I'm glad that "Meaningful PvP" was singled out. PvP is important to me and its one of the things that Ultima Online got right that vast swaths of MMOs since have floundered with (in my opinion).
In parts of the world (Felucca[1]), UO was a rare RPG where anyone could kill anyone, for any reason, but with the repercussion that they would be branded a "Bad person" (visible with a gray or red name instead of blue). Stealing from good people corpses also did this. Anyone can attack and kill bad persons, and if you killed even more people you were a murderer and it took a very long time to return to normal.
You want to use super awesome powerful gear? None of this sissy MMO stuff. Die and you lose it, and your enemy (or his enemy!) gets the spoils.[1]
Those are the two criteria by which I think "meaningful PvP" should be judged:
1. Can I kill anyone? (ie, in WoW you can't kill 90% of the people you see, they have to be in an arena/faction/alliance).
2. When you kill someone do you actually win something? (preferably something of theirs), and when you die do you actually lose something (preferably the equipment you risked to try and have a more favorable fight).
Ultima and UO were very big into morality and moral dilemmas, which is a thing I love in both single and multi-player games. Some of the Ultima games featured very interesting choices, like whether or not you should kill "evil" (possessed) children or leave them alone.
In UO, if you did have a "bad person" title and wanted to know how much time you had left before you would be considered blue again, you had to type:
"I must consider my sins"
~~~
The other problem I have with a lot of MMOs is that the power of your character is simply how much time you sink into the game. Essentially, MMOs are games that reward wasting time.
UO had so much more than that. The class-less system definitely helped, and UO was a game where treachery and sneakiness really paid off, if you wanted them to. Lots of ways to nearly instantly kill or entrap people lead to a lot of very exciting plots where guilds might be laden with spies. Absolutely nothing like the limited PvP found in many modern MMOs.
In a lot of ways UO was the Diplomacy (diplomatic back-stabbing board game) of MMOs. And it was great.
See also outworlder's wonderful comment explaining UO 90 days ago[2]. Also considerably interesting was the economy of UO[3], which was wrought with a good deal of experimentation.
~~~
Also, if you played UO, you'd know that property taxes are a wonderful idea. So many people land-rushing to get the largest properties possible, who then sat on them and never built anything! (Or never played, while newcoming regulars had zero chance of ever finding a home at a reasonable price)
~~~
[1] In the beginning there was only Felucca. And an insurance system was added later (2005ish?) where you could pay a certain amount per item to not lose it on death. Both were attempts to make the game less harsh. Like a lot of later patches, this was unpopular with older players and popular with newer players. Over its lifetime, UO did a lot of things to make the game world less cut-throat, which will always be controversial. Some realms rules stayed more "hardcore" than others as a compromise.
Richard Bartle: "[without permanent death] Newbies (and not-so-newbies) feel they can never catch up. The people in front will always be in front, and there's no way to overtake them. The horizon advances at the speed you approach it." [2]
Really, permanent death? PvP corpse looting? These are profoundly user-hating mechanics and their removal is likely among the factors that made WoW successful.
There are other ways to allow newbies to catch up and to incentivize or disincentivize players that don't rely on 'ruining your month of gameplay'.
Yes, really - but it is a matter of taste as tsumnia says in the sibling comment
In Monopoly, I can go bankrupt. In Nethack, I can (and often do) die. In Super Mario Bros 1, I can lose all of my lives. In football, I can get knocked out of the Champions League (by a red card).
In all of these cases, the fact that I can "lose" creates meaning - I care more about the outcome and I appreciate my achievements more. And one never loses everything - the skills stay with you. "Next time I can do better."
Counterbalancing, for a different mood: works like Ocarina of Time are still great, but they sit separately - they're about the journey, not about the achievements.
I think the difference is that Monopoly, Nethack and Mario are intended to be played short term. Of course you can lose terribly in Monopoly and Nethack elevates dying to part of the gameplay.
The stakes are a little different in a long-term, persistent world MMO. The Mario you died with is, for the most part, the same Mario you started with. This is not the case in an MMO. Punishing you, irrevocably, for dying in that situation is a dreadful, fun-destroying design choice.
Even in platformers, it's probably telling that one of the most successful recent ones is Jon Blow's Braid where you not only don't die but you get to reverse time.
I think its not so much user-hated as difference of taste. I love the perma-death aspect of a lot of the games I've played because I get to appreciate all I've earned. That being said, to balance it our, you remove the idea of 'epic loot' (things that take months to earn). Now, the hit of death isn't game-ending.
Games like Realm of the Mad God, DayZ, and Minecraft (its survival based multiplayer) make this perma-death a part of the game (though Minecraft, you keep the character). You feel defeated, but not dissuaded towards playing.
The way to keep newbies is to make the gear they can earn secondary to the gameplay.
They wouldn't work in a carnival-lite atmosphere like WoW, because so much of your self-worth in said game is how much ph4t lewtz you have and whether or not you're at the level cap.
PvP corpse looting works exceptionally well in Eve Online. You don't really have permanent death, there, though.
And if a month of your gameplay gets ruined by getting instacane blapped in Eve, you're doing it wrong. Never undock with what you can't afford to replace.
Agreed. I'd much rather play a MMO that included permanent death but the balance needs to be there. It can be a much more rewarding experience, especially the types of conflict that you can create (actually pkilling someone from a league and having that league come after you)
If the entry point is too high (say several weeks of grinding to get even a mid-level player) people will be less likely to venture out and play the game. The reward is very low for the risk. If the entry point is too low then it'll just be a FPS. Striking that balance is really tough.
In my opinion, a permanent death MMO it should take about 20 hours of grinding to reach the top 2%, 60 hours of grind to reach the top 1%, and 400 hours to reach the top %0.01 (and so on).
Permadeath sounds cool, is great for many to boast about around the virtual water cooler, but in the end suffers from the simple fact, things go wrong and people cheat.
You can self replicate perma death for yourself in any game you play but I know most people would not, they would rather be water cooler hard cores.
Having recently played XCOM which has a perma death for your troopers I lost my taste real quick because of bugs. Players certainly won't pay for a perma death MMO where they died because of bugs or cheating; there will be cheating. A free to play perma death MMO might survive but even then its a fine line before the bugs push them over the edge.
I really don't want to be in another MMO like Eve, where areas of the game are off limits or worse, certain groups go on nerd rages and just grief people who are no threat/not even interesting but convenient.
> I really don't want to be in another MMO like Eve, where areas of the game are off limits or worse, certain groups go on nerd rages and just grief people who are no threat/not even interesting but convenient.
Dude, if no one likes you, that isn't their fault.
Besides, there are no "off-limits areas". You can venture that if you want to risk it. I know, because I enjoyed doing just that.
There's nothing like invading a big alliance space, get chased by multiple pilots, and by some skilled (and lucky!) piloting managing to escape alive. All the while knowing that one screwup would cost the whole ship.
This is only true if you are talking about level-based systems.
UO had a skill cap, which you could reach rather quickly (less than a month if you had no life, a few months playing casually). After that, there was no difference.
And you could even close the gap faster, by focusing on skills which made the most difference. You alchemy could wait.
Also, there was a stat cap. There wasn't that much difference between a new player and a veteran. The veteran would have like 2x the amount of health compared to the newbie. This is in constrast to WOW, where it is not uncommon to have a 140x difference, or more. You actually had a decent shot against veterans, if you knew what you were doing.
I am a big fan of permadeath - in video games, not real life! Ramp up fast, die fast, no grind - that's the way I like it; Spelunky really taught me the value of this design.
Never catch up isn't really true, it depends on the game. I prefer perma-death games, and often you see a situation where you will reach max levels in the game in one month or less if you work really hard or have expert assistance. Of course item collecting might take a year if your guild doesn't equip you, and skill building might take a life time. Wow had to do what they do to build a never ending money sapping treadmill, but it isn't the only way.
I used to play a Star Wars MUD that had permanent death and a similarly aggressive PvP policy. As a result, there wasn't a single character that survived more than a few months. Considering the huge up front cost you had to pay in leveling, skill training and resource collection, eventually people got sick of having to start with nothing. Every time you died, you had to make the decision if it was worth starting over. The longer you played, the greater the chances that answer was "no." Player turnover was bad, especially for MUDs at that time.
That's all my way of saying Permanent death may sound great in theory, but it takes a hell of a lot of balancing against to make it work well in the long term. Maybe making it easier to get up to speed with any single character? Or maybe making it worth your while to be altruistic to other players (I'm not sure what that mechanic would be, but it would be interesting to see something that make people more social as opposed to the antisocial element that PvP tends to foster).
There's so much more nuance to MMO design that seeing a blanket "yes to permadeath" request just feels wrong. Bartle got permadeath to work in a MUD where levels were social commentary on the British class system and individually meaningful rather than being one out of 70 or 80 or 120.
Never add in features willy nilly because it sounds good. Figure out why they work well with your design.
I'm all for permanent death, but it absolute must be accompanied by rock-solid stability from the outset.
Playing through Diablo III on all but the hardest difficulties, I must have died about 100 times due to extended lag spikes and only a few times due to my own mistakes.
While UO was my favorite game of all time, this is not UO. I won't be helping fund this. Garriot does not have a track record anymore. He's had failure after failure post-UO.
He needs to take a step back and look at the successful games that have taken off recently that have roots in UO. My best example is DayZ. You run around with items that if you die fall on your body. Weapons have low relative value like UO. You can trust no one. People love the hell out of this game and it embodies what UO was to a lot of people. Unforgiving and harsh, but so much fun.
I'm disappointed where he's going with this but with what he's made post-UO I'm not surprised. I never expected him to create the next UO.
In his defense, Lineage was a horrible game before he got there.
I'm hoping that with complete creative control, he can go back to his roots and create something truly amazing. He probably won't, but I'm willing to wait and see.
Curious. I've seen some more people saying this... and the game being not a MMO is precisely the reason I've just pledged.
Don't get me wrong, I love MMOs, but they're not only games, they're designer drugs. I keep away from them because I fear losing my social life. So I'm glad this game is not an MMO.
I played back before the trammel/felucca split. (I was a beta player -- people who play MMO betas these days are spoiled compared to how UO beta was; I still have the install CD that we had to pay s/h for! Ah, 1996.)
I still think the split was a bad idea. I think of Eve now the way I thought of UO back then: if you can't afford to lose it, don't leave town with it.
Being an EVE player and lover, I still think this would be even more awesome with the good old knights and mages... If this gets to that, it'll be a very worthy game to play :)
I was thinking the same thing, except that I rarely find it tedious. One important thing about Eve Online is that there are hundreds if not thousands of viable ways to play the game - many of which bear little or no resemblance to the other ways of playing it.
The progression of UO over time is not unlike that of most computer games over a longer period:
We used to have 3 lives, and pixel perfect jumps. Not a "100 life" buffer with health packs or -worse- life regeneration if you hide behind a tree. Or a completely safe MMO world like UO ended up as. Few went to the Dark Side of the UO world.
Most games have become movies, with little chance of anything bad happening to the viewer except getting popcorn hitting the back of your head.
UO was exciting when you thought you might get jumped and killed. It made you think hard about what you took out hunting.
If you are interested in a game that holds similar mechanics, take a look at Darkfall(http://www.darkfallonline.com/), while it is shutting down, the 'sequel' is being released. It offers the same full looting, full PvP experience. The only area where time-sinking customers benefit is from the fact you can build your own strongholds to store things if your toon gets killed.
UO PvP was the golden era of my gaming experience. I was Dread Lord Phlux on Napa Valley shard and was playing from beta through go-live for ~2 years.
I worked in the Intel Game Developers Lab at the time and we had ~6 accounts machines all right next to one another. We had 100 hide and also had Great Lord Phlux characters as well.
It was so much fun logging in as Great Lord Phlux and people just saw "...Lord Phlux" and would attack my good rep character and lose their rep!
So many great memories on UO.
I long for such an experience again, and since I have been playing the ultima series since Ultima II on the Apple IIe - I will always support this series...
In parts of the world (Felucca[1]), UO was a rare RPG where anyone could kill anyone, for any reason, but with the repercussion that they would be branded a "Bad person" (visible with a gray or red name instead of blue). Stealing from good people corpses also did this. Anyone can attack and kill bad persons, and if you killed even more people you were a murderer and it took a very long time to return to normal.
You want to use super awesome powerful gear? None of this sissy MMO stuff. Die and you lose it, and your enemy (or his enemy!) gets the spoils.[1]
Those are the two criteria by which I think "meaningful PvP" should be judged:
1. Can I kill anyone? (ie, in WoW you can't kill 90% of the people you see, they have to be in an arena/faction/alliance).
2. When you kill someone do you actually win something? (preferably something of theirs), and when you die do you actually lose something (preferably the equipment you risked to try and have a more favorable fight).
Ultima and UO were very big into morality and moral dilemmas, which is a thing I love in both single and multi-player games. Some of the Ultima games featured very interesting choices, like whether or not you should kill "evil" (possessed) children or leave them alone.
In UO, if you did have a "bad person" title and wanted to know how much time you had left before you would be considered blue again, you had to type:
~~~The other problem I have with a lot of MMOs is that the power of your character is simply how much time you sink into the game. Essentially, MMOs are games that reward wasting time.
UO had so much more than that. The class-less system definitely helped, and UO was a game where treachery and sneakiness really paid off, if you wanted them to. Lots of ways to nearly instantly kill or entrap people lead to a lot of very exciting plots where guilds might be laden with spies. Absolutely nothing like the limited PvP found in many modern MMOs.
In a lot of ways UO was the Diplomacy (diplomatic back-stabbing board game) of MMOs. And it was great.
See also outworlder's wonderful comment explaining UO 90 days ago[2]. Also considerably interesting was the economy of UO[3], which was wrought with a good deal of experimentation.
~~~
Also, if you played UO, you'd know that property taxes are a wonderful idea. So many people land-rushing to get the largest properties possible, who then sat on them and never built anything! (Or never played, while newcoming regulars had zero chance of ever finding a home at a reasonable price)
~~~
[1] In the beginning there was only Felucca. And an insurance system was added later (2005ish?) where you could pay a certain amount per item to not lose it on death. Both were attempts to make the game less harsh. Like a lot of later patches, this was unpopular with older players and popular with newer players. Over its lifetime, UO did a lot of things to make the game world less cut-throat, which will always be controversial. Some realms rules stayed more "hardcore" than others as a compromise.
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890513
[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890481