Rich Vogel, Raph Koster and Starr Long Discuss UO

GDC Online is over, but Gamasutra is covering it, including a post-mortem of sorts from Rich Vogel, Raph Koster and Starr Long.

There are a lot of good stories, and hopefully we will see a full transcript or video soon, but in the meantime, my favorite stories about the early days are about the animals leveling up:

In the alpha, the team had wolves that chased rabbits across the map as part of its emergent gameplay system.

In those early days, the rabbits would actually level up if they got into a fight with a wolf and managed to escape.

“People would wander off in the alpha and try to kill a rabbit, and pretty soon they were playing Monty Python: The MMO,” joked Koster.

The game was tweaked to disallow this, though Koster confesses that they left one monster rabbit in the world when the final game shipped.

The article is a definite read for UO players, past and present.