Darkfall vs Ultima Online

[likwidtek]

You know a lot of people compare Darkfall and UO.  In fact the devs even admit the game is heavily inspired bu UO.

I'm just wondering how many of you have played UO and what your thoughts are about it.

[Phienyx]

I played UO several years ago.  It was my first MMORPG.  I got really bored with it because it seemed that the only purpose was to level up.  No real game-world goals.  ....or perhaps I missed what they were.  It also could be that I was not guild associated.

[Jarimus]

I have nothing but great memories of UO. But I did play from beta and got a quick headstart on things when the game came out.

I played with a lot of real life friends and also some big active guilds. It was great because it was so VERY sandbox, you really could do whatever you wanted, and there were so many skills. I soon found out that my high school librarian played because I saw her reading UO Forums one day during study hall!

There were 5 character slots per server. We called worthless alternate  characters "mules", I think mostly because mountain miners could carry very little since raw metals and even smelted ingots were very heavy. So miners typically had a mule character that would hold a lot of their mining gear like a South American mule train going through the mountains.

There was a great alignment system with 2 aspects - fame and notoriety. Fame was never negative, it was either 0 or it went up as you did big things. Notoriety was neutral and went positive or negative depending on whether you were good or evil. So the higest level of fame got you the title Lord. And depending on your notoriety, you were either Dread Lord or Great Lord. And there were titles all along the way that were displayed in your paperdoll. Only the Lord titles displayed when someone moused over your character (so obviously the word Lord was not allowed in character creation).



So with the 5 character slots, a lot of people had a good player, a red PKer, and some crafters. This was great because then everyone could experience every aspect of the game. Usually after someone got 1 character established where they could make money on their own, they would feed gold/resources to their crafter. It was a good system, and it wouldn't take too entirely long to have a few well skilled characters.

Skills went from 0-100. You could buy yourself up to 30 of any skill from an NPC town vendor for like 300 gold. For me one of the most fun parts of the game was starting out, because you literally had almost nothing, and getting gold took a lot of effort. After you had an established PvE character, you could get 300-500 gold drops off mobs in certain dungeons fairly easily, but PKers always searched those great dungeon spots.

For magic, there were 8 spell circles. So each circle was about 12 skill points. So at like 40-50 skill you were casting 4th circle spells to skill up magery. There were 8 reagents for magery and they were sold by NPC town vendors. Every spell required at least 2 reagents, some required 4. So obviously, it took A LOT of money to reach 100 skill. The other factor of title I forgot was skill. When you got to the skill cap of 100, you got the title grandmaster. So my main char, Jarimus, was, "The Great Lord Jarimus, Grandmaster Mage."

Melee and archery were pretty standard like all games. In UO, and also DF, items could be repaired, but they would also decay. So, my katana sword might be 100/100 durability at start, then dip down to 80/100. When I got it repaired, it might then be 90/90, so eventually it "broke" and disappeared." This was a GREAT sinkhole for the economy and meant that crafters and goods were in constant demand.

So at launch everything was not fully implemented into the game, but there was plenty to do and it was fairly polished. It probably took the majority of players several weeks to get to grandmaster (GM) in 1 skill, and with a total skill cap of 700 points, probably several months to become a maxed out 7X GM. Along with this, it probably took people 2 weeks before they were stable enough to explore a dungeon, but since dungeons had multiple levels, probably several months until anyone got the the lowest level where the hardest monsters were.

And of course, with every patch came a new addition, rebalance of a skill or "class" that made something the "flavor of the month." For a while archery was overpowered, so there were many archers. Then melee, mages etc. Later on, they tweaked poisons role in the game and everyone wanted to use the fastest sword with poison, since it would not let casters cast, and they were constantly losing health.

Other flavors became new character sets. Fishing was a skill in the game, but was worthless and could easily be macroed to 100 overnight. Then one day they made it INCREDIBLY hard to gain in fishing, and a few days later someone pulled up an SOS bottle from the ocean. There was no mention of this from the devs, someone had to discover it, which is a similar path that the DF devs are taking now with the lack of information.

When that guy posted about the SOS on the forums it was MASS HYSTERIA! People were so excited, and everyone went out to level up their fishing in hopes of getting an SOS. They had good treasure - gold and sometimes good items. A few months later a treasure map was found in a bottle, and people freaked again. Everyone went to raise their (until then useless) Cartography (mapmaking) skill. So out of this the "treasure hunter" character-type was born. It was like being Indiana Jones, you had to have lockpicking, and you would teleport to dungeons to pick locks, but you also needed the Disarm Trap skill or they would blow up in your face - it was all very exciting. Later trends were different types of mages like the nox poison mage, or the freeze and use explosive potion mage, animal tamers, and mage escorters. Then there were also things like collecting and trading rare equipment (rares). There was always trash items on the ground in town, and the devs stopped creating some items. I had an animal fur from 1997 that they stopped making - it was was worth a fortune in 2002.

Because there was always something new like this on the horizon, and because it was NEVER fully explained by the devs, it made the game great because everyone was searching for something new. And all the while you "played the game" by doing your own thing on your main character: going to dungeons, PvPing, crafting, decorating your house, guild events, etc.


Maybe another reason I loved UO so much was that I was playing MUDs through Prodigy in 1995-1996 and having the same thing with graphics was just UNREAL - I was only 14 years old!

Sorry this got really longwinded, I am at my desk at work trying to look like I'm doing something constructive! And I like talking about and remembering the good times I had with UO!