I guess it is hard to explain the ultima feel...all my years I don't think I can do it now. Whatever it was, UO didn't have it. Yes it used familiar names and had a little canon in it...but I didn't feel ultima. There were no memorable NPC's in UO. None that I could think of at least.
Hopefully I can provide an interesting perspective on that "Ultima Feel" for this debate.
It's always been the case that UO was divided into two realms; the basic game, where players drove all the economy and interactions, and what I shall call the Event level, where global plot was driven by new content and OSI/EA individuals roleplaying. The reason there were no memorable NPCs is because the game wasn't expected to need them, indeed isn't really coded to allow them... for instance, there's not any way to talk to an NPC and get them to spawn an item on the map, unlock an area etc; Almost everything standard is pure decoration. But anyway!
The point is, all the memorable content was inside the Events. And once the events ended, or the global content was switched off, you'd struggle to remember what it was. Without googling, who can tell me who Relvinian was, and what his lasting influence on the game was?
I couldn't, and I only know because when I came onto the EM program in 2013, I was given a document listing the history as known, which I've just re-read. But it only went up to September 2003. And all the sources went to the original uo.com, which had been deleted by EA 10 years before. If you thought they might have backed up any of it's content... don't be silly! Nope, all the links in the History document (which still listed OSI as the copyright) were a decade dead. Even EM's can't check any further back than 2003 unless they find a source online.
The best unified source is probably here at Stratics, or
here at uoguide but where the past are concerned, they're necessarily slapped together as best they can be from multiple recollections and where internet hasn't dropped the axe...
What else happened in 2003? Age of Shadows; and for all of the criticism (deservedly so) today of Portalarium, that's probably when the game really started to fall apart, as EA swallowed the intellectual property up completely, and all the remaining OSI staff slowly disappeared to be replaced by people who loved the game, but were coming at it as fans, not as people who wrote the originals. And we all know how hit and miss fan-fiction can be. Age of Shadows eh? Apparently what Ultima fans
really wanted then was Diablo-esque itemisation! Or maybe not, as that (not Trammel) is when UO first starts really losing subs...
Over the years then, there's been various attempts to bring in the "Ultima Feel", which you had to be taking part in to appreciate, and might not have enjoyed if your personal take didn't match the people now running the franchise. And let's be honest, some of them were just
awful. Mesanna doesn't have a roleplaying bone in her body, and from what I saw before I walked out in disgust, she was playing Minax exactly like her "Dark Lady" character which is what she's really like as a person... a thin skinned, short tempered violent and abusive bully. And Minax actually has a history in early UO, which she makes no real effort to link back too...
But let's talk about my own personal experience. There were attempts to run Events similar to the core Ultimas, at least until 2009 I think which is when my research indicates the last clear one was run.
The Warriors of Destiny cycle of Events was roughly based upon Ultima V. The game now is roughly in the U6 era (gargoyles) but since then it seems to have devolved into random fan service again;
I really like the Ararat call back for instance, I was near the ship in the Underworld playing U5 on my Commodore Amiga when I learned my grandfather had died, so it has heavy significance for me; but it wasn't tied into the wider Ultima Online lore at all, it's just a separate bit of content.
EMs however are free to write their own content, within reason; Most focus upon writing their own stories, and because we weren't warned of the upcoming Global content, that might be a safer bet as you might find suddenly your narratives made no sense due to global changes. But how well were those stories written? Well let's just say there's no interview process any more; Mesanna just asks around the shards to find out what people think of you. My job acceptance was a single line email months after my application saying "welcome aboard". EM training and testing is how well you can make the atrocious spaghetti code work physically. Hence the wild swings in EM quality as experienced, there's no oversight of fiction unless someone complains.
I'd like to think I at least wrote some decent fiction and tried to add some "Ultima Feel" to my shard;
I was going to play Blackthorn closest to how he appears at the end of Ultima V. He was a mortal King, worn down by the burdens of his experience, not evil, just with a different value set to the Virtues. He even offered Bladderstick the chance of a random moongate instead of execution, as he is offered the same in UV. But here's the thing about "feel". Half the crowd were just trying to get the item drop and not bothered about the fiction at all. My fellow EM, playing as the King, didn't put any effort in, turning up 15 minutes before it started not having read the emails I'd sent explaining how to play it, and indeed even caused trouble by bringing up Bladderstick's sexism which I'd been specifically ordered to drop or be sacked, because a player complained a villain wasn't an angel, sigh. Of those who were serious roleplayers, I never heard anyone recognise the allusions to UV. So... unless I openly record that it
was (which I'm doing here) there's no record online and no one at Broadsword knows or cares that it was. But they may sue the pants of me for breaking NDA, ho ho ho.
Oh, and much as I love the EM that replaced me, he then re-wrote the story I was going for with the use of The Raven King; I was trying to build it more along the lines of the song dedicated to and inspired by Paul Raven by Killing Joke
"
Let flags of black and red unfurlEchoes of distant laughter
Confederation of the dispossessed
Fearing neither God nor master"
I even set up a tower with black and red banners, but no one caught the political imagery either, although to be fair the Devs forgot to apply "NoDecay" as requested to them, so they vanished a week later, sigh. The idea was that Blackthorn loved the Raven King
because he was misunderstood, but both valued freedom above the "virtues". But I just got into endless arguments with players who either reacted at a purely visceral, simplistic heroics level ("ew, the ravens are eating our bodies! they must be evil!") or were so focused on their own little stories they didn't bother to email me before hand and try and sync it with mine or each other; so Blackthorn would suddenly have to deal with someone springing an argument that was the equivalent of who was letting their dog crap on whose lawn, and it would be impossible to make the fiction flow realistically in the time I had. I did my best to merge them into my own global narratives,
and I re-coded the webpage to auto archive everything I and the players did for future history, but then someone hacked the global EM webpage, no one at Broadsword fixed it for months so the EMs couldn't use them, and then it all got moved off to Facebook instead. Sigh.
But the point, lest I forget what point I was trying to make, is that there's a lot of reasons why UO suffers for lore. It was an experiment with event driven narrative, where even the publishers are cavalier about recording it, where it's often been badly written where it's not forgotten, it's extremely hard to implement and many of the players simply don't care. But if you DO care, and want to engage, the "Ultima Feel" is there. I know it was for me, until it broke my heart and I couldn't feel anything for the game any more. And it is for many others too. But it's not easy to
share it, because it doesn't care about it's history as much as it should
No biggie!
