Ultima - Most.Important.Game.Series.Ever. @ Joystiq

Yeah well, to each his own and all that - as I said I have no interest in arguing whether this or tha good but what's funny is how different experiences from one people to the next.

I thought community was UO's strongest point really - there was a sense of strong community and to me it felt like it came from the approach the game stood, there was a lot of interaction between players and that made the world feel alive (It'd actually go and argue than even PKilling had its upside... when PvP became optional in MMOs, it killed a lot of the fun AND a lot of player interaction)

The time I spend on Everquest though... I never felt any sense of community in it, and beside the combat-focused approach, this is the reason I just didn't found any enjoyment in it. And I think it has just become worst with every MMO since - "community" is limited to whatever Guild you might belong and player interaction feels limited to strangers asking you to group to kill some mobs, and then leave you without exchanging so much as a word.

To be it felt like in UO, you all belonged in a same worlds, with all its shortcomings and grievances as well but that made it fun. Modern MMOs feels more like everybody are playing in their small tight group and that's it. Indeed to me the reason SWG failed compared to UO is because there just wasn't this sense of community, or rather the community didn't seem to care anymore about the kind of stuff UO had ans SWG tried to further. So at this point I stopped SWG as well because well... what was the point?

But as I said, different people gets different experience - we meet different people, try different servers and so on and just that can change a lot about how we exprience a MMO I think.

-Sergorn

CraigCWB said:

All he's got on his list I'd agree with is the open world (they weren't the first with that either but they did it best at least) and the morality system. Of course, when it comes to changing from the player deciding at character creation what morality they wanted their character to be D&D style to the character's morality changing on the fly based on the player's actions it's up for debate whether that's a good design decision or not, isn't it? Companies like Bethesda have made drastically altering the character's morality so trivial that most people go from one extreme t the other several times during a playthrough just to capitalize on morality benefits and reduce penalties. Why is that better than enforcing (disallowing or penalizing behavior that's not consistent with a character's personality) a morality selection made at character creation?

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You could change your characters' alignment on the fly in Wizardry I already, so it wasn't really enforced. And the game didn't really penalise you for it either. So Ultima's wasn't the first morality system. It was, however, the first (?) to turn it into the "Art thou good, Avatar?" bullshit.