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Classic Game Postmortem: Ultima Online

GDC Festival of Gaming · 183.7K views · 2018-09-25 · 59:47

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Overview

A 2018 GDC panel where Raph Koster, Starr Long, Richard Garriott and Rich Vogel look back on what went right and wrong building and running Ultima Online. They share candid stories from the early days, including player behavior and server architecture.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a transparent MMO postmortem and as the source of the story that the term 'shard' originated with Ultima Online.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2018–2024

Topics

Game history & retro gamingGame designDistributed systems
Search by tags
ultima onlinepostmortemgdcshardingmmogame history

What people said

swozey · 2018-12 · Strong recommendation

I'm loving this UO talk, I just found this Postmortem by GDC published in Sep 2018 (so I think it's new? I've never seen it) [VIDEO] This is a much watch if MMOs fascinate you. They're very transparent. Absolutely great video. edit: Oh my god they bring up FlyGuys prostitution ring..

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ksec · 2024-08 · Recommendation

Classic Game Postmortem: Ultima Online [1], I think that goes into the origin of Shard. ( Sorry I didn't save down the time like but it is an interesting video for those into UO ) And if you do a search on HN you will see plenty of other links about UO and sharding. [1] [VIDEO]

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NegatioN · 2023-04 · Recommendation

In a similar vein to the "War Stories"-clips, (even though I never played Ultima,) their Ultima post-mortem from GDC is a great watch too. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by GDC Festival of Gaming, played through YouTube.

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