Talking about UO seems to be all the rage. Terranova is writing its eulogy. Scott is talking about why it was such a wondrous yet bad idea. I thought I’d talk about it from the unique point of view of someone who tried to make a sequel.

First and foremost, I’m extremely thankful for UO. The game captured the imagination like no other MMO ever has. People were absolutely enchanted with the idea. UO had ambition – a ridiculous amount of ambition, that it had no hope of living up to. But the ideas, man, they got in your head. You heard Raph talk about what could go on in UO, and your head spin with possibilities. Of course, half of those possibilities were exploits, but still.

I’ve told people that if UO hadn’t come first and whet people’s appetite, Everquest would have capped at 75-100K, WoW never gets greenlit, Shadowbane never kicks off, and MMOs would be one of those wacky things the Asians do, like robot dogs and panty vending machines. Ultima Online got people excited about persistent world gaming.

But when it came to play UO in those early days, it was very harsh and surreal. The possibilities were endless, but many of the implementations were ill-concieved, unbalanced, or broken, and it often seemed that the developers would code systems without stopping to think how they’d interact. UO in those days was like living in a a Dali painting. You played it because anything could happen, and you didn’t want to miss it. And to be fair, that’s not wholly a bad selling proposition – it worked for Twin Peaks and Lost. And in the early days of UO, they even embraced it. I remember before they launched, they posted a strategy guide on the official UO website that talked about how to train guards out of town so you could kill newbies on the streets.

But man, making a sequel to it? That’s harsh, and it’s why two sequels to the game have stumbled. It’s not hard to see why. Here’s a sample conversation that I’d have with fans.

Fan: You’re making a sequel to UO! That’s awesome! My favorite part of UO was how you could kill someone, let them walk into someone’s house as a ghost, and res them through the window!
Me: Um, we probably won’t allow that.
Fan: One time, me and my friends may a staircase of spoons and used it to climb to the unlocked door on top of someone’s towers, and then clean it out!
Me: Yeah, we probably won’t have that either.
Fan: I used to really love teleporting newbies to 1X1 islands in the middle of nowhere by putting a teleporter right inside the bank door,where you couldn’t see it because the roof hadn’t popped off yet.
Me: Um, no.
Fan: Man, you people suck.

But of course, it’s not fair to mention this part of UO without also mentioning the beautiful and amazing parts of UO. It’s all good and well to say that freedom is over-rated, but the things that players did in UO still blow away any of the expressions of creativity in any other games. For example, many games have had player housing, but none have created the truly tangible and communal player cities the way that UO did (and many have tried). What other game have people successfully given you the ability to build a piano out of shirts and a chess board? Freedom doesn’t just give you the ability to grief and exploit. It gives you the ability to do amazing things. This is somewhat lost in today’s safety-first designs.