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'''''Ultima Online''''' ('''UO''') is a popular graphical [[MMORPG|massively multiplayer online role-playing game]] (MMORPG), released on [[September 25]], [[1997]], by [[Origin Systems]]. It was instrumental to the development of the genre, and is still running today. The game is played online, in a fantasy setting similar to that of the other ''[[Ultima]]'' games that preceded it.
'''''Ultima Online''''' ('''UO''') is a popular WANKER INFESTED|massively multiplayer online role-playing game]] (MMORPG), released on [[September 25]], [[1997]], by [[Origin Systems]]. It was instrumental to the development of the genre, and is still running today. The game is played online, in a fantasy setting similar to that of the other ''[[Ultima]]'' games that preceded it.


==Overview==
==Overview==

Revision as of 08:19, 10 August 2007

Ultima Online
Ultima Online box
Ultima Online box
Developer(s)Origin Systems, Electronic Arts
Publisher(s)Electronic Arts
Producer(s)Richard Garriott
Designer(s)Raph Koster and more... over 20
Platform(s)Windows
ReleaseSeptember 1997
Genre(s)MMORPG
Mode(s)Multiplayer

Ultima Online (UO) is a popular WANKER INFESTED|massively multiplayer online role-playing game]] (MMORPG), released on September 25, 1997, by Origin Systems. It was instrumental to the development of the genre, and is still running today. The game is played online, in a fantasy setting similar to that of the other Ultima games that preceded it.

Overview

The success of Ultima Online opened the door for the creation of many new massively multiplayer games. Ultima Online is a fantasy role-playing game set in the Ultima universe. It is online-only and played by thousands of simultaneous users (who pay a monthly fee) on various game servers, also known as shards. It is known for its extensive timing-based player versus player combat system. Over a million paid accounts have been created in the game. To maintain order in the online community, there are Game Masters who resolve player disputes, police the shard for terms of service violations, and correct glitches in the game.

Several expansions have been released, but its aging game engine and graphics make it outdated compared to competitive, new massively multiplayer games. This changed with the release of Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn in 2007, which features a new game engine. Since Ultima Online's prime in 2003, the overall subscriber base has seen a steady decline. Subscriber numbers peaked at around 250,000 in July of 2003, and to date sit around 135,000 subscribers (approximately 70,000 of which are Japanese).[1] As of June 2006, Ultima Online held a 1.1% market share of the massively multiplayer online game subscriptions.[2]

Quoting directly from the Electronic Arts press release announcing the Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn expansion, Ultima Online was "the first MMORPG to reach the 100,000 subscriber base, far exceeding that of any game that went before it. Since then, it has added seven expansion packs and dozens of free content updates, making it one of the deepest, largest MMORPGs ever created. It is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest continuously running MMORPG in history."

History

Ultima Online is the product of Richard Garriott's idea for a fantasy game involving several thousand people who can all play in a shared fantasy world. There were a number of prior games that allowed hundreds of people to play at the same time, including The Realm Online, Neverwinter Nights (the AOL version), and Meridian 59. However, Ultima Online was intended to be a significant improvement over the previous games, both graphically and in game mechanics. The initial team was composed of Garriot, Starr Long, Rick Delashmit and, a bit later Raph Koster, who became the lead designer for the project. Koster wrote a number of public "designer letters" and usually went by his nickname of Designer Dragon.

The project started in 1995 and was shown to the public at E3 in 1996. At the time (in the mid-1990s), Ultima Online was a very expensive project and quite risky for the company. The development cost was much greater than traditional computer games, it relied on people accessing servers with modems, and it attempted to transform the Ultima series into an entirely new genre. Ultima Online was an ambitious game on a number of fronts, such as:

  • Players may buy housing and build houses within the persistent landscape (this is still an uncommon feature in many online games).
  • A skill system without the more traditional experience-based levels or classes.
  • Many different trades or crafts can be performed by the players to create an in-game economy.
  • Players could be freely attacked anywhere in the game, even in cities (this has since changed).

Upon release in mid-1997, Ultima Online proved to be very popular, reaching 100,000 paying subscribers within six months of release. Subscriptions grew for several years reaching a peak of some 250,000 paid accounts. Origin was able to make a great deal of money from the monthly fees required to play Ultima Online and many other companies took note and began development of their own massively multiplayer games. The most successful games after Ultima Online have been EverQuest (released in March 1999), Dark Age of Camelot (released in October 2001), and World of Warcraft (released in November 2004). The Korean massively multiplayer game Lineage was very much inspired by Ultima Online, as have many other subsequent online games.

Game mechanics

Main article: Ultima Online game mechanics

Ultima Online continued the tradition of previous Ultima games in many ways, but due to advancing technology and the simple fact that it was Origin's first persistent online game, there were many new game mechanics as well. Partially designed as a social and economic experiment, the game had to account for the widespread player interaction as well as deal with the long history of players feeling as if they were the center of attention, as had been the case in single-player games. New to both the developers and the players, a lot that was planned never happened, and a lot that was unexpected did, and many new game systems were put in place to compensate.

Issues faced

Main article: Ultima Online issues faced
File:UO LB assasination.jpg
In an infamous incident during the beta, Lord British was assassinated.

Ultima Online has seen many major revisions throughout its history. This includes gameplay revisions, staff changes, technical revamps, and fundamental design changes. With few earlier MMORPGs to take lesson from, the staff behind Ultima Online was breaking new ground and had to solve complex issues that had never been faced in a commercial game on such a wide scale before. The importance of understanding psychology, social interaction, economy, and other issues became increasingly important as complex social behavior evolved.

Throughout the pre-release development of the game, a well-balanced, realistic economy and social structure was the goal. While not all of the features planned for incorporation made it into the first release, the developers did manage to give almost all of the control to the players in terms of what they could do to each other and the world as a whole. What ensued caused permanent repercussions still faced in the game today.

Expansions, sequels and other releases

Throughout Ultima Online's long history, there have been many releases of the game, both on store shelves and online. Several sequels were in development but canceled, and expansions have been released regularly.

Sequels

Two sequels were planned by Electronic Arts, but both were canceled during development so that more focus could be spent on the original game.

  • Ultima Online 2 (UO2), later renamed Ultima Worlds Online: Origin (UWO:O) was announced in 1999. It was to add steampunk elements to the fantasy setting, set in a world where the past, present and future of Sosaria were merged together by a mistake made by Lord British while attempting to merge together the shards of the Gem of Immortality. Todd McFarlane was hired to design original monsters and regions for the game, as well as help shape the story. It was cancelled in 2001 before its release, citing the competitive nature of the massively multiplayer online gaming market — Electronic Arts feared the sequel would harm Ultima Online's subscription numbers. Some of the monsters and art made for the game were later used in the Ultima Online expansion Lord Blackthorn's Revenge.
  • Ultima X: Odyssey was a new MMORPG to be set in a world named Alucinor, created by the Avatar after the events of Ultima IX: Ascension. It was cancelled in 2004 in order to focus on expansions to the original Ultima Online.

Expansions

Expansions have been released regularly, all of which add new content in the form of landmass, art, quests, items, or game mechanics.

Other releases

Ultima Online has had several special releases which were not expansions, but came with boxed or in-game extras.

File:Ultima Online 8th Age.jpg
Ultima Online: The Eighth Age
  • Ultima Online: Charter Edition (September 30, 1997) was available to pre-order from Origin Systems at the launch of Ultima Online and in small quantities alongside the standard retail box. It included a signed lithograph of the Ultima Online artwork by the Hilderbrandt brothers, a pewter pin badge bearing the Ultima Online logo and the box was signed by Richard Garriott. The Charter Edition also included the cloth map which was also a feature of the standard box.
  • Ultima Online: 7th Anniversary (September 25, 2004) was a special release of the game to celebrate Ultima Online's seventh birthday. Like all of the items listed in this section, this release did not bring anything new to the game and is not an expansion, although it did include a more recently patched CD; the Age of Shadows was still the most current version at the time. This release was contained in a small cardboard box containing a triple-CD jewel case, featuring Ultima Online: Age of Shadows, but also included Ultima IX: Ascension install and play discs as a special bonus. A glossy booklet showing the history of Ultima Online expansions was included which contained historic art and an interview from the Ultima Online team and community leaders. Also included in the package a code for an in-game gift, one of which was Ultima Online's famous Hilderbrant print, an extra character slot (a total of six characters was now available) and 7 buddy registration codes.
  • Ultima Online: Gold (July 18, 2005) was a special release sold by Wal-Mart and includes the same content as Ultima Online: Samurai Empire. This edition also comes with an Advanced Character token code, and quick-start manual.
  • Ultima Online: The Eighth Age (September 25, 2005) was a boxed game CD with an array of in-game tokens. Though not bringing any new features, the release was to celebrate Ultima Online's eighth birthday. The box included a updated game CD (with more recent patches), a glossy booklet feauring an atlas of Sosaria, in-game tokens for an anniversary gift (choice of 8), a character transfer, an advanced character and a 45-day free trial code. Also a time-limited blue soulstone was included.
  • Ultima Online: 9th Anniversary Collection (October 31, 2006). Formerly known as "Eve of a New Age."

Shard emulation

Main article: Ultima Online shard emulation

Fans of Ultima Online have reverse-engineered the game to produce server emulators of the original Electronic Arts servers. With the modern emulation server software available today, it is possible to customize most aspects of the game and support large numbers of concurrent players on a single server.

Clients

Electronic Arts provides the standard client with which players are allowed to connect to the Ultima Online servers, though some third-party clients have been made.


Original client

The original Ultima Online client is completely 2D and, while it was state of the art when released, it is intended to be used on low-end machines that cannot support the more taxing 3D client. It also presents a different artistic flavor which some people find more attractive than the 3D client. Many of the graphics used are high-resolution versions of graphics used in Ultima VIII.

Ultima Online: Third Dawn client

The 3D client was originally released as a part of the Ultima Online: Third Dawn expansion, but has received poor reviews from both veteran and new players alike due to a large number of performance issues (especially memory leaks early on) and what many see as sub-par graphics. An update to the 3D client was made on January 30 2006 when characters and creatures from the game were scaled down to smaller sizes.

As of early May/Late April 2007, the Third Dawn client was done away with by EA, in order to make room for the Kingdom Reborn client (see below). Official UO servers will no longer work with the TD client.

Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn client

Screenshot from Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn.

Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn was announced in August 2006 was released June 27, 2007. The new client, according to the Ultima Online team at Electronic Arts, is being created for the purpose of modernizing the game's look, making it easy to add new content without backsliding through outdated and outmoded art, while maintaining the niche market as an MMORPG that can be run on lower-end computers.

At a players' convention in Atlanta, EA announced that the recommended specs for the UO:KR client are a 1GHz CPU, a GeForce 3 series video card (low end enough to be considered obsolete by the manufacturer as stated on its Internet site), 2GB of hard drive space, and 512MB of RAM. They stated that they had "some success" running UO:KR at 256MB RAM, but that 512 was recommended.

EA has referred to the UO:KR client as "2.5d," meaning that it was written in 3d and then effectively backslid into 2d to make it easier for lower-end computers to run -- and, presumably, to maintain the "feel" of the game.

The client will be available as a free download for current players of the game.

The client originally had a release date of "Spring 2007," and EA has repeatedly stuck to that time frame. Remarks made by EA at a player convention in New York City suggested that the beta test will not start until June 2007; however, it is now a fact that the beta test started on the 3rd of May 2007. The beta test was offered to certain veteran players, and players who attended various "UO Town Meetings" first, but a more open beta is said by EA to be coming as well.

Statements made by EA originally suggested, or appeared to suggest, that the KR client would replace the long-standing UO client. However, at the first of several EA-sponsored players' conventions referred to as "UO Town Meetings," in Atlanta, EA representatives suggested that the two clients would exist side-by-side until about 95% of the players had switched over to the new client.

Easter eggs

Ultima Online has included some well known Easter eggs throughout the years.

  • Lord British's throne is the top half of the Ultima Online logo.
  • On rare occasions, casting the spell energy vortex will summon a purple llama instead of the cloud-like creature the spell is meant to summon. The purple llama is labeled in-game as "an energy vortex" and has the same powers as the creature the spell is named for.
  • A monster called a slime existed in-game which is a small slithering blob. Some years ago on rare occasions, it was possible to encounter a slime that was renamed a "jwilson," which was purportedly named after magazine editor Johnny Wilson, who had given Ultima Online a bad review and thus earned a derisive place in the game by the developers. "Jwilsons" are no longer in-game on OSI, but still exist in RunUO and (at least some) POL servers.
  • Cows may be tipped by clicking on them numerous times.
  • Cows can also be renamed Corey Johns when fed 9,999 times.
  • Occasionally an aggressive "mad cow" will be spawned in place of a docile cow.
  • Pack horses will eat jester hats.

See also

References

UOForums.com - Interview with Punkbuster's Founder, Tony Ray.

UOForums.com - Interview with Jeremy Dalberg, Community Coordinator for Ultima Online.

UOForums.com - Interview with Tim "Draconi" Cotten, Designer for Ultima Online.

UOForums.com - Interview with Dave "Cathat" Brown, Character and Envrionmental artist.

UOForums.com - Interview with John "Wilki" Wilkinson, Designer for Ultima Online.

UORadio.com - Interview with Tim "MrTact" Keating, Senior Designer for Ultima Online.

  1. ^ MMOGchart.com (2006-07). "An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth - Version 21.0". MMOGchart.com. Retrieved 2006-08-09. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  2. ^ MMOGchart.com (2006-06). "MMOG Subscriptions Market Share". MMOGchart.com. Retrieved 2006-08-09. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
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