Red Portals
Today, Raph Koster, original Lead Designer of Ultima Online, made a post on his blog called “How Metaplace was born.”
This is particularly interesting because in the process of describing how the concept of Metaplace, his new project, he goes into some detail regarding his days working on UO and one idea in particular that he pitched.
That went away with the big MMORPGs. But when we did UO: The Second Age, there had already been a movement among players towards having “grey shard” server emulators. Some of the tools users had made to hack the UO datafiles were actually better than the tools we had in-house.
So I informally floated an idea for the expansion that didn’t go anywhere. Why not release the game server as a binary, release documentation for our scripting language (which was fantastic for the time), release our tools client, and let people make their own worlds?
We could then add red moongates as a housing object you could place in the main UO shards — red moongates in Ultima lore were the moongates that traveled from world to world.
The full text can be read here.
The point is that he poses an interesting question:
I still wonder what the MMO landscape might look like today if there had been enthusiasm around the idea
It’s an interesting thought. I don’t have any doubt that it’d have been popular back then. How many of you would have loved to run their own “official” little UO server? Especially considering that early emulators like FUSE were barely functional, and even then, the majority of UO players certainly had no idea they even existed.
But it’s probably a given that red portals would have been an exciting, well used feature. But why do it? Is Raph just crazy?
Well, maybe. The intangible effect on the game is hard to estimate. It could potentially even fragment the population and leave the official servers emptier. It’d probably cause a lot of whining for features that existed only within a favourite red portal. It’d may even cause a larger drift to “true” emulator servers simply through awareness of the possibility, both by people who would develop and by those who would play it.
Having a red portal as a housing option would be a relatively small hole in the ceiling. The odd strange player would wander through, but mostly your red portal shard would be populated by a few select friends. It’d be a novelty. Not that harmful, especially since you have to have a UO account to log into the game and go through the portal. Maybe beneficial to long term retention rates, and maybe even beneficial for short term profits if you did some serious forward thinking for 1998 and charged an extra fee to be able to set up a red portal world.
Then again, 99% of player created content is crap. In fact, I remember quite well exploring shards early in the days of emulators. Most of them were barren aside from a few potions renamed “bong” and such. I don’t think the audience was going to go too far beyond that at the time for the most part, but with a little forward thinking I’m sure you could have gotten a lot of people to pay an extra fee to set up their own red portal server.
Of course, if you charged money here, you’d have had to do work on a toolset that was user friendly, or you’d have a lot of pissed off people furrowing their brows when they buy something expecting to see a “create cool shard” button and getting nothing of the sort.
Simply releasing what they had at the time and even forcing players to host it themselves would have been a little different than adding red portals as a feature accessible to the general player.
In that case, would red portals have been relatively rare, and because of this received somewhat well when advertised on UO boards? Would the quality of the red portal worlds have increased because of the technical hurdles? Perhaps the worlds would have been uncommon and houses with red portals in them would become well known gathering spots, attracting far more players than had they made the feature more generally accessible.
It’s interesting to think about, because while the idea of a toolkit that anyone can dive into was probably NOT what Raph was thinking about, it probably would have gathered more interest from inside the company because of immediate profit potential. I’m sure you could argue that small red portal worlds would even help to forge lots of individual tightly knit communities, along with the owner of the portal paying an extra $9.99 per month (or whatever).
Ultimately, no matter what route you take, I think you’d risk making grey shards a much larger problem. I had been around the UO emulator community for a long time before IPY, but before I put that server up, it was basically incredibly, incredibly rare to see a server with more than 60 or 70 people on a player run server. Still most servers only have five or ten users online, but I think that if you expose EVERYONE to a novel concept like this (at the time) when the game was new and exponentially more popular, you do run the risk of making it a big problem.
How many massively popular free shards do you remember in 1998, 1999? Any?
I have no doubt this would create more. Bringing the idea into the general consciousness of every UO player along with starving red portal operators for users by making them stick the entrance in their small house outside of Minoc would inevitably create a bigger supply and demand for outside emulated servers.
Certainly, I think MMOs might be a bit different right now had that happened. But would it have been a financially sound idea? Hard to tell now of course, but the possibility that it would have potentially injected more player created content facilitation systems into future MMO design as opposed to… what we have now… is very intriguing.
Perhaps working with the idea a bit to allow red portal custom “dungeon adventures”? Who knows, but in any event the general idea was probably just a bit ahead of its time. Looking at what we have now, probably about twenty years ahead.
-Az
September 5th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Re-Open IPY! Everyone I know would come back! I have WOW and I’m BORED TO CRAP, cant even attack people in IF Who are talking crap and spamming.
Would give me something to do, Instead of waiting for the next expansion where you do more raids over and over and over and over. My epics will be worth crap, even though you spend like a million hours getting the set.
Btw, I see that you mentioned Redemption! Its sad that that did not work out, I was one of the staff working with Tilly, and It was alot of work, but keeping UO in its proper true form was worth the hours and hours of fixing and coding.
- I posted this here because the other topic wouldn’t let me comment. probably that was on purpose. but since this is about UO.
REOPEN IPY PLZPLZPLZPLZPLZ~~~!!! I dont care that ? has a castle with everything in it, and that whenever my guild fights them more just appear from nowhere! btw FKU and MLT = Awesomeness.
September 6th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
If anyone ever has an honest question about things that went on during IPY, I’ll gladly answer very honestly over private emails. I have so little to hide that it’d scare you. I went to some pretty extreme lengths to make sure that shard was clean, fair, etc. In fact, compared to any shard since then or now, I think you guys had it pretty good with me and the senior staff I surrounded myself with (NH, Dole, Aaralyn, etc). We were all very honest, very concerned with keeping things so above the board that you’d puke.
September 6th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
I know you guys kept it clean, we attempted the same on Redemption, I worked with Dole for a few weeks on there as well, but Since other staff (not I) were doing questionable things he kept on disabling all of the gm accounts. So I know how tight things were.
I’m not saying that ? was cheating, infact I know that you guys had extensive runebooks. And I know one of the tactics was to let one of your guys fall back and send a gate for the rest of ? to come fight. I also know that with the amount of guys you had in that guild if you guys farmed like I did you guys would have everything as I did.
I was on IPY from the beginning, and honestly it made me so happy playing the game again in its original form. I was Anti-pk for about 80 percent of my time there until I turned red accidentally. So I do know how crazy things could be from griefers, blue pks and the like but that freedom is what makes uo what it was. Back when I started UO on official servers right around beta there were places on chesapeake called “the den” and other places like paxlair that had people who griefed/pked and all the like, but there were also antis, and craftsmen and others, who even though were tortured by these types still played because it made the game exciting and worth time, because if theres no risk then its like leveling up over and over and over and over without anything to lose.
Anyways, IPY is still one of my best experiences in the game and im sure if you did find it in your heart to give back to the community IPY im sure even the assholes who you played alongside and also the good ones would be greatful.
so again PLZPLZPLZPLZPLZPLZPLZPLZ!!!!!! give us back IPY!
September 7th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
“im sure even the assholes who you played alongside and also the good ones would be greatful.”
Oh, I seriously doubt that.
September 7th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Its easy for you to sit there and say what you want about the playerbase, you obviously have your mind already made up no matter what anyone else says.
The thing that I find funny is that you mention IPY almost 5-6 years after it closed and there are still people begging for it back.
I don’t really understand why you think that way, there were obviously some good people on the server or you wouldn’t have had that many ppl online all at once consistantly. All of them couldnt have been jerks.
I know for a fact that if the chance arose to go back to ipy, I would quit WoW and cancel my other gaming accounts and only play that.
Why? because the game itself pre-uor was and still is the most exciting game out there, not unbalanced like WoW, if you make a Warlock or shadow priest you can kill almost any other class easily. It is because the skill system and the stat system were equal amongst players which gave no significant advantage to others so it actually took skill to fight and/or survive in that world. Another thing is that in UO because you could build little towns with friends and you would all help each other out it built a community. All you do in WoW is log on and type in guildchat “whats up?” and the response always is “dailys” or “raiding” its like running in one of those little plastic balls that you put your hamster in. Atleast in uo, you can go kill some creatures, go treasure hunting, mine, fish, chop trees, furnish your house (it took real skill to make some of those fish tanks, pianos etc.) you could also have a guild war, pk, anti-pk, raid someones town or defend it or even do some faction wars. what im saying is that the game has a complete package that all of the other ones are missing a piece of.
UO as far as im concerned did it right, and IPY brought together a community, i used to see atleast 50 people or more in irc at all times. I also saw atleast a few hundred people online at all times. You may have seen the worst of the worst but if everyone was a good player think about how boring that would have been.
Even though the “worst of the worst” wouldn’t admit it they would be thankful for sure bringing back something they obviously enjoy doing. I am very sure of it.
Even on a regular OSI server I never saw so many players joining in on events, the ones in vesper and brit had people going crazy. Anyways I will still hope for one day to play it again as it was one of the best gaming experiences me and im sure most of my friends had on uo ever which just beat out by a fraction vesper wars on the chesapeake server.
September 11th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Our events did always have a fantastic turnout.