 History, Garriott, Games, and Guts: The Longest Nerd Post Ever
Submitted Friday, August 22, 2008 - 1:40:51 PM by Klaitu
I recently had an interesting conversation regarding one Mr. Richard Garriott. If you guys have been reading, you know that I'm sort of like a birdwatcher when it comes to Garriott. Garriott-watching is one of my hobbies, simply because you don't know what this guy is going to do next. I've written about his upcoming trip to the Space Station.. what's he going to do after that?
This post won't be about Garriott's eccentric tastes, though. This post has more to do with his games, and my involvement with them. It's bound to be a long one, but for some reason or another I find myself thinking about this somewhat frequently, so I figure it's best to put hands-to-keyboard and let it rip.
It might seem trivial, talking about video games.. but the truth is, I've spent my life around video games in one form or another. I don't claim that they are the be-all-end-all of life or anything. I don't know if they're an artform, or any of that high-falootin stuff. Maybe I've played too many.. all I really know is that I have fond memories of them.
I was born in the late 70's, and I grew up in the 80's and 90's. There are older gamers that I, but I seem to rank up there in the "geriatric" scale in terms of game players today. In the beginning, the games were sort of experimental.
That's where Richard Garriott comes in. He made Akalabeth: World of Doom when I was an infant. It came out for wide release in 1980.. but that's not where I encountered Richard Garriott and his world of Britannia. My story begins a decade later, in 1990.
A friend and I were really into Sierra adventure games back then. We formed a club at our school, where we would all trade games at lunch. I don't know what the other kids did, but when I got a new game, I made a copy of it. I ended up having copies of just about every Sierra game there ever was. Even some girls got into the loop. All you needed was a game to trade.
In 1990, Sierra had many games out, but not so many that they were difficult to collect, so my friend and I expanded into games made by other companies. Broderbund, Cinemaware, Interplay.. all the old guys. One of the games we stumbled across was Ultima 6.
Whereas a Sierra game might take a week to beat.. what with school in the way, Ultima 6 perplexed us for months. It was like playing monopoly for ages and then suddenly playing one of those war board games with the hexagonal tiles. It's not like we couldn't figure out puzzles.. in those days there was no internet, no cheats, no hints. We were good at that. It's just that Ultima 6 was so large that it just took forever for us to get through it all.
My friend and I would both play, we would pick different places to explore, and then come to school the next day and trade notes. It was painstaking work, but it got to the point that between the two of us, we were able to piece together everything we needed to do to beat the game.. and we did.. and it was awesome.
We were just kids back then, playing on our parents computers. We watched as video games and the technology needed to run them increased to the point where we could no longer play games anymore. After all, parents aren't particularly concerned with video games.
Ultima 7 came and went, and all of its addons. Ultima 8 came and went. To be sure, there were other games, particularly Sierra games that held us through those years, but we didn't have the muscle for the latest and greatest. Near the end, we were waiting 2 or 3 minutes for sierra characters just to cross a screen.
In the meantime, my friend and I were separated by different schools. Our club broke up, and we were on our own.
Then, I graduated from High School and began to strike out to the world. The "World Wide Web" was brand new, and dialup internet was all the rage. I bought a year subscription to a dialup service for 99 bucks, and I discovered a new game coming out.. Ultima Online. It was 1997.
Of course, my computer was still pathetic. I started working at AOL and one of my first purchases was a new computer.. an IBM Aptiva with a Pentium processor. This computer was cool. It was black when most computers in that era were compaq white. Gateway was called Gateway 2000, and Dell didn't even exist.. and this baby had the muscle to run Ultima Online with room to spare.
So I bought UO at a Babbages computer software store. The charter edition for 90 bucks. That Babbages is actually now a claire's boutique. It was, quite simply, the bad mamma jamma. It had all the depth of my beloved Ultima 6, but there were other people you were playing with. UO had some problems at first, particularly regarding the resource system and the PvP. I ended up being frustrated by the game because of this. I was an archer, and chickens wouldn't spawn because everyone had stockpiled feathers. I was working full time, so I quit the game to pursue other things.
But I had this boss computer, so I checked out Ultima 7 and what a treat it was. It was like Ultima 6, except better in every way. I also tried out hits like Wing Commander and all those other great Sierra games that I missed out on because of my previous computer.
As more time passed, I ended up not working for AOL anymore, and I couldn't get a job anywhere. I used some of my leftover money and started UO again, and I became a counselor. At the time, counselors got free accounts, and this insured I could play UO perpetually without having to pay for it.
UO was a much improved game now, the second age was out and many of the problems that plagued UO to begin with had been fixed. I stayed on, and I became an Elder.. which is a sort of storyteller in UO. All was well for a time, the Roleplay community was really starting to shine. The Reniassance was released, and many declared that UO finally had its kinks worked out.
Around this time, Ultima 9 was released. It had pretty stout system requirements for its time. The game was open and freeform, it was ahead of its time in many ways. It had many features that wouldn't be found in a game again until Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.
In the interim, Ultima Online lost its way. It was plagued by developer reorganizations. Garriott left the company to go on to different things, and the people who were left each had different ideas of what should be done. They began doing things like making a 3d client without the resources to do it right. They contracted Seth MacFarlane (creator of Spawn) to "spruce up" the art of UO, but all of the players hated it. There was a huge push to make the game more items-based, and the playerbase grew more unhappy.
UO began to face stiff competition. Star Wars Galaxies was released, and it was designed by many of the original UO designers. Its systems were very similar to UO's. So similar, in fact, that many people called it UO with guns. Shortly after Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft came along.. and we all know what a big hit that game was.
When other companies saw the success of World of Warcraft, they tried to duplicate the game. This is not uncommon in the gaming industry, but it was particularly noticeable to me. The producers of Star Wars Galaxies decided that their game should more closely follow warcraft, so they changed the entire control scheme to match wow. They created a greater emphasis on items and looting. Eventually, they eliminated the existing game systems and stripped SWG from over 16,000 professions to 9 classes.
Star Wars Galaxies was not the only game to feel the burn. UO, still plugging along, wanted to hop on the bandwagon as well. Their first 3d client had failed utterly, so they set out to make another 3d game client.. again without the monetary resources to do it right. Its controls and interface were identical to WoW.. they didn't even bother to change the color scheme.
Games that came after WoW were also heavily influenced by it. The Lord of the Rings Online is almost a direct clone of Warcraft, albeit with better graphics, and less emphasis on farming. Recently, Age of Conan was released.. although it had a unique combat system, it too was identical to WoW in many respects.
Since WoW was released, it seems like the industry has sort of turned its backs to anything but following the "WoW model". I believe this is disasterous. There are many things that WoW got right, but also many things that were done better before it came along, that WoW completely ignored.
Allow me to go back to Ultima Online for a minute. There were many things that made Ultima Online an amazing game.. and some of these elements are still exclusive to only Ultima Online. It's been over a decade, and game companies still ignore these important aspects.
Ultima Online was:
- Use-based skill gain
MMO's today advance you when you kill things. You kill something, get XP points, and when you collect these XP points you advance. UO wasn't like that. In UO every time you swung a sword, you had a chance of gaining proficiency with that sword. It didn't even matter if you killed the target in question.
- Skill Tree professions
MMO's Today tend to lock you into one of several predefined classes, but UO offered the player complete freedom in creating a character. Want to be a shoe making catrographer? No problem. Swordsman chef? No problem. If you could imagine it, you could be it.
- not originally items-based
In the beginning there were only about 5 or 6 kinds of weapons of each type that a player could use.. and of those 5 or 6 types, there were a number of differing durability and damage-dealing stats. Each different type of weapon was viable as a combat option. There was no one "best" weapon, although the players certainly had their ideas of what was best.
The same could be said of armor, anyone could wear any kind of armor, so long as they were strong enough to wear it. Each kind of armor had strengths and weaknesses. You could mix and match the pieces as you liked. There wasn't any best armor, it was up to you what you wanted to wear.
- The first game with player housing
Other games have offered player housing, SWG probably being the closest in design. Houses weren't just homes, they were shops and guild halls. They were crafting areas, Taverns, and community centers. In today's mmos, the rare games that do have player housing only use it for extra storage.
- Without an endgame
Ultima Online didn't really have an endgame, because there was no point at which you achieved all there was to achieve. The game didn't end, it kept going for as long as you wanted to play it.
- Was based on community
What Ultima Online got right was its dedication to community building. It didn't have time sinks. It didn't waste your time by requiring you to grind for weeks. It let you play with your friends immediately. A newbie character, although weak, was not completely useless. There was no way to gauge how strong or weak a character was. The entire point of the game was to have fun, not to max out stats and items.
This meant that people were equally as content adventuring in a dungeon, or sitting around in a tavern talking.
- There was a price to PvP
UO had a sortid history with PvP, but in its golden era, there was a penalty to PvP. You could potentially lose, and lose your equipment. Good or evil, when you won, your victory was decisive.. at least for the moment. Even if your opponent was able to return to their corpse, you could have disarmed him by looting the things he needs to do battle. In UO, you had to pick your battles.
All of these aspects of UO would be lost in future MMO's. Star Wars Galaxies would come the closest again to achieving these things.
Are all these innovations to be attributed to Richard Garriott? I honestly don't know, certainly the UO design team all contributed a great deal to the amazing design of UO. At the very least, Garriott allowed these designs to take shape. He originated the storyline and the setting of the game.
Garriott's next game would be Tabula Rasa, which is agreed by all to be nowhere near as good as his previous games.
Maybe Garriott has lost his mojo. Maybe WoW has changed what consumers want in an MMO, and Garriott is just responding to it. Maybe Garriott just wants to get into space and made a deal with the Koreans to accomplish that goal. I don't know.
At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I miss the days when developers could afford to make great games. When it didn't take a 100 million budget to produce a game of any weight. In today's enviornment, UO would have never been made. It isn't a WoW clone, and it doesn't "fit" into the MMO scene.. and yet, Ultima Online as it was in its golden age is still a superior game to any MMO on the market today.
Maybe we've been taught that the thing that is the most "fun" is item collection. We like running through the same little mazes over and over again at the prospect of getting a slightly better cheese.. and what happens when we have gotten the best cheese?
The key to making a great MMO is not the cheese. Give everyone all the cheese they want.. the key to making a great MMO is the maze. Make the maze worthwhile and the rats will run it simply for the experience of running such a great maze.. and that one simple truth is the staple of all of Garriott's games.
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