Lord British is Dead! - The 5 Year Anniversary

[Sharpe]

If memory serves, it was 5 years ago this month that the infamous "Lord British is Dead" incident occurred during the Ultima Online beta test. For those who don't recall, UO was the first mass-market graphical MMORPG and was a very unknown quantity at the time. Nobody knew if there was a real market, nobody knew whether people would pay a monthly fee and for how long, nobody knew if the lag, server problems, etc could be overcome. Most of all, nobody had any idea of how much a problem player behavior was going to be in this genre.

5 years ago, Lord British (Richard Garriot) participated in an event near the end of the UO beta. While the founder of the game waved to the milling crowds, a player used a scroll (and a fortuitously re-set invulnerability switch on Lord British) to bring down a fiery blast killing Garriot's avatar to the great dismay of Origin staff and players alike. Origin responded by unleashing a host of demons to drive the crowd away but not before an enterprising player snapped a screen of LB's deceased body, along with a speech bubble carrying the immortal line "Lord British is Dead!" (BTW I cannot find that screenshot anymore - I saw it posted on the UO Vault back in 97 but I no longer have a copy. If anyone has a copy, I'd love to see it again).

Although the later success of UO and EQ in the market has established MMORPGs as a potent sub-genre with VERY high (potential) revenues, the sticky issue of player behavior remains.

I have no doubt that there are LOTS of players anticipating SWG who yearn for the chance to pronounce "Luke Skywalker is Dead!". :)

Anyway, given that the final weeks of UO beta and first weeks of release represent some of the most intense gaming (positive and negative) that I've been involved in, I thought it was worthy of note.

UO will soon be officially 5 years old, and still has 225,000 subscribers according to Gamespot. Who'da thunk it back during the beta? Not I, for one.

Dan

[Qenan]

I remember reading about that incident on Usenet. I had been thinking about whether to try UO (was somewhat undecided because the graphics didn't really call to me and I was not a long-time Ultima fan)... that incident and various posts that followed over the following months about "PKs" convinced me that it wasn't a game for me, and I didn't end up trying an MMORPG until Everquest, with its PK switch.

In the years since, I've read innumerable arguments about PvP vs. PvE. A good first-order approximation would be that the PvE'ers always want separate servers, while the PvP'ers insist everyone must play the game their way.

Despite the tremendous success of PvE servers in Everquest, everyone seems to want to build PvP games, which confuses me. The PvP aspect of SWG is one of the reasons I'm uncertain I'll bother; life is too short to put up with getting ganked.

Anyone, thanks for remembering the anniversary... food for thought.

[Brian Rucker]

Despite the tremendous success of PvE servers in Everquest, everyone seems to want to build PvP games, which confuses me. The PvP aspect of SWG is one of the reasons I'm uncertain I'll bother; life is too short to put up with getting ganked.

It's pretty simple to avoid getting 'ganked' in SWG. Either don't join a faction (Imperial, Alliance or Hutt (perhaps)) or join 'covertly' which only exposes you to attack under certain circumstances. You may still be exposed to danger if you join a PA (player association - like a clan) that voluntarily declares war on another PA or end up in a player controlled town that's lawless by nature (player controlled towns make up a fairly miniscule amount of territory compared to everything else) - even then, I believe, only designated 'militia' characters (as selected by the local boss) can attack at will which might be the entire population in a really dangerous place. There are also PvP zones that you can electively enter.

Whether all this works or not, and I can't see right off why it wouldn't, it seems to be a good step in the right direction at integrating PvP and PvE in the same environment.

[Supertanker]

Google is fun. Here's the interview of the guy that killed LB and a couple of screenshots:

http://privat.schlund.de/u/uo_cso/ultima/recent/rec1.htm

[Sharpe]

Supertanker thank you most graciously for the link. I've been trying to find those screenshots for years :).

BTW, it turns out that my memory is faulty. The quote in the screenshot is not "Lord British is dead!" -- the quote is "LB is dead!!!".

In any case, thats a real blast from the past. That incident foreshadowed SO MUCH of what was to come in UO in just a few seconds of play.

Dan

[mtkafka]

This incident actually made me MORE interested in UO.. for the fact that it meant that even the highest NPC's could die. Although, I just liked the idea of someone being a sneaky bastard and then the moderators going apeshit to catch him!

etc

[Chris Floyd]

It's pretty simple to avoid getting 'ganked' in SWG. Either don't join a faction (Imperial, Alliance or Hutt (perhaps)) or join 'covertly' which only exposes you to attack under certain circumstances. You may still be exposed to danger if you join a PA (player association - like a clan) that voluntarily declares war on another PA or end up in a player controlled town that's lawless by nature (player controlled towns make up a fairly miniscule amount of territory compared to everything else) - even then, I believe, only designated 'militia' characters (as selected by the local boss) can attack at will which might be the entire population in a really dangerous place. There are also PvP zones that you can electively enter.

Um... yeah... simple. That's not what I'd call it. How is some poor shmoe who just wants to be Han Solo supposed to navigate all that? And how many members of their prospective SW-fan-boy audience are going to NOT join the Alliance or Empire?

There are two reasons PvP is commonly considered a necessity in MMORPGs. 1) If good guys can't kill bad guys, and vice versa, it breaks the realism of the setting. It's that whole misguided (I think) simulationism thing again. 2) It provides ongoing, ever-evolving activity that doesn't require new content from the developers. That's a good reason, but there are other solutions to this that don't engender bitterness and resentment amongst players.

[Mark Asher]

The whole "join a guild/clan" thing is definitely something that's for the hardcore and not the casual player. I'm assuming that you won't get ganked if you just solo it in SWG. I can't imagine that the game is going to repeat UO's mistakes.

[Brian Rucker]

The whole "join a guild/clan" thing is definitely something that's for the hardcore and not the casual player. I'm assuming that you won't get ganked if you just solo it in SWG. I can't imagine that the game is going to repeat UO's mistakes.

That's precisely right. You start off as a neutral and have to build favor with either the Empire or the Rebellion to join up. The Empire and Rebellion, however, aren't player associations - they're uberfactions. If you don't join any PA or any of the main factions there's really nobody, except NPCs in particular circumstances (guarding a mission objective or as a random encounter for example) that can harm you - and you can't harm anyone else. I think I saw Raph describing it as players not being so much against the idea of PvP but really wanting to control the circumstances under which it occurs. That seems to be a goal in the design and the solutions are pretty good - at least they seem that way to me.

[Sharpe]

I think I saw Raph describing it as players not being so much against the idea of PvP but really wanting to control the circumstances under which it occurs.

I think this is exactly right. The problem with UO PvP was its *non-consensual* nature. The market has conlusively demonstrated that what a large number of players dislike to being subject to Player attack at the attacker's discretion rather than when the player is "in the mood". Games that offer a choice on PvP such as DAOC have managed to have a fair amount of success. The Lord British incident showed non-consensual PvP at its worst: the game-designers were hosting an organized event, not expecting any attacks and a player forced his agenda on the design team by killing LB, forcing the cancellation of the event. That same non-consensual PKing was what caused the first few months of UO to become "Lord of the Flies".

Dan

[Bub, Andrew]

The Lord British incident showed non-consensual PvP at its worst: the game-designers were hosting an organized event, not expecting any attacks and a player forced his agenda on the design team by killing LB, forcing the cancellation of the event. That same non-consensual PKing was what caused the first few months of UO to become "Lord of the Flies".

I think you're right about the result, and games have learned from it, but this was unimaginably good press at the time as it drew attention to that "anything can happen in this gameworld" feature. They couldn't have planned it better if they tried.

[Alan Au]

Ah, good (?) times.

- Alan

[Qenan]

It's pretty simple to avoid getting 'ganked' in SWG. Either don't join a faction (Imperial, Alliance or Hutt (perhaps)) or join 'covertly' which only exposes you to attack under certain circumstances. You may still be exposed to danger if you join a PA (player association - like a clan) that voluntarily declares war on another PA or end up in a player controlled town that's lawless by nature (player controlled towns make up a fairly miniscule amount of territory compared to everything else) - even then, I believe, only designated 'militia' characters (as selected by the local boss) can attack at will which might be the entire population in a really dangerous place. There are also PvP zones that you can electively enter.

Whether all this works or not, and I can't see right off why it wouldn't, it seems to be a good step in the right direction at integrating PvP and PvE in the same environment.

I hope all is as you claim, but the recent history of MMOGs doesn't give me confidence that the reality will match the vision. And then, there is the question of whether a game catering to PvP will offer enough to satisfy the PvE audience. I wish them well, but remain skeptical.