Friday, July 23, 2010

UO Reminiscing

I can't help myself -- I love Ultima Online. I'm not currently playing, though, because I subscribe to the update notices, I get told when a new patch goes in and get tempted EVERY TIME to renew. Luckily, I'm conscious enough of my lack of free time that I know I wouldn't be able to do a subscription fee justice.

UO is what drives a lot of my programming projects, too, no matter how hard I try to distance myself from it. When trying to work in Metaplace, I was more often working on UO-like functionality or a UO world than not. When working on my Windows Phone 7 development, I find myself making a UO-like game to learn XNA. And of course, when I work on MMORF, the whole driving motivation is to make something that can run a UO world.

Lately I've been interested in the early days of Ultima Online; I was there in the first month or two of release, but missed an Alpha or Beta testing, back when the world was young, broken, and in transition (not to say that a live MMO isn't always in transition, but...) there are some great screenshots of a world that I never got to see, but it's the handful of anecdotes out there that are really good, ones that detail how the rules worked -- or how the rules didn't quite work -- in the early days.

There weren't tons of these to be found on the old Alpha/Beta archive sites that I found; they were mostly about screenshots. But it was while reading an old post-mortem on Raph Koster's site about UO that I caught reference to where it had been originally posted: the old rec.games.computer.ultima.online Usenet group! This has led to a treasure trove of opinion from 13 years ago, which has unfortunately sucked me in completely. I'm only on the second page of posts and I've already found a few priceless gems, which I'll share with you now:

I started in Yew and was swarmed by  NPCs wandering all over the place.  Several beggars followed me wherever  I went.  Most of the time, I couldn't move (server kept yanking me back  to the same place when I tried).  Eventually, the beggars cornered me  against a building and the coast and would not budge.  I tried  everything I could think of ("Look! Isn't that Lord British?") but they  would not move.  I had nothing to give them but the edge of my dagger.  Of course, after one swing a nearby guard (there were dozens) "freed" me  from the beggars. How thoughtful. :)

I went to a farm just outside Britain to see if I could make some money picking crops.  I couldn't figure out how, so I went into the farmhouse to see if I could find any farming implements.  I found a dead body lying next to a pitchfork with two guards standing nearby and thought better of it. :)

They happen to be by the same author (Dave Erazmus), so I'm going to have to watch for his "future" posts to see what other gems he might have posted.