Ancient joke: A man finishes a meal in a restaurant. He calls the waiter. "Waiter!" he complains. "First of all, the food here was absolutely vile! Second, the portions were too small!"
That's what playing Ultima Online is like. You complain endlessly about the bugs, the imbalance, the poor design – and then you complain more when you can't connect and play.
Ultima Online is a grand experiment – the creation of a persistent, shared, realistic multiplayer online role-playing game with an ecology and a supply-and-demand economy, plus the chance for players to become anything from a tailor to an evil sorcerer. As of this writing, however, its success depends on the ability of the design team to patch a buggy and imbalanced game engine faster than players lose patience. For those who stick it out, though, the game can be rewarding.
The primary flaw is the overwhelming number of players who treat Ultima as if it were Diablo with a bigger map. By exploiting bugs, nonexistent documentation, and Origin's unwillingness to risk losing business by cutting out the teenage-psychopath market, the company has turned the wildernesses of Britannia into killing fields. Naked, dead bodies literally line the roads, and the only pretense of "justice" is found in the teleporting guards who treat any wrongdoing as a capital offense. In short, fascism within the cities, chaos without.
If you don't want to play a psycho killer, your options are limited. The realistic economy is stuck in a perpetual depression of too many products chasing too little gold. If you read the newsgroups and the online help files, you can survive – and even have fun. But any player coming to the game blind is going to be toast – quite literally, as players can carve up human corpses, then cook and eat the flesh.
The game's potential is what keeps people coming back. It's a wonder to look at – I'd spend hours gawking at the rich and detailed world if standing still weren't an invitation for theft or murder. Every city has a unique look and feel. The sounds range from laughable to excellent – the digitized meows of hordes of cats confused my meatspace felines to no end. If the combat and magic systems are balanced, the consequences of evil increased, the bugs fixed, and the loopholes closed, this game could easily become what was promised. But by the time that happens, will anyone still be playing? Ultima Online: US$64.95. Origin: +1 (512) 434 4264.
This article originally appeared in the February issue of Wired magazine.
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