So when UO came out I was working at intel, we had a game lab (building out and testing the celeron SIMD based machines as intel was goaling for sub $1,000 machine)
We had 6 UO accounts...
We used to be followed around by admins who were invisibe because they were studying how we were so successful at the game.
We did use macros - but it was really about the fact that we had an OC-48 and everyone else was on a 56K modem.... and our Hide skill was 100 - but we played on 6 machines all right next to eachother and we had mule accounts - and nefarious accounts...
So we had Snoop and Sneek our mules with hide of 100, then we had both Great Lord Phlux and Dread Lord Phlux (me) and same for Mym...
We would taunt great lords with our dread lord accounts and then chase them down with our great lord accounts and they would attack us and lose their status and become dastardly and they would lose their shit.
We found this great axe that was bugged. It could kill literally any character with one hit. The mods that were following us around wound up taking the weapon, we were pissed - but they deleted the weapon as it was so bugged that we massacred many a foe.
we were skilled at kiting dragons to the top of our castle, then trapping them in corners of the castl with chests such that we would train our characters on attacking them.
We built houses around the front of the castle to enclose it, then we only used runes to teleport in, but we blocked all the other spots with bags of flour such that you could not rune into the spots...
Draygor (our third member) got too stoned and got whacked by the japanese contingent that we were at war with and he failed to put his rune in the bank....
the japanese team runed into our courtyard, and hid until we opened the door with our castle butler and then attacked and they stole every loot we had in a massive store of chests in the castle....
I have similar stories with UO... it was the best sandbox game every created. In many ways UO felt like an open world crossed between Minecraft and an Elder Scrolls game. Often even the bugs and quirks aided the whole experience too- often quickly exploited to pull off some crazy plan (like trapping a mod). In comparison, WoW and most MMORPGs feel like linear adventure games.
Game philosophy question: I wonder if the difference is between FPS and Isometric WRT how it plays on one mind.
in WOW being FPS, you are the being. in ISO youre mre omnisciently playing.
Think of Populous (not the shitty later versions, but the 80s version) -- even when you are playing as your personality, its easier to express and enjoy that personality at a macro level than a micro level.
The exception to this is that in any FPS, with PVP it is satisfying to conquer a foe directly... think Hitman sniping style... but that is quest based.
When you have an open world like UO that had no quests it much more free.
e.g. ever logged into a game you havent played in a while and been like "fuck I dont recall all these quests I was in process"? -- UO had none of that. UO was "forget damsels, gather loot and power" only and it was glorious.
the FPS genre needs to keep itself to "* Kill that guy without being killed/seen OR adventure*" like you say... but games like UO took game-thought to a new level and you were managing an empire if you could build it...
Now, with that said, I dont game much any more - so the modern version of UO would maybe be EVE, as I mentioned a guy had a full time income from managing an EVE army... thats next level cerebral.
Man, we are going to have Ghost-in-the-Shell future sooner than we planned.
(ALL gaming bleeds into reality... William Gibson and Neil Stephenson should get the Nobel prize in futurism)
Since we had all 6 accounts logged in, and right next to eachother, we would whack a guy in PVP but use our Snoop and Sneek hiding characters to grab the loot.
So if we got killed, your ghost would typically have to run back to your body - but typically the loot was gone obviously. - so we would move the Snoop and Sneek characters along the same path as our Dread Lords - and when we would whack a person with the dread lord, we would have Snoop and Sneek pickup the loot and hide.
Multiple times ppl killed our main character, attempted to loot us, knowing that we had just looted the ppl we killed but then found nothing of their friends loot on our body and were saying WTF... this is why admins followed us around. They didnt get how we were exploiting multiple accounts with such coordination.
Or if our dreadlord got whacked, we could quickly loot our own body, then hide, protecting our loot.
Snoop and Sneek, while skilled little rogues were master mages.
Recall when IN VAS FLAM was bugged and would insta-kill anyone? Yeah Snoop and Sneek have a vast kill roster with that bug.
So my story is I had a thief in occlo and I trained with a guild and we would steal from rich innocent mages. It happened that the Occlo mage shop was so crowded on that little island, it was hard for anybody to avoid us. We had the mages litterely sorrounded by thieves. I grew the character and learned some nice macros. And graduated to dungeons and stealing from lich kings and stealing from players fighting lich kings. My best take was a silver broadsword of vanquishing. The owner, not to happy, found me somehow and tried to fight my blue character in town. I called guards! And stole the rest of his stuff. Good times. I was also an Elder in UO and wow, that's a whole other story.
Similar situation. We had 5-6ms pings to the Lake Superior shard in an era when most people were on modems (IIRC at launch most people weren't even on 56k!). We sat next to each other and could see each other's screen while for other folks even IM was a novelty for team coordination.
When to others it looked like you were warping around and doing 5 things in an instant and you had great communication/coordination with your partners, you could do some serious damage.
