vw history

  • Recommended posts, 2017-2025

    Hours Categories Game talk

    It’s been over five years since the last time I gathered up recommended posts in one place and added them to the menu above. I figured I was due.

    As usual this will include talks and interviews as well as articles. Just think of it as “my take on what the best stuff to look at on the site is.”

    Previous collections of recommended posts can be found under the Blog heading on the menu bar or at these links:

    Game design overviews

    All of these posts are about game design in general and tend to cover big swaths of similar territory.

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  • New stuff on the site

    Hours Categories Game talk, Misc

    I really have been neglecting the blog lately. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been adding content to the site all along. I figured it might not hurt to do a little summary of items that have been added over the last year and a half or more. The last talk I posted up was my GDC talk from 2024!

    So, here’s a bit of a catalog…

    For folks who are interested in the history of Ultima Online, I finally gathered up the various snippets I have posted about why exactly the original ecology system didn’t survive to release. There’s a theory out there that it happened because players were like locusts and killed everything and caused it to collapse, and that’s not quite correct. Players were like locusts. But the ecology system came out of the game for economic reasons and for performance reasons. So if you’re curious, you can read the answer to “did players destroy the UO ecology?” here.

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  • Ultima Online’s 25th anniversary

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking
    Comments 7 Comments

    Well, twenty-five years is a long time. Half a life, in fact!

    Given that I actually started work on UO on September 1st 1995, it’s actually more than half. The fact that the game is still running is a testament to the devoted community and the ongoing maintenance over the years from countless people.

    I note a lack of thinkpieces and articles, this time around. The fact of the matter is that the most frequently targeted gamer audience wasn’t born when UO came out. A lot of the folks streaming about games weren’t born yet either.

    I saw a post on Reddit yesterday that asked “how come no other MMOs have done open world housing, besides ArcheAge?” Ah well….

    In many ways the influence of UO is so pervasive that it isn’t visible. Whether it’s Runescape, Minecraft, Eve, DayZ or Neopets, those younger folks probably played something that was inspired by UO in some fashion, and don’t realize how big a shift from prior games it represented. These days, when people say they are sick of crafting being in everything — it makes me want to apologize a little bit. Won’t apologize for games that let you sit, decorate a house, or go fishing, though.

    I’m running low on specific stories about UO and its development, so instead, I’ll just point back at older ones:

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  • Sandbox vs themepark

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 1 Comment

    I just watched a couple of videos about sandbox vs themepark games (in particular one by NerdSlayer and another by Josh “Strife” Hayes)… One thing that struck me about the ways players often talk about this (because at this point the history is so old) is that people think of sandbox as the older version of MMOs, and themeparks as newer. But that’s not right – sandbox is not the older form.

    Sandboxes are the evolution of themepark MMOs, not the antecedent.

    Part of the reason why this isn’t clear is because most players today haven’t played what themeparks were originally, back on the text virtual worlds called MUDs that led directly to MMOs. Given that I suspect I am partly to blame for these two words having currency in the first place, I thought I’d put in my two cents.

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