UO Reborn… again

 Posted by (Visited 7738 times)  Game talk
Aug 272007
 

UO’s latest graphical update is live, sez Kotaku. Links included to go to a free 14 day trial.

It does make me smile to read the comments thread… mostly positive recollections… funny how the horrible bits get sanded away by time. 🙂 But hey, I’ll take it!

  11 Responses to “UO Reborn… again”

  1. Azaroth says:
    August 27, 2007 at 3:16 pm

    The reaction to the client in the UO community has been surprisingly negative, oddly enough.

  2. Raph says:
    August 27, 2007 at 3:24 pm

    I don’t think it is surprising. People always seem to hate art changes to their virtual worlds.

  3. Morgan Ramsay says:
    August 27, 2007 at 5:34 pm

    Looks great! I might have to go find a “rogue” server to play UO again.

  4. Azaroth says:
    August 27, 2007 at 6:17 pm

    I actually thought it looked pretty good myself. There seems to be a full revolt in action though.

    But, like Raph said, I don’t think there’s anything they could have done to keep some of the players happy when experiencing a full facelift like that. Even a change to fully next-gen graphics would have yielded screams of “We love 2D!” and “I can’t see my sandals because of your stupid 20 million dollars worth of art????”.

  5. Morgan Ramsay says:
    August 27, 2007 at 7:08 pm

    There seems to be a full revolt in action though.

    Eh? The folks in the Stratics UO community don’t seem to be revolting. They’re constructive, if anything. After looking through the art criticism thread, I’ll revise my previous comment. “Looks great! …from a distance.” The new graphics seem to have lost a lot of detail, are really low-resolution, and are a completely different style.

  6. Azaroth says:
    August 27, 2007 at 11:40 pm

    Hm. Whenever I looked at the UO Stratics boards, a lot of people seemed pretty upset. There were several threads consisting entirely of complaints, people organizing themselves into little groups officially protesting the client, etc. Things may look a little different today than they did the last time I looked, though. I suppose that’s the nature of a messageboard.

  7. Darniaq says:
    August 28, 2007 at 2:52 am

    It seemed to me that a lot of the hate-change crowd had their say during the beta period. The gamut seems more to skew towards resigned-acceptance and constructive criticism. Of course that’s in aggregate. Any one community is likely to collectively focus more on a specific pov 🙂

    I like the changes, but I think they are more noticable in the cool animations than they are on the static structures.

  8. Michelle D'israeli says:
    August 28, 2007 at 4:28 am

    The biggest problem is not so much the art update, but the client performance.

    We have seen this before in UO and other MMOs, players typically only believe in the validity of the fastest client. Such a client increases their ability to avoid getting killed, aiding in the prefered activity of MMO players, bottom feeding.

    The only real objection to the artwork is the loss of the detailed fantasy look and feel of the interface. World art itself is actually highly detailed, however you need a high resolution display to be able to appreciate it.

  9. Morgan Ramsay says:
    August 28, 2007 at 7:19 am

    World art itself is actually highly detailed, however you need a high resolution display to be able to appreciate it.

    Sounds like the artists were thinking, “Everyone uses 3200×2400!” Exaggerating, of course, but I remember those days!

  10. Over00 - Game Development Diary: Can I have those old "ugly" graphics? says:
    August 28, 2007 at 7:38 am

    […] = ‘http://over00.blogspot.com/2007/08/can-i-have-those-old-ugly-graphics.html’; Since UO is “Reborn”, could someone tell them to ship me for free their old graphics? 😛 Yeah, I guess not…Bah, it’s […]

  11. Abalieno says:
    August 31, 2007 at 1:41 am

    People always seem to hate art changes to their virtual worlds.

    People hate *style* changes.

    I don’t think there’s anything they could have done to keep some of the players happy when experiencing a full facelift like that.

    Retaining the same artists could have helped a lot. I know it couldn’t be done, but it’s not the upgrade itself, it’s the change of style and subjective improvement.

    I dislike the way looked UO, but I also didn’t like what I saw from screenshots (messed up proportions and sometimes less detail).

    And I don’t understand the resolution comment. Isn’t the 2D world just rescaled? And if the performance is worse than previous client, then the programmers need to go back at school. You don’t rewrite a whole client, with subjective graphic improvement to deliver WORSE performance.

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