Almost every gamer has a game that holds dear to our hearts. It’s usually one that really struck a cord and somehow manages to stay with us. For me, that game was Ultima Online. It was one of the first games to be considered what a modern MMORPG would be.
Ultima Online can be described as a persistent world that kept going while the player wasn’t playing. The gameplay was 3/4 top-down of character sprites similar to Diablo. While it had primitive graphics, it was one of the most dynamic and complex games I have ever played in a massive player online setting.
The complexity is a little more easily summarized:
There were no “partying up” or “raid groups”. Organizing a raid was fairly difficult unless someone present was a cat herding pro.
Game wide communication was non-existent outside of Communication Crystals that were fairly expensive and relatively impractical since they could only link up with one crystal.
Mounts were an incredibly intricate part of gameplay in most cases (especially if you weren’t a Mage) and actually legitimately required proper care to keep around.
Combat was… Neat. More will be explained in the dynamics, though.
When outside of a designated cities boundaries, the game was pretty much the Wild West.
Players could build houses.
That housing had an actual impact on the game world.
Now for some dynamics:
There were a lot of skills. A lot of them. Not kidding. This opened the door to an incredible number of things that the game could offer. Players weren’t pigeon holed into being adventurers with swords and shields, magic, or bows and arrows. Want to play a game where you are just a baker? Building a house, planting wheat, harvesting said wheat, milling the wheat into flower, making dough from the flower by mixing with water, and finally baking the dough into bread was a thing in this game. As was being a miner who went out into a cave to mine up ores that could be smelted into ingots and then, with the Blacksmithing skill, forged into weapons and armor. There was an option to essentially farm animals, slaughter and butcher them, cut the meat out, and then cook the meat. Those same dead animals? Yeah, it was possible to skin them, too, and harvest the leather, or feathers when it’s a bird. The leather could be used to create leather clothing or armor, and the feathers used to make intricate clothing or fletching for arrows. Speaking of making clothing, one could grow and harvest cotton or harvest wool by sheering sheep, spin the product into yarn or thread and make clothes. Even fishing, yes, you could fish, provided treasure maps that required another skill to decipher in order to find the location, then follow it manually (no quest guiding ribbon or mini-map marking)to attempt to dig up the treasure. I’m rambling and there’s much, much more that one could do outside of “hack’n’slash”, but I hope you see the point with the numerous examples provided.
Speaking in line with raising animals, a player could learn to tame creatures. It usually started with chickens, but those would really wanted to pursue the skill could even go as far as taming dragons. Yes, you could have a dragon as a loyal pet. A DRAGON! Trading critters in that game was its own Pokemon-style economy.
Even the combat skills were neat. Because of the way combat worked, jousting was honestly something that could be done by having the characters just run by one another while attacking. Sure, games like WoW have something that can be done like this due to melee range being required with respective weapons, but… With this system, there was even a dismounting ability that could be performed using certain weapons. If successful, it knocked the player off of their mount. Boom, real jousting. Don’t want to use a weapon, but instead develop your body into a martial weapon? Sure, they had hand-to-hand combat that included special types of strikes that could be performed that even included temporarily paralyzing your foe!
Then there was the magic system. Oh, great Lord, the magic system. The first and most obvious benefit of magic was in combat. Magic could be used to improve your characters abilities, magically armor you from attacks, and, of course, offensively assault your target with fireballs, lightning, and the like. But it even held a large number of more mundane, but useful things. Summon food to feed your mount if you don’t feel like harvesting fruit or otherwise. Hell… Summon a mount, for that matter. Polymorph yourself in a chicken and make yourself (hilariously) hard to target because of your now diminished hit box. Trying to make it through a dark cavern? There’s a spell to light that up. Beyond even that, though, there was the spell Recall that allowed for quick travel. The spell had a built in limiter, though, in that the caster had to have Runes programmed for a specific location by the Mark spell in order to travel. There was an entire economy in the game built around folks traveling by boat (yes, BOATS) to faraway places, just so that they could begin marking Runes to that location. When it did come to combat, there was a huge amount of spell-to-spell interaction that made spell combat interesting. Trying to gain an edge using the right spells at the right time – both offensive and defensive – or even starting to cast one spell but cancelling and casting a different one was a really awesome face paced chess match that I haven’t experienced in any other games since. All of the magic was balanced through the requirement of not only Mana as a resource, but a laundry list of various combinations of reagents to power the spells. It was brilliant.
I mentioned boats, yes? Navigation was even a skill. As was Map Making. No kidding. And boats were a huge part of travelling, at least in the games infancy before marked Runes became common or servers that were low magic, because there were oceans. And sea monster. You could be chased and/or attacked by a freaking sea monster along your way. I never personally experienced it, but piracy was a thing in the game. YAARGH!
Death could end up being relatively permanent if you did things wrong. Resurrection had to happen. There were wandering NPC’s called “Healers” who would resurrect players, so long as they weren’t considered outlaws. If you were stuck on a boat in the middle of the ocean when you croaked, good luck unless you had a friend that could try to find you. And the ocean was big. Really big.
The final dynamic I’ll discuss, and it certainly isn’t the last one, is the PVP. As indicated earlier, the game outside of cities was the Wild West. Players were free to literally kill one another. There were ramifications, of course, but they were minimal if you knew how to play through. If you did it too much, you couldn’t go into town without being killed on sight by guards, though. That’s not to say it regularly happened, but there were plenty of traveling bands of outlaws whose entire gameplay involved killing off other players in order to loot their corpses.
The game was fun. Hours of fun because it seemed like one could do whatever they wanted. Why does it bring such fond memories for me personally? I started playing the game nearly as soon as it went live. My intention when I started was to be a virtuous paladin-like character that roamed the lands stopping evil in whatever form was found. That didn’t last long. The calling of PVP was even stronger than I would have originally thought. I quickly turned to a life of crime, attacking nearly any I saw. The game was so dynamic, though, that I shifted from being a sword fighter, into a pole-arm fighter, into a mage, and finally a barkeep. Yes, towards the end of my playing the game regularly, I had opened a bar where I would cook food to order, serve drinks, and attempt to keep the peace as best I could.
Sadly, from what I understand now, the game has fallen significantly from what it once was in an attempt to “keep up with the Jones’s” like WoW. Before that, it was an amazing game and there are even a few player-run servers that harken back to the great days of “classic” UO. This is totally a recommended game if you’re able to find a classic server.
So, how does this relate to politics you may ask? It portrays a wonderful example of free market – both via in-game mechanics as well as the game sales and participation. The game had a player based economy. It was fascinating being able to see how different “Realms” handled their markets. It was also fascinating to see the evolution of the gaming world, and how games were developed to be the next big “thing”.
-Mike H
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