A trip down the memory lane

There was a time when the genre of “MMORPGs” had more variety than just another copy-paste version of a single-player game story that you go through with a bunch of people over the internet, which is the common formula used today. I wish that the genre had gone in the direction of free-form exploration/roleplay games we had in the past, things like the original iteration of Star Wars Galaxy or Ultima Online (aka UO to close friends).

UO, specifically, is what left me with dreams and delusions of what an online RPG could offer.

I should say that I never played on the original server. Monthly payments in dollars were ridiculously expensive for a working-class family in Brazil. No, I played on pirate “shards” running server emulators with custom scripts. More than that, the servers I played were “roleplay shards”, meaning that roleplay was mandatory. Not doing the roleplay part, like talking out of character (or OOC, as the cool kids used to say) could result in certain penalties or punishments for the player. These same shards also had the whole map open for player kills (or PK, as those in the known call it), but it was forbidden to kill people just because: the player’s character had to have a reason for it, and it couldn’t just be “I hate this guy” or “my family was killed by orcs and I swore vengeance upon their race”.

As you see, there was a glimpse of a working society there. And they definitely were enforced deliberately depending if you were friends with the game masters (or GMs, not for good morning). Most GMs in most shards tried to be unbiased, but we know how it is when there’s a clique of people running things on pirate servers in the early 2000s. But I digress.

Despite what it might look like, it was awesome. It was the closest thing one could have to a “virtual life”, as Second Life was still some time away and ActiveWorlds never became popular enough (and both weren’t RPGs, of course). People would log in to the server and go about living their character’s life. A lot always ended up being adventurers, but quite enough people used to just be blacksmiths, carpenters, weavers, and so on. With the possibility of founding guilds — for adventuring or otherwise — a sort of social order would be naturally established. In some of these servers, players would actually run the game’s cities as mayors or something equivalent, with all sorts of repercussions and intrigue that came with the job. It was incredible.

My desire for a return of these kinds of games derives precisely from these happenings. I actively played the game for a shorter time compared to some of my friends — even though that “short time” encompassed a few years — and collected tons of stories that could, in themselves, be published as novels set in fantasy worlds. Most of these would be equivalent to what happens in tabletop gaming sessions, I guess, but probably could also be called “emerging narratives” before the term became popular. The thing is that these stories were truly magnificent in unbelievable ways. Like, as an example: in one of these servers, I played mostly as a bard. I had almost no combat skills and, even as a bard, my character’s musicianship wasn’t high enough to cast any sort of useful musical spell (scripted by the server admins). So I just… wandered around and talked with people, fled from the creatures that lived in the routes between cities, and played my lute to annoy some players. Nothing else.

But I was also part of a guild, composed of pirates (who didn’t have a ship for a lot of reasons, including ships bugging out in that server) who were at war with a guild of warriors. My guild lived in Cove, the other one lived in Vesper. The members from each guild were constantly provoking each other (in the game), up until a point when war was declared.

Seriously.

And I kinda became the messenger, and had to bluff my way through guards to deliver messages (“Do you really want to attack me? A messenger transporting important information between the leaders?”), and did the same to protect the bard from the rival guild, who was also delivering messages, when a bunch of mercenaries (seriously²) wanted to kill him after noticing he was with the enemy.

I survived this war, which was, like, 10 people fighting 10 other people in the UO’s forest (horrible place for the game’s pathfinding), but died a lot to ettins, bears, wolves, and other dangers lurking in the woods while exploring. Good old times of guild wars (heh).

And while this happened in that part of the world, other things were also happening in other places, like clerics from an evil god abducting a pure elven mage — all players — to use in some ritual, and so on.

Isn’t this just amazing?

In another server, a bunch of friends became the city’s de facto adventurers/rescuers because they knew pretty well how to fight PvE and PvP, but other people were always going into the dungeons and being trapped by monsters, or dying because they were pretty horrible at combat. Then these friends started calling themselves Lâminas (“Blades” in Portuguese) and organizing incursions to loot dungeons in the region. But the players who were the proper guards in that area didn’t like my friends’ rising fame, because it painted them as incompetents at their jobs, so conflict arose from it.

By this time, I was also playing on this server with a lumberjack/carpenter called Rufus (haha) and making staffs from a high-level wood (I think it was blackwood? Again, something scripted by the admins, not part of the original game) that did as much damage as a sword while being part of the group.

After a while, it so happened that the Lâminas became some sort of “underground fighters” because the guards didn’t like us, so we moved stealthily in the city when required (which was part of a custom map for that server) and lived mostly on the woods. We used a cabin someone found (it wasn’t possible to buy land) as a meeting point (furnished by me over time). Everyone in the group used a hooded robe (which hides the player’s name), and most members were pretty good at fighting, so we always survived ambushes by other players. One time, a friend fought against 2 or 3 players at the same time and emerged victorious thanks to his smart use of explosion potions. It became a much-talked topic for quite a while, even in the forums (remember those?).

Anyway, things happened — I’m not so sure how — and, somehow, we became the protectors of the city instead of the old guards. More than that, one of us became the emperor of the kingdom, with all the things that entails. Someone was having trouble with monsters? They talked to the emperor and he dispatched one of us. People were being assholes to another player? The emperor, again, dispatched one of us (and in the case of player conflicts, people did fear fighting us a bit). Sometimes the emperor himself would just don the robe and go into a dungeon to deal with whatever needed dealing there.

Then something happened with the elves, who lived in another kingdom on the same continent. I don’t remember what happened, but they sent a delegation to the city to talk about something and do some “intimidation”. There were 5 or 6 highly-equipped elves, I think, in the emperor’s chamber, which had only 2 NPC guards. Then the elves made some threat or demand and all of the Lâminas sprouted from the shadows — because everyone had mastered stealth, besides their primary skills, and was hiding by the pillars, mere meters away from the elves. Needless to say they were quite surprised and stopped their shenanigans.

In the end, almost everyone of note in that area was actually a secret member of our group. Then one of the members got promoted to GM and started to run his own events, including a search and rescue story through a portal that led to hell — where the Lâminas, as expected, were the ones who kept everyone else in that adventure alive.

Also, yes, GMs ran their own events and adventures, just like dungeon masters do on tabletop games. Sometimes these were related to the overall story of the server (and some players would be immortalized in the lore), sometimes these were just something the GMs did because they were bored.

The important thing here, though, is that none of this involved “being the chosen one to rid the world of evil” while fighting alongside hundreds of other chosen ones. If the game provides a sandbox with enough systems and freedoms to support player agency, things much more interesting may arise from that than just “let’s save the world together”.

Bear in mind the stories I told lacked a lot of details, and they were all from my point of view. And these pirate servers didn’t even have that many people: the most popular one peaked at 500 simultaneous players, I think, while most stayed under 100 at their high, with everyone playing their characters — by consensus and law — creating a rich tapestry of roleplay and storytelling.

I don’t think I would have the energy to play UO like this again nowadays, but it all brings a strong sense of nostalgia that makes me wonder how the current MMO landscape would look like had companies followed UO’s formula.