to improve your leatherworking you needed hides from the animals, and one hide was exactly the same as the next, whether it was rabbit or bear, so it didn't matter what you were killing. And all the meats were the same in the animals if you wanted to practice cooking. And all the spellcasting reagents were out in the wilderness so if you wanted to be a mage you had to be out there, and if you wanted to practice magic, hey, there's a rabbit, blow it away.
But the developers told us actively about this ecology, and we knew about it at the beginning. What they DIDN'T tell us about was how they turned it off. As far as I know, very few people noticed when it left, because we were still trying to reach a point where we could deal with the bigger fights we wanted to handle, dragons, beholders, zombies, whatever. (My personal hunting grounds were the lichyards south of Yew.)
In the end, it feels like this interview is just Richard, perhaps bragging about how awesome his game was and misremembering what really happened. Oh well.
Right, Rabbits would kill you when you started out, so like.. people attacked whatever they could find to get skill ups
I think you're looking at the trees, not the forest. The point is that they put a lot of work into this potentially cool feature and then watched as more players than they ever imagined jumped into the game and destroyed it so badly that it wasn't salvageable. Then they took it out and, as you mention, even people who knew it was there didn't notice that it was gone. Regardless of the specific reasons from the wholesale animal slaughter, if you were one of the people who worked on the ecology system, that's a hell of a bummer. (And let's be honest, people were going to kill every moving thing regardless of those specifics. MMO player behavior that's obvious now was a brave new world then.)
no he's looking right at the forest, the point is that the feature was broken to start with. PratzStrike well explained why it wasn't working: killing small animals was a very valuable thing to do so people kept doing it. So the game was just unbalanced and that feature didn't work as expected only because of that. The dev team probably didn't see the real reasons and they just removed the feature altogether
Yeah. I don't think Richard got it right. On some shards there was a big number of animals, but nobody cared about them because of the level of difficulty was lower and anybody could wipe out a cemetery from the character beginning and sell all the stuff, with the money buy raw material from the vendor and train your skills. Way faster and easier than to collect everything from the wild.
I think the comment is spot on and I don't understand why some game designers do this when looking back at things. They create a nice story while not actually correctly explaining what happened with the mechanics and what were the player motivations. I doubt that Richard doesn't understand it, I just think he completely neglected that part because he was more interested in telling a good story.
5:05 wow, that is one intense crackpipe.
Your lack of drug knowledge is disturbing. That is clearly a foxclover piper. Don't be daft.
There is literally no way to remove the bowl?
I want one! simply because it's awesome.
Bro thats not crack lol
Its not? oh my god my life is a lie!
I miss that game! I went from Ultima Online, dial-up to Motor city onlline,....but STILL missed playing Ultima. 30 years later, still think about and remember the good-times I had with that game! You should bring it Back!!!
It wasn't that they were fun to kill. They have things you need. You can cook meat for cooking skill. Use feathers for making arrows. Hides for tailoring. The problem was the small animals still had a use. Maybe not as much as the larger but you could still use them. Also just getting skill in fighting for killing stuff.
Except for cooking and eating were both completely worthless back then. But yeah there was no real downside to slaughtering everything you saw, just like in real life... of course the downside will come generations later, long after you have perished so you would never get any feedback as to what the consequences of your decisions were.
Humanity's first instinct when given any kind of freedom is to abuse it. It applies to games as well, as another British gamer pointed out: "Give players guns and they shoot old ladies. Give them cars and they run over old ladies. Give them aircraft and they will ascend to the highest point of the map and hurl themselves out the window, falling right on top of an old lady. And if you give them clothing options they will strip down to the most naked they are allowed to and then run around hip thrusting in the faces of old ladies."
Why always the old ladies? Did he have anything against the Queen? Lmao
@@Vysair No idea. Maybe Yahtzee hated his mum.
Give them porn, and they will seek out pictures of old ladies. What a strange pattern of humanity.
GTA Logic
Given no freedom, people fight and die for it. Given freedom, people become soft and abuse it, eventually gets taken away. Such seems to be the cycle of society lol
World of Warcraft had this problem initially and eventually implemented a good fix: small zones had ringfenced population numbers of different mobs, and as soon as players killed them below a certain number, killing another immediately spawned one more in the area, so you could never run out. They also aggressively devalued the mobs in xp and monetary rewards so that the game could not easily become about just mindlessly grinding one pack of mobs, and made quests far more valuable to force players to move around a bit.
boiledelephant yeah but then It's no fun. because you can't make them go extinct. the goal is to see if players are able to Keep a world alive
One old MUD I used to play solved a similar problem by just giving you a stat for each mob that tracked your "knowledge" of it. Once you killed enough of them to reach "100% knowledge", of say a deer, then killing deer would give you zero xp. That way the weak noobs could still go out and mass murder rabbits and butterflies but they would soon have to move on, so you would only have a few guys ever doing that at any time.
Keepin: Diablo 1
Love these War Stories! Thanks, Ars and Richard Garriott.
Ultima Online was my first graphical MMO, and the reason I upgraded to Windows 95 and bought my first CD-ROM drive. I lasted a month before I ragequit so angrily I didn't touch another MMORPG for about four years, until Dark Age of Camelot.
My very first combat in UO was a rabbit...that killed me.
I had to deal with getting killed and having other players loot my corpse. Then I started getting stronger and hit skill caps where my Grandmaster Swordsman that I spent days leveling to 100 dropped points because I raised my campfire skill.
Then griefer players ran rampant and would attack you anywhere outside of cities. They introduced the Reputation system to stop that, and the griefers figured out how to trick the system so the person they attacked ended up losing rep instead of them.
Then I bought a ship, and it was immediately stolen because it was "unlocked".
Then I bought another ship, used it to make trading runs for two weeks to save up enough to buy the deed to a small cottage...searched EVERYWHERE for an open plot of land to place it, and found one near the main road, touching it on a corner. THE DAY AFTER I placed it, the game announced that all player-made structures would be destroyed if they touched roads. I sent multiple emails to support asking them if they would at least return deeds for people who spent so much time in the game saving for a house, and never got a reply. Quit the game and threw it away.
Who directed this interview? These cuts are hilarious. Reminds me of "What we do in the shadows"
No risk, low reward investments are more popular than high risk, high reward investments.
Bold statement with Battle royal games currently dominating the market.
Not really a statement, just me regurgitating some basic economic axiom.
Even so, can't see how what you said is related. Care to explain?
Adonis not even related...
Tell that to the balrogs in hyloth....
Felucca died almost instantly when trammel arrived. Nice for me farming dragons and making millions alone, but everyone was rich by then anyway... paid my rent with gold from house placing though :D
I always get such a kick out of how eccentric this dude is. I'll never forget following his big launch event for Tabula Rasa haha.
WAR STORIES R MY FAV PART OF THE TH-cam MACHINE. PLZ DONT EVER STOP EVER
I'd watch an entire video about the pipe at 5:04
Squiggs where dose one purchase such a pipe
You need to farm and skin the pelts of direwolves around Castle Blackthorn. When you have enough pelts, you can craft this pipe.
Me too
Well, the players are the almighty heroes meant to defeat every obstacle in their way. Meanwhile, the animals cannot defend themselves and are lucrative sources of income and skills.
Devs: We made a beautiful virtual playground for you
Gamers: kill! stab! burn! destroy!
😂
@Nobody Knows yeah but its metagaming
@@thomaslefebvre7842 technology is literally about metagaming.
@@JamesBideaux nah
I was there when Lord British died.
I was also one of the most prolific serial killers in the game. I miss this game.
You must be very proud
@ßoomßoom I said I miss the game.
I'm a database guy and I didn't know where the term sharding came from. Interesting etymology!
I remember running from cows and chickens back in the day :(
I remember my first death in the game was to a cow. Good times. :)
What made you think a cow would be easy to kill with a bow or sword? :p
I tried to punch a cow. I got rekt
rip xD
momma had a chicken, daddy had a cow
7:18 - There is actually a fix for this, and it's one that harkens back to the days of Zelda and Monty Python. Make it so each animal has a guardian spirit and if the players kill too many of a certain creature too quickly, the guardian spirit is angered and will actively hunt them for an amount of time.
That's a really deep take on the chicken thing, but you're right, they probably added it to deal with players who were determined to fight the chickens. They also implemented the other obvious idea, which is that herbivores RUN AWAY.
Okay now you've made it a gameplay challenge.
What about compensating for the kills by spawning an animal everytime it is killed? That might balance the source-sink dynamics
This feels like a fairly bad idea if the goal is to get players to stop killing the animals... what you've done is created a system where players get a bigger challenge when they attack animals which is usually a desirable outcome for players. I would say the only way to counter that would be to make the guardian spirit essentially like guards in UO where they did a ton of damage, and were difficult to kill and got you nothing for killing them... but people kept going after guards so I don't think the result would get you what you want. It would discourage newbs but encourage elder players to cause mass genocide. The interesting thing here is that though players generally would kill everything... the value of killing say rabbits, does go down as a player is around longer... but under your system, the value of rabbits may go up as you get bigger.
@@RazakAsir The problem is the Guardian Spirits in this case are, 'You Lose'. They one-shot you, have infinite health and you can't kill them. And they WILL catch you. They outrun you and will teleport right outside of whatever town you're in. All you can do is either die to them, or wait 24 hours until the kill count resets and they go away.
I'm about to watch this, and before I do, I want to say that UO has such a deep and emotional nostalgia to me... I don't even know if I can watch this. Thanks for making this game, man.
Saw you made this comment 3 years ago. Best game ever!
you need to Aply the 1st Law of the Chicken. Wich is to make it so hard and timeconsuming to kill or catch a chicken that it is no longer worth it. People will still try to do it [mostly just to prove they can] but it helps the balance.
Talas is this a real thing? If so, it's genius!
That philosophy drove masses of DAoC players away, one of many failures by the devs.
Or make them attack you in swarms.. looking at you LoZ
.... You... attacked a chicken... I can already hear both the stormcloaks and the imperial army movilizing... and the thalmor!?... wait war? oh no man they are not coming ro wage war... they come for you chicken assailant
Im from the Philippines and your law of the chicken is seriously flawed. Catching chicken is really easy if you know what you are doing. First you take grains (rice or grinned corn) and throw it on the ground. Chicken will come to eat. Then you inconspicuously walk to them like nothing (they can read body language so you have to be really cool about it, like if you are hurried or threatening they will run away) and then just scoop them up from behind.
As a human, I do human things, that includes ruining balance, as humans do.
The very turning point for humans was when we invaded a foreign eco system.
Or whe some idiot decided that getting close to fire was actually not a bad idea.
Only white people do it. Others live in harmony.
SSchithFoo 😂I hope this is a joke
SSchithFoo
every race and creed fought and invaded each other, I hope your not serious.
SSchithFoo imagine having such a bad understanding of history you think the skin of a human Makes them worse
Didn't you receive letters after Ultima III (my first Ultima) that showed your player base was homicidally psychotic? Wasn't that the reason you made Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar? Still one of my favorites, and ground breaking even by today's (standards?)
Beta testing UO was an amazing experience, even if it did get me REALLY close to being fired. Had UO installed on every computer I had access to. Was on my way to the Lord British speech, about 3 blocks away, when the servers crashed. I came back in a few moments later, Lord British was dead. Damn! So many fond memories :)
Thanks so much for so many years of incredible joy playing your games!
Is NO ONE gonna talk about this dudes braided rat tail?
I was trying to ignore it the whole time but wasn't very successful.
Garriet is a weird dude.
🤢🤢🤢🤢
nothing special to people familiar with him for decades... he's been to space too.
I just assumed he has achieved the rank of Padawan.
I played UO, but I didn't know about this feature. Killing animals was the bread and butter of a new player's experience. You just had to kill as many animals as possible if you wanted to get anywhere in the game. I think pretty much everyone wanted some sort of combat skill, and there was nothing accept these animals to fight. There were proper monsters in the world, but their existence was pretty narrow, and they were extremely difficult to take on alone. Skills in general needed to have a very high stat in order to be useful, and required many hours of training to achieve those levels.
This ties in with my main frustration with the game: most of the map was quite boring. Just endless large tracks of land with nothing but a few animals present. Long travel times, and you needed to stay close to a town in order to stay safe from player killers, as well as sell your wares and access your bank.
I loved many elements of UO. I loved exploring, leveling up skills. I enjoyed the challenge of the steep learning curve in the game. I think most of the problems stem from these cool and interesting elements happening in the context of a game that is ultimately boring. (no pun intended).
It sounds a bit like the population density of humans relative to the things they try and kill is just way, WAY too high.
Also, these animals are too easy to kill.
Have you ever tried to catch a rabbit? It will run off at high speed and hide in a burrow.
Most animals can outrun a person by a substantial margin.
Most predators can tear us apart before we have a chance to do anything back to them.
Hunting animals requires extreme caution.
Anyway, I don't know if you can realistically fix something like this, but it does seem there are a few hurdles here where the animals were just not numerous enough, and not strong enough, to survive the onslaught.
Killing them is just... Far too easy and low risk.
Even a deer, if you tried to hunt it up close with a melee weapon, it could kick you and that would knock you out for a good few minutes, possibly break bones, and maybe even kill you.
So... The animals are just way too weak and vulnerable, and not nearly numerous enough, to maintain a virtual ecology under these conditions...
KuraIthys
Well, professional hunters, soldiers, heroes and mages aren't weak either. That was the implued issue, players were too powerful and smart. After all, only Monty Python would have a rabbit be a bigger issue than the forces of evil.
its simple implement an infamy system where if you kil to many animals, all animals will avoid you or if you kill too many animals a "spirirt of the forest" will come out and basically just wreck you. or have the "king" come out and tax you if you hunt too much and take more than you can gain by just hunting.
It could've easily been fixed if they added an element of animal protection laws like they have now. That's what's stopping us now from hunting many animals out to extinction. They could've added guards like in TES who would approach/target you as you hunted the limit of that day. Forcing the player to stop or to engage more mobs (Guards) if they decided to continue hunting.
You really think a deer is going to put up a fight against some epic warrior with magic armor and a fire sword that slays demons and dragons?
Ultima hardly cared for epic weapons
The vanquishing tiny axe hit harder than the crafted one but not by too much back in the day
This is seriously one of my favorite videos on all of TH-cam, something about it just absolutely cracks me up lol, NEVER underestimate the creativity and persistence of MMO players!!
on **ALL** OF TH-cam? good god.
@@cocksandcobras The guy films his cat watching TV so...
The confidence to not only rock the braided ponytail, but to bring the braided ponytail out front to make sure it got air time too. Incredible.
The problem was how easy it was to find and kill the animals. If a player had to spend 15-30 min to catch and kill a rabbit and 1-2 hours for a deer they wouldn't waste the time.
True but that would be massively boring. Nobody wants to chase a rabbit for 15-30 minutes to get a skin that costs next to nothing. What you are purposing would make the game not very fun.
jg togi That's my point. Killing rabbits wasn't intended to be a significant part of the game. They made it a souce of cheap easy cash and xp.
jg togi that would've been fun because skins would _massively_ inflate in price, being a hunter would've been an honest profession.
That could be fun. Trappers cornering the fur market. fur used to make leathers and whatnot for the soldiers who defend the realms and make it save for the trappers and hunters.
Just need to implement a crime element that would allow creatures that are low in population to be put on a protected list and would be considered poaching until their number replenish.
That would mean insanely high prices for leather very quick, thus making crafting available only to rich players, effectively blocking off newbies from the market and thus crippling the whole economy.
The problem would get worse with time as the longer the servers would run, the more disposable income the long-time players would have, and therefore the prices would constantly rise to the point no new players could afford anything. I've seen that happen in several MMO's. This is not a good thing in the long run.
This is a really long way of saying "There were more players than we thought there'd be."
I remember playing in the closed beta. I was terribly disappointed when it did not work out. Also, I thought the shard concept could have been a great idea for accommodating different play styles. I argued for that in the forums before release. I felt that we could have slightly different rule sets on different shards. Some people hated the idea of pks (player killers). Well, fine, let them have a completely separate shard. Later on, after release, this dichotomy between pvp and pve became a problem. So they split each shard into two worlds. The problem was they were still interlinked. You could pvp in one section but pve in an almost identical other section. So people would "prepare" for pvp in the pve area . . . and often not get around to ever actually pvping. Pvp became rare, and honestly, a lot of the thrill of the game disappeared. Myself, I had no fighting skills, I just went around with my item identification skill and stealth trying to buy in remote areas and sell in more traveled areas. Yet I loved the pvp aspect because of the constant tension it created. I hated when they split the worlds into two but left them linked. All the tension just disappeared. By far, some of my favorite moments in gaming were created by that tension-created by close calls, and yes, death, where I lost all my stuff I had worked for. Oh, how differently we play when death has no consequence whatsoever. Anyway, taking the shard concept further and creating differing rule sets could have done a lot for gaming and kept the game fresh.
These videos are so addictive
5:05 That is the craziest bong I have ever seen.
I’m no programmer, but I’m an ecologist by training. I can think of one or two tricks.
1. Add a succession component, which could be done by setting something like if there are x number of tall grasses in a y area for z time or at a time interval, then they would be replaced by a bush that would slow movement until destroyed by a player or herbivore, then add in trees which would block a space entirely if bushes populate a threshold proportion. Have bushes roll an RGN at regular intervals for disturbance to destroy bushes or trees normally. This would create a negative feedback loop with players looking for quick/easy combat by making them navigate annoying and even dangerous mazes where the herbivore count is low. This would also help herbivores bounce back from major population depressions. To boost that, you could make bushes “high quality” food, which would count more towards reproductions.
2. If that’s too much to program, make shelter for herbivores. This could be impassable terrain with vegetation on the other side, or extremely high risk areas that would be too dangerous for all but more experienced and therefor likely value conscious players who are there for a purpose. You would get herbivore emigrants that would hopefully help distant populations recover from collapses.
3. Add a size structure, where organisms can be sized 1-3 let’s say. 1 is young, has no drop, and is quick/likely to die until it consumes x food and becomes size 2 and begins reproducing at y offspring per food. After eating z food, then it reaches size three and doubles reproductive output. That would allow for a lower cost of food for reproduction, and based on the described behavior players might spend too much time on the size class 1s and some would presumably manage to escape. If they ignore class 1s: problem solved... sort of. I think this would be the most difficult.
u should become a programmer
I don't know that i"d be good at that. Building ecosystem games is common in studying population dynamics. I have no concept for the scope of such a program in a game.
If you double clicked a rabbit to attack it, it would literally run towards you right into your sword. Every creature had the same AI. It was just atrociously designed for what they wanted to achieve.
Cool ideas. World building is one of the most important features in a game for me. I would love it if game developers would employ the help of experts in ecology, economy, sociology and so on to create "realistic", "working" worlds (I think some of them do actually, I once read that EVE Online hired an economist).
I think it would have been more simple to just randomly assign codes to a certain percentage of animals that would make them untargetable/unkillable by players only could have easily fixed the situation. It would've maintained a minimum population of wildlife that exist long enough in order to maintain the overall ecology.
This is the video equivalent of one of those photos that looks weirder the longer you look at it. A braided tail, a gramiphone?, the shirt, the pipe, fascinating.
Already made HLL artillery calculator, just need to wait for release :X
Omgosh! I was laughing so hard at his analogy, because the “horde” and “swarm of bees” spreading out across the surface of the world, and wiping out every living creature on the planet world, along with their giving players swords and weapons to commit “mass murder”..was so incredibly spot on when describing how Us players played the game...& Yes!, it was fun to kill the virtual animals, and that’s why we did it..*laughs*
But, because I’m a bit odd, I admit...I also tried to “trap” animals inside of my castle to keep them as “pets!” Sadly, that never truly worked out long term, now I know why..*chuckles*...
Also, it wasa rather tricky venture, as that particular castle I owned was in a swamp only area, so the only creatures usually around were monsters or *laughs* what I tried keeping as “pets”..wild alligators, which, yes! they immediately attempted to attack and eat you!..(so you had to be a high enough of a level to survive them+the other monsters in my neighborhood, which was one of the benefits of owning a castle where I did)..The only good thing that came out of the “pets” adventure, was that They made great security guards for when random Players wandering through the area would come in your house, or other players trained in theft skills (sneaking, unlocking, etc), and they would try to take your stuff in your home or break into your treasure chests (I also set up boobie trapped easy pickings chests to lure them to certain death..*laughs🤣*),, or some Players would be nice, come visit you, and then they would try to PK you in your own home, because (at one time for a while) the game wouldn’t register thst as a Player Killing, etc.,..until of course, Developers fixed building ownership rights, and Developers began binding objects to specific players, and implementing various other permission/rights fixes...
I really Enjoyed playing UO, it was so complex but easy, diverse, customizable, and just over all a ton of Fun!, it is still one of my all time Favorite Games!...Play On, Everyone, Play On!..*smiles*...
Without any explanation, the players just saw the game as... A GAME. No player would ever consider the ecology unless you told them about it, because it's such a weird mechanic and doesn't have an obvious impact on the game. It's like making certain walls destructible with no perceivable sign of being able to be damaged, and no obvious reward, along with making the wall really hard to damage, and wondering why players never try to destroy the walls.
Exactly, the players reacted quite logically in fact, they simply explored and played by the given rules, which in the end, will most likely always be too simple, 'easy' to 'hack' or counter and work around. We can hardly do that in real life, we get tired, really wounded and for a while, even traumatized by experience, yet we play the game to actually escape all that 'reality' and become some kind of God tier sword swinger and magic users.
Tymprasta Bear in mind this was in the very early days of MMOs when player behaviour was not well known.
Also the real issue is that the world was too small. Much too small for the number of plsyers
You're probably right, I'm just saying Richard is somehow still failing to understand this many years later, or this realization is being downplayed to make the story seem more interesting.
I wonder what would happen if the players were just told that there was an active ecology. If they knew killing too much would lead to extinction, would that make them kill more or protect?
smtktc do you really need an answer? if you're here, you probably play mmo's, so you should know what kind of psychos we all are in them.
Alpha and Beta was SO much fun. Thank you Richard, Ultima was a childhood memory that carried me along for much of my spare time. UO was life for several years.
When two rat tails cross paths, the longer rat tail has the right of way.
They should have taken more inspiration from real life and made the herbivores run away faster than players could catch them and maybe made some of them more dangerous to corner such as herding and having AOE stun attacks like knocking the player down so close in fighting would be more of a daunting task.
Computers didn't have the power they do now Everything was very slow especially when you're talking about dial up connections I don't miss those days at all
If you look at the other comments fighting those animals were required to level up at the start of the game........ so ya they really goofed
I gotta say, knowing nothing about Ultima, i saw that coming. Players don't care, they will straight up murder everything that it's possible to murder and if you punish them for doing so they'll complain about it.
Ultima Online players don't complain as they are a different breed of gamer that is not spoon fed every step of the game.
UO had no quests, so you made your own adventure. Way different than todays MMOs. UO best MMO to date. It's just not graphically viable anymore.
I am still enjoying it to this day. So many more things to do than one can possibly imagine
eight216 Well consider that this was one of the first MMOs ever. They didnt have a lot of data back then about how people would behave in online worlds. It was entirely new ground. Its easy to say that now with hindsight. They were trying something never done before, they pictured the end result and thought they could predict how players would interact with the system but they were wrong. They also got way more players then they ever expected making it even more complicated. As you seen him explain, they expected players to kill herbivores just not on the swarm of locusts scale.
Yeah, it's fun never playing the game that's 20 years old, was the first of it's kind and just declaring YOU would have seen all the problems coming.
I mean, no one had tried that before on that scale, but no, you, you special snowflake, would have anticipated every conceivable issue and resolved them all.
And yet, with this magical power you currently build nothing. Do nothing. Are nothing.
These are great learnings and insights from Richard. Try to see the fun side of it and take a moment to appreciate how amazing UO is. Still alive and going strong with a super loyal player base.
That was great part of uo, you could even go around collecting fruit and wheat that would grow
Best game I ever played, hands down.
Pre-launch: we created a beautiful virtual ecology where the animals and plant-life effect each other and develop a natural equilibrium in the game world. This will be wonderful to watch for people playing rationally.
Post-launch: players massacred everything faster than it could spawn
The biggest failure was failing to reel in the player killers until most of the player base left for Everquest. At first it wasn't that big of a problem. But after the game had been around a while, a person or group could get a lot more high end loot from a fellow player than they could get killing a bunch of dragons and a single player, even a veteran player, was not as risky as a dragon. So even nice (blue named) characters often had evil (red named) characters murdering good players and funneling the loot to the player's "good:" character. UO wanted a simulation and expected the player base to police its own just like in real life. But in real life, you cannot log off and log in as a totally different person with different features, etc. So if you were a veteran player, you often left your best gear in the bank instead of wearing it in dungeons. Co-workers got me playing the game and most of my friends played it. One day it hit me that all my real life friends and co-workers had quit the game due to all the PKers so I joined them in Everquest. :(
Awesome! Thnx for the upload. Hilarious conclusion of the human condition/mind set.