Reflections on Ultima VII and UO: Embrace the Ultima

If you don’t know by now, it’s Ultima VII’s 20th Anniversary. WtF Dragon has done an amazing job of gathering materials and information for it.

It’s the 20th Anniversary, and just 5 months from now, it’ll be Ultima Online’s 15th Anniversary. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, both UO and Ultima VII. I wrote an article, UO’s 20th Anniversary Part 1: The Players, the first in a series, about what I feel is important if UO is to make it to its own 20th Anniversary. In the first article, I felt it was important to bring in new players if UO was to make it another 5 years. Consider this to be second part of that series – a look at using Ultima lore to bring in new players and add to the game world itself.

New to Ultima and New to Ultima Online
It’s 2012 – many potential players have tried MMORPGs of one sort or another, so I’m not going to break new players down into those who have played MMORPGs and those who haven’t. Instead, I want to break it down into those players who are new to the Ultima univers in general, and those who are familiar with the Ultima single-player games, but not Ultima Online, the Massively Multi-player Online Roleplaying Game.

Ultima Fans Who Aren’t UO Players
For those who have played previous Ultimas, UO has a lot to offer, but at the same time, there are a lot of very valid criticisms – It doesn’t quite fit into Ultima lore, things have been added that have a tenuous link (at best) to Ultima lore, and there are things that plain just don’t fit into Ultima lore. You can’t get around the latter at this point – there are things that have been added to UO, that while they aren’t a part of Ultima canon, they are UO canon. That has to be accepted.

People Who Have Never Traveled Through the Lands of Britannia
For those who haven’t played the Ultima games or UO, UO is currently not an ideal introduction to the Ultima universe. Buying Ultima IV – VI or Ultima VII through GOG.com is a better solution. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t try UO, but those games can give you a background that enhances the experience. With that said, you can always jump into UO and go back later on and play those games.

Grinding
Inspired by some threads about “grinding” at UO Stratics and UO Forums, I’ve been thinking about the issue of grinding and how it impacts new and returning players. Grinding, as defined by Wikipedia, is the “process of engaging in repetitive and/or boring tasks not pertaining to the story line of the game.” UO is full of it these days, and it can be a definite deterrent for both groups of players. While some of the Ultima games had their grind-like areas, for the most part you were progressing from one objective to another, even if it wasn’t quite linear, and not continuously repeating the same actions in the same areas for the same rewards. If/when it happened, it wasn’t like grinding in an MMORPG. Ultima VII let you wander around, engage in all kinds of activities, and stay away from that, and early UO did as well, but with the move towards itemizing UO with the Age of Shadows (UO Guide), grinding has become a problem in UO. Both groups of players are going to be annoyed at some point by it.

Can Developers and Designers Get Away With Grinding?
Of course. World of Warcraft proves that with its over 10 million subscribers. You would be hard-pressed to find an MMORPG out there that doesn’t have it in some form. How do they get away with it? Either the reward is great enough, or the player is doing it with other players and so the task itself is pushed to the background, while the experience of playing with others takes over. In the first 5 years or so of UO, when there were several times the number of active players, you could easily forget about a lot of the grinding. People grinding away at raising their blacksmithing could easily find others doing the same, and hang out with them.

The problem is that these days, grinding can easily turn UO into a single-player game for some, or it encourages illegal behavior a lot more.

What Does Grinding Really Mean?
I’m glad you asked. You want to really know what grinding is? Simple. Grinding is a lack of imagination on the part of game designers and developers. If a player has to do the same thing over and over, hour after hour, you have failed as a designer or a developer. Maybe you want to introduce new content, but don’t want it available to everyone, so you make it tough to get. Tough to get doesn’t have to mean the same repetitive task over and over for hours on end. It can be tough to get through a series of mini-quests – if you want players to expend time in the pursuit of an item, don’t have them camping one spot hour after hour, or engaging in the same sequence of events dozens or hundreds of times in a row. Send them out on a series of mini-quests doing many different things in many different areas.

Developers and Designers Hurt Themselves with Grind
You’re shooting yourself in the foot, because the more grind there is, the more it will increase player dissatisfaction. Player dissatisfaction = fewer players = lower revenue = lower budget = fewer developers.

What Can be Done?
The designers and developers should take a hard look at some of the most grind-like parts of UO. As others have said on UO Stratics and UO Forums, grinding contributes to player unhappiness, and can even encourage illegal “scripting”, which goes against the UO Terms of Service (TOS) and hurts the game. Scripting can be on the scale of a single-player looking to automate a very repetitive task with third party software for whatever reward they are after, or it can be somebody running several instances for financial gain, and selling the results to other players who hate grinding.

Either way, it’s bad, and it doesn’t help UO’s future at all. Many players quit games they feel are too much of a grind, or they completely bypass story arcs or certain skillsets that require grinding. That closes off a lot of content to them, and reducing content can also reduce player longevity in the game.

Questions to Ask
Designers and developers should look at the systems and the items in UO that require grinding and take a step back and ask themselves these questions:
– How is this enjoyable?
– How is this helpful to player retention?
– Is there another way we can introduce these items and rewards into the game that doesn’t make it feel boring and repetitive?

So what does grinding have to do with Ultima lore?
It’s quite simple, really. The Ultima games have a rich history of many quests/side-quests, even if they go by another name. From Ultima IV and on, an incredibly rich world was built up, only to see most of it disappear before making it to UO, or if it made it into UO, it was very stripped down, or was slowly forgotten/neglected over time.

The Purists
The Ultima purists and the UO purists out there will complain if major changes were introduced or lore or characters were introduced that don’t exactly abide by the Ultima canon, especially concerning timelines, but you know what? This is a chance to reconcile some of the issues the purists on both sides have and this is a chance to introduce people to the world of Ultima who have never played UO. It’s been 20 years since Ultima VII, and over 10 years since Ultima IX.

The purists on both sides just have to deal with the fact that UO is a mish-mash of Ultima lore and generic swords and fantasy lore. That doesn’t mean it can’t change. While there are generic fantasy elements that can’t really be removed from UO at this point, that doesn’t mean we can’t try and drown them out with Ultima-specific NPCs, locations, and lore that has been neglected or ignored.

Embrace the Ultima
Over the last 3-4 years, when looking at UO and at the single-player Ultima lore, there is work being done to bring them together on some level. We’ve gotten relevant races (Gargoyles – UO Guide), we’ve gotten settings (Stygian Abyss – UO Guide), and now work is being done to complete the virtues (see the UO Guide entry on virtues as well). As a matter of fact, an effort is being made to get the virtue system completed this year. We are also seeing some Exodus-related events (UltimaCodex.com forum thread – warning – spoilers).

That’s a big step forward for UO.

Put the Ultima Back in Ultima Online
Don’t stop on introducing the “new” things mentioned above, fully revisit all of the areas of UO. I know there are revamps planned for all of the dungeons, but don’t stop with the dungeons. Revitalize all of the towns. Give people reasons to visit them more often. Right now far too many UO players are hermits. Get them out and about. The town loyalty and current story arc are helping slightly, but already I’m seeing participation lowering in areas, and people returning to their old ways.

When people talk about games like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Skyrim, and MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, part of the discussion inevitably turns to the richness of the game worlds themselves. UO has a rich game world, but part of that is dependent upon players, and let’s be honest, UO does not feel as big as it once did. It never lived up to the potential that it had. Some of that was due to server/hardware limitations of the 1990s, some if it was due to time constraints and development resources. I think that upon the 20th Anniversary of Ultima VII, it’s time to really populate the world of UO with Ultima lore, NPCs, buildings, etc. and quests that tie into the history of Ultima.

In my humble opinion, the world of Ultima is just as rich and full as many of the most successful MMORPGs and RPGs out there, but we’re just not seeing it translated fully into the world of Ultima Online. Replace the grinds with min-quests that tap into Ultima’s history. Make the world more active. Make the cities come alive again.

Have the designers, developers, and producer play Ultima IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX. Have them study all of the little things about those games that people loved. Bring that into UO. Give Ultima fans a reason to play UO, and give new players a much richer world to play in. You don’t even have to spend money developing new lore – it’s all right there, just waiting to go online.