Crowfall

Yes, I'm the person who is responsible for bringing you Trammel and the dilution the original UO. And I regret some (but not all) of the outcome. My charter as the VP of Online at Origin Systems (and Executive Producer of UO), was to grow the game. The unforgiving play environment that made UO so intense was clearly driving away between 70+% of all the new players that tried the game within 60 days. The changes we came up with to address this problem were a compromise, mostly driven by fiscal, technological and time reasons.

The good: After the change which broke the game space into PvP and PvE worlds, the player base and income nearly doubled (we went from 125k to 245k subs). So from a fiscal responsibility standpoint it was a totally winning move.

The bad: Without the "sheep to shear" the hard core PvP'ers were disenfranchised. They didn't like preying on each other (hard targets versus soft targets), and they became a smaller minority in the overall game. The real bad though was that the intensity and "realness" of the game for all players was diminished. This was the major unintended consequence.

Part of the context during that time was that UO2 was under development, and the plan that was being pushed on us was to shut down UO when UO2 launched (even though it was a completely different game). In fact, my second week at Origin I was asked for a shutdown plan for the game. (My answer: if you are serious I'm quitting today, because some of the players are going to kill (IRL) the people responsible for such a decision. They really didn't understand the emotional attachment UO players had for the game). This continued to be something talked about though continuously, but less after we grew the game. Remember that EA at that time was a packaged game company and they culturally only understood launching new products, not running live ones. Our Live team needed to keep UO vibrant and growing to offset those forces, so we were continuously scrambling for how to do that. I'm proud that UO survives to this day based partially on the momentum the team (and our loyal customers) created.

I also learned from my UO experience that it's really hard to change a brand. Inherent in the UO brand was the fact it was a gritty, hard core world of danger. We were not successful in bringing back the (literally)100's of thousands of players who had quit due to the unbridled PvP in the world (~5% of former customers came back to try the new UO, but very few of them stayed). We discovered that people didn't just quit UO, they divorced it in a very emotional way. But we did keep more of the new players that came in by a large margin, significantly more than than the PvP players we lost.

If I had the chance to do it again, (and we had different fiscal and time constraints), we would have done something more like keeping the current current worlds with the original ruleset (like we later did with the Seige Perilous shard, which was too late in my view), and make new shards with a more PvE ruleset.

One of the benefits of experience is the mistakes you've made along the way, and the pattern matching to avoid old mistakes. Of course this means that you get to make new and even more spectacular (but different) mistakes in the present!

I hope this gives you more insight into what happened the UO that you (and I) loved.

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Another interesting thing to note is that the push for bigger audiences leads directly to more "accessible" experiences. (that's code for directed experiences, that are more forgiving, less intense games which cater a broader group of players). There are plenty of big companies out there making those types of games (and plenty of players who want them).

We are specifically making our game for players who will like the kind of experience we will create, not trying to cast a wide net to get a mass market audience. We want the folks who will appreciate an intense gaming experience with real risk, winning *and* losing. While we want as many players who are engaged in our game as possible, we won't need millions of players to make our game work.

So our game won't be for everyone, and we certainly don't want people playing who aren't enjoying the experience. This is supposed to be an activity we experience as fun after all!

P.S. Please do remain skeptical, we don't expect anything on faith, but wait until we unveil our entire vision before passing final judgement!

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We still have distinct servers -- but and the worlds are unique. How unique? VERY unique. In fact, the the maps are different from one world to the next. Mountains, forests, rivers, lakes. And these worlds are dynamic; they're made to change based on player actions. We'll cover more about that later.

The result is a universe of unique WORLDs, not just a list of instanced servers. Why would we do that? Why make each world unique? To allow the the characters to travel between them, of course!

This one, fundamental change opens a HUGE array of design possibilities. We'll talk in more detail about the design implications in future updates.

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etchazz_sl said:

Eh, my interest in this game is already waning. I think PvP just for PvP's sake gets really fucking boring, really fucking fast. Having PvE as just fluff for the game makes it sound like PvE is completely irrelevant, which in my opinion truly misses the mark as to what makes PvP fun (fighting over good PvE spots). Just look at EQ, and all the drama that was caused over guilds fighting for camps/spawns. Now, imagine if instead of just trying to pull a train on the other guild, you could actually engage them in PvP. That to me would be a hell of a lot more fun than just doing castle/keep sieges a hundred times a week (see also GW2).

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Bruman_sl said:

This is going to be a fun 2-3 years of people bitterly arguing over a game that doesn't exist yet, then when it's released for everyone to post for 1-2 months about why it's failing and how it didn't live up to expectations, then be basically dead by month 3.

Ya know, like every MMO released in the past, what 5-7 years?

Sure is fun though

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Palum_sl said:

PvP only just never works because the online time factor. In a game with compelling and rewarding PvE if your competition doesn't show up it's like Christmas. In a game without, you get nothing, eventually everyone is bored and you quit because little ore counters for magical resources for the team no one really gives a shit about once it stops engaging you.

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Lasch_sl said:

Eve's pve is not exactly the most riveting experience.

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Lasch_sl said:

Eve's pve is not exactly the most riveting experience.

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Big Flex_sl said:

So you never played eq PvP then? OK. Having had played rallos zek, sullon zek and red99 I can share how that actually worked.

The best parts of eq PvP were random 1 vs 1 encounters one had in upper guk at level 18 or in blackburrow at level 5, when everyone is poor and sucks and you're fighting over a sweet cracked staff with rusty halberds, its every man for himself. Then, its all down hill...

Imagine competitive raiding from EQ's prime but with cancer.

Its basically dissolves into a two guild scenario where Guild 1 is trying to deny Guild 2 from touching any raid mob and hoarding pixels, just to do it. Balls deep in VP? Don't let Guild 2 touch Ragefire or Phinigel Autropos. Ever.

Its really no different from fighting a guild to deny them access to an iron mine except you don't need to be bat phoned at 4am to defend an iron mine, the iron mine is up more than once a week, unlike fucking dracolich or something. The iron mine is always DTF, always there for contention and is always useful. The iron mine is always awake when you text it after the bar closes. The end result is the exact same as you "fighting over good pve spots" but with less bullshit i.e. (EVRY 1 BUFF AND CAMP OUT HERE NAO)

Then, at the end of the day, the gear divide between top guild of the server and the second guild becomes so pronounced that is greatly impacts PvP, and the less powerful guilds cannot complete their epic quests, etc. Its not fun. Now, I LOVED Everquest, I had a blast in EQ PvP. I really did. But I wouldn't fight over Vox again if you paid me. If someone made a reskinned EQ1 with PvP, I wouldn't play it. (Ok, I probably would, but still) The dynamic of PvE raid mobs with long turn-around which drop rare phat lewt is AIDs to a long-term PvP ecosystem.

I'd rather fight for resources, land, influence, and for luls rather than to deny another guild's alts plane of hate armor once a week.

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etchazz_sl said:

No, I never played on a PvP server in EQ. However, if this game is supposed to be more skill based, action combat than turn based, I don't think the same problems would arise as in EQ. If skill actually does impact how effective you are at PvP more than the loot, I don't see this as being that much of an issue; especially since they are talking about full loot PvP, where if someone does have badass loot, and you're able to kill them, you can then take all their stuff. I just think of a game where there is literally nothing to do other than griefing other players as being fun for maybe a week, then immediately being about as much fun as masterbating with a cheese grater. I mean, it's fun to jump in and play Call of Duty or Titanfall for a few hours, but as far as playing in a high fantasy virtual world where there is nothing to do but PvP? I just don't see the appeal of that. I think that a beautifully blended game of both full PvP and PvE would make PvP much more interesting; as you would be fighting for the best contested areas, instead of just killing other players ad nauseam for no other reason than to kill them.

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Mr Creed_sl said:

Flex, the gear divide is only an issue if you get to keep the stuff indefinitely. Actually given contiued wear or loss of items outright (destroyed, lootable, doesnt matter how), the divide probably isnt getting that big in the first place. You describe a list of ways to cirumvent losing your shit on death. I suggest the devs look at that list and make methods to avoid item loss too difficult (impossible ideally, but that's impossible I guess). You wear it, you risk it, no pussying out by putting it into a container quickly or the like.

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Mr Creed_sl said:

Flex, the gear divide is only an issue if you get to keep the stuff indefinitely. Actually given contiued wear or loss of items outright (destroyed, lootable, doesnt matter how), the divide probably isnt getting that big in the first place. You describe a list of ways to cirumvent losing your shit on death. I suggest the devs look at that list and make methods to avoid item loss too difficult (impossible ideally, but that's impossible I guess). You wear it, you risk it, no pussying out by putting it into a container quickly or the like.

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