Mythic To Assist Ultima Online Team 28
Gamasutra reports that Mythic will be assisting the UO team, now that they're both a part of the EA family. "The short website message indicates that the existing Ultima Online team will be working together with Mythic, best known for their work on the Dark Age of Camelot MMO, to 'forge Britannia's future.'" Fans of the venerable MMOG should be happiest, though, with speculation that the company will be assisting with a sequel or update to the world of Britannia.
If I were a fan of Mythic titles though (Score:5, Interesting)
I currently Play Ultima (Score:1, Interesting)
What UO needs most is a good Scalable 3d client, that maintains the isometric camera angle. The Worst thing that could happen to UO is to turn in into an FPS or an over the shoulder perspective. As long as the EA dev team sticks with that sorry 2d client the artwork in UO is always gona be less than stellar(2d pixil graphics don't scale).
If the Mythic team can get UO a new 3d client great. Or if they are finally gona make a sequal, great. But its long past time for the status quo to end.
Re:UO is dead (Score:1, Interesting)
You dumbass. I'm fed up with pre-UOR fanboys always spouting how trammel was the death of everything cool. That schtick was old in 2000, here it is 6 years later and your attitude hasn't changed one bit.
Get over your inability to enjoy change, learn to deal with new environments, and expect that EA is going to push for a completely new redesign of the UO system. Over the course of a few years, they will phase out the old servers for a new generation, and it will be more EQ/Wowish than ever before.
The reason? Emulation. RunUO and Sphere have been around for years, and are engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with OSI. They allow players to own their own servers, or to run public servers. EA has thus far been unable or unwilling to put a stop to the practice.
This could be the nail in that coffin, with emulator-writers forced to start all over or abandon any hopes of emulating modern game play. If they choose to stick with the old architecture, they inherit clients that will never again see security or gameplay updates, and a server system that gets older every day. If they start over, it will take them years to be in a similar position once again.
Re:PvP (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the classes I played was a Light Mentalist. This is a ranged casting class with a mixture of high damage AoE spells and a couple decent damage single-target spells, combined with some minor paralyze type spells, and a limited pet ability.
I have never been more frustrated that when trying to PvP with that character. That is because, the class that I was 'weak' against where enemy stealth/assassin characters. The problem for me was, my mentalist wasn't just 'weak' against those classes. They had such MASSIVE advantages over me that it was essentially no contest, and additionally, it seemed most of the teams I was on could do very little to protect me. It would often go down that the stealther would insta-kill me with backstab (which would leave me with maybe 10 percent of my health), and before I could target them and quickcast a paralyze or anything, they would insta-hit with a melee stab attack that would kill me. Literally going from no combat to dead in about 3 seconds. And, because they were stealthed before they were attacked, my team couldn't react fast enough to save me.
I suppose there were some counter tactics to this, but I just fealt that in trying to create rock-paper-scissors, Mythic went way overboard in making mages, particularly light mentalists, far too vulnerable to stealthers (and it seemed like about 40-50% of enemy PvPers were stealthers). And that is just one example. I don't think Mythic ever got the class balance and tactics down very well for PvP. (My Light Mentalist was a lot of fun for PvE, but just an utter waste of time for PvP it seemed like). Things that Mythic did very well in their RvR system was the siege system, with building and destroying towers and castles using siege engines. That was very cool.
But, overall, I just wasn't that enthused about their PvP. Far too much mezzing was another problem. I've never been a big fan of paralyze powers in any kind of PvP system. It usually makes the battle come down to who paralyzes the other team first. Once the team gets hit with an AE mez that lasts for like 30-45 seconds, its all over.
But, time will tell. Maybe Mythic + the UO team can come up with something more engaging next time 'round.
Re:an update or new version of UO would awesome (Score:1, Interesting)
You see, the premise of DAoC, when it came out was that it was anti-grind. 50 levels. No five billion expansions like Everquest, each one tacking on another 10. Nope - just 50. And levelling was quick. You could effectively take any class to 50 *solo* if you had to.
Then they bought into the bullshit of 'PvE' and released Trials of Atlantis. The expansion added such things as: a) Massive raids, requiring several dozen (to the point of 100+) people, b) Artifacts, which completely changed the face of PvP and as a result were necessary to get. Artifact encounters could take anywhere from 1 to a few dozen people. They required days, weeks or even months of PvE in order to 'activate' and 'level' - this even after the encounter.
The game was struck a heavy blow, and its population fled en masse. They've since 'fixed' ToA by making it much easier to get through (IE, accessible for those who don't even have a life, but might have a job), but the population of the game is still dwindling.
Unless they're absolutely batshit stupid, they won't make the same mistake twice. As they've managed to pull off the best implementation of PvP combat seen on any MMOG, I've hope that they're not stupid.
Re:PvP (Score:3, Interesting)
Definitely depends on the server. I've only been corpse camped once in the six months I've played.
Crafting: nerfed to uselessness
Not sure what you mean by this, tailoring/skinning makes me a pretty decent income.
constant grinding
Now that's totally untrue, WoW has thousands of quests, some are kill x amount of bad guys, some are gather x amount of things, some are proper quests with a story.
My character never FELT like he was getting any better over 40+ levels. As opposed to say, a Diablo character.
You didn't say what class you played but my warlock has gone from free HK to someone you don't annoy without a reason.
I've played quite a few MMORPGs and most were just one dimensional "grind until you're high enough to spend all your time fighting other players" type games. WoW has a lot to do: don't want to grind, do some quests. Don't want to quest go join a battleground. Fed up with battlegrounds go attack random strangers out in the world. Or if none of that appeals you could just wander around looking at the pretty graphics.
I wouldn't describe WoW as perfect, there are things that annoy me about it but it's by far the best one of the bunch that I've ever played. Sounds like you got to Stranglethorn Vale and got fed up with the regular ganking.
Re:PvP (Score:2, Interesting)