How Gamers Killed Ultima Online's Virtual Ecology | War Stories | Ars Technica

What people said

fennecbutt · 2026-01 · Recommendation

O-oh boy...well I guess he'd achieved his ultimate goal, perhaps there was nothing else after that. That's what I love about these sorts of emergent systems. Although I was discussing it with a friend, there's a great ars war story on ultima: [VIDEO] Won't spoil it for you but we did have a great discussion from that around how emergent gameplay can be amazing, but player agency means that you'd still need the "hand of God" to be involved in fixing things and making adjustments so that major plot points and still enabled and the player doesn't kill the entire world (unless that's the point of the game I suppose).

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acomjean · 2024-01 · Recommendation

We loved ultima 3 growing up. A bunch of us were playing it in middle school and we'd occasionally swap hints about how to advance. Before the internet thats all we had. Out of our group, at least one of us had a real copy of each game, making the spell books and instructions available... The cloth maps were fun, but I don't think we used them during game play. The games were a bit of grind, but we didn't care. I do like the Ars Video on how they spent all this time on the "ultima online ecosystem" only to have it not work out.. [VIDEO]

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acomjean · 2022-09 · Recommendation

Yew tube. (I expected trees..) I’ve seen a few in the series. Less technical but The NES comes to America is pretty good [LINK] And the Ultima online tried create programmatic eco system is kinda hysterical. 7 minutes (with lord British) [VIDEO] Ars (the publisher)has a whole list of them. Non YouTube but seem to have transcripts. [LINK]

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