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Ultima Online still the King of trade skills
Aleckor
Member Posts: 3
You hear that Devs? I'm getting rather annoyed at the new age games with lackluster trade skills. Take an example from Ultima Online to see what you're doing wrong and what they've had all along.
In Ultima Online you could fish in any water. You could mine any mountain (or inside any mine). You could chop any tree for wood. Fletch any wood for bows. Carpenter any wood for furniture. Smelt your ore into ingots and smith any blacksmith item from those ingots. And much, much much more.
You never had to go find the ultimate ring of +2 tradeskill to complete your recipe. You never had to go find the Succubus Tail of Godliness in order to complete your awesome sword.
Seriously, what is wrong with games today? The tradeskills are lackluster at BEST. Ultima Online is still the King and it's older than most new games combined.
You never ever had to level your character at all in order to do trade skills on Ultima Online. That's the way it should be. Completely independent from the rest of the game.
-Aleckor
Comments
well you did in a way like inscription you had to have magery a certain level to do certain scrolls and whats not.
but yes it is the best game for trade skills i have to agree with you.
It was, but isnt anymore.
You can go stratics and find several threats about fix crafting. Basicly there is this "bod" system that crafters need to use to make better items in order to compete in market. Bods are sort of lottery tickets that only crafters with certain amough of skill points can get once per 8 hours, so if you play 24h per day or are able to log once per 8 hours you can get 4 tickets per day. Some players have openned "bod accounts" that are full of crafter chars that are able to collect these bods, so that they have better change to get winning ticket and win reward from this lottery system, so they can make items that are worth selling.
(to previous post)
Im sorry, but people complain in every game.
As for ultima online, i agree its still the best game out there. If only they got off their arsies and came upw ith a new client...
Devs should look at ultima online for pointers - the cookie-cutter mmo's *cough*Wow*cough* are all evercrack-types... Ultima online had, and still has, depth. All it lacks now is a makeover.
I would go so fara as to saayy UO hasa the best skill system overall. The crafating, and the way it is done is perfect.
Sure players complain about it in every game, but in UO they actually complain for reason, since it used to be good. Seriously it's ruined to obvious. It's not crafting if you use crafting char to collect lottery ticket once per 8 hours. It's more like some lotto... I can understand EA wanting to keep this system as lot of players have multiple accounts just to collect these lottery tickets, so if they removed these it would effect a lot to their subscribtion numbers.
UO crafting was great and in fact the whole game used to be good and I still think it could be so much better. It just need to take different direction than it took with pub16 and AOS.
Just visited stratics to see updates and I saw they are adding even more neon hued items and are calling them artifacts... See it yourself http://boards.stratics.com/php-bin/uo/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=uouhall&Number=5707472&page=3&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=31&fpart=1&what2=postlist ... Found this post too http://boards.stratics.com/php-bin/uo/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=uouhall&Number=5696544&page=1&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=31&fpart=1&what2=postlist pretty much sum it up for me atleast.
If I am ever going to play UO again its going to be on player run server unless EA does something great for original uo other than make more like crafting lottery system or ruin 2d graphics with horrible hues.
Have you ever played Star Wars Galaxies? (unofficially Ultima Online 2). SWG is easily the new KING of trade skills, crafting, etc... Heck just the mining profession is mind boggling. And that is just one of over 30+ professions. The SCS system ensures that SWG has the best ever ingame economy out of every MMORPG ever created, including UO.
Have you ever played Runescape? It has all the features you listed just now, and more. Mining ore, smealting metals, and smithing them. Mixing different natural metals to produce new metals. And yes, even fletching to make arrows, being able to cut down trees. There are even different types of trees in RS, different types of wood! And it has fishing, freshwater fishing as well as saltwater fishing. And much, much, more.
Well i have to say for me UO too is one of the best crafting trade skills around even after allm this years.
If there is one game better at trade skills that i have played it has to be SWG.
Some games come close to UO but are still lacking.Horizons has a descent trade skill system but lack incentive and the population to do it.
EQ2 has a intresting trade skills espically since it has a degree of interdependancy but the lack of vendors kind of make me put it below UO.
So its sad that after nearly 8 years only one game really rivals UO for trade skills(SWG).
The BoD (Bulk Order Deed) system is actually quite nice. It gives people an oppurtunity to craft to get a reward from a blacksmith to craft nice items, etc. I am going to completely agree that the ultima online craft system is still the best by far. I played SWG for over a year and SWG is a close second, with Horizons (Yes, that game blew, but the crafting was to bad) coming in at third. These are just my opinions, all of it is everyones opinion, but the opinion seems to be UO is the best crafting system
. Alchemy has always been my favorite in UO, even before you could fill up kegs, you'd have 300 potions stored in a bag :P
I don't have anything to compare it to (other than EQ2), but I doubt WoW made crafting better.
I'm speaking as a Blacksmith/Weaponsmith in WoW. At first it is very easy to get into which is nice, you seem to have a variety of things to make and a ready access to the materials. As you reach the cap the majority of materials are easy to come by if you are high enough level and there are a few materials that seem to be impossible to get by farming, so you pay a arm and a leg at auction. This is all well and good except that once you make these items, hardly anyone wants them because they can find better items through drops or quests. And there aren't many plans (recipes, patterns) to choose from. So you end up becoming a blacksmith to make a few items for yourself.
Sorry to rant, but we were just discussing this in my guild the other day. You really don't need more than one smith in your guild (unless you personally making the item yourself).
This isn't really a problem if you don't consider crafting a focal point of WoW as I assume its not. But it would be nice if they built on what they have now - using some of the elements people have mentioned from Ultima Online.
Since I mentioned WoW, I'll mention EQ2. Once again, I only got to level 19 cleric and level 13 crafter (don't remember title).
EQ2's crafting is interesting. You have triple (?) the amount of things you can make and it is fairly easy (though not as simple) to get started. You have different levels of quality for the items you create. You have to craft across the board of trades to make things so you get a taste of each before you decide what to specialize in. Unfortunately for me, once you start to specialize it was difficult to get what I needed to finish because I had to rely on other players for their wares. (When I played I had joined a new server that didn't have many players to trade with. Since then, more than likely the players who craft have increased.) My other major issue was having to be at "home" to sell things. If anyone can explain the reasoning behind that I'd love to hear it.
Obviously I like crafting (my 3rd post to this thread in a row!)
I don't know how hard it would be, but I would like to be able to make things per player request. Not make me a sword (Level IV), but something along the lines of (I don't know much about swords so I had to pull a description of a rapier from a website.):
Unsharpened (adds stamina)
high-carbon (adds strength)
spring steel blade.
Imitation ivory (add intellect) handle with a
polished metal basket guard and pommel.
Black leather scabbard (lowers decay)
with nickel silver (lowers weight) tip and throat.
And each of the things I add/subtract based on what the player desired.
I guess EQ2 and RYL did this to some extent. Does UO and SWG have something like this?
I so have to try Ultima Online one day! One of the greatest RPGs I've ever played was Ultima 7 the Black Gate (And the sequel, U7 The Serpent Isle). UO is pretty much that same engine (with less bugs I hope) except with an online community.
Star Wars Galaxies had an amazing trade skills system too. If it wasn't for the fact that if you wanted to gather water, you had to place a harvester, on the ground, to harvest water from underground when there's lakes and oceans all over the place. :P
Then you harvest minerals, chemicals, gases, wood, food, etc... you create components out of those, then you can finally build something like a house, a vehicule, a droid, etc. Not to mention the craft interface was the best I've ever seen out there!
/sigh
It's too bad none of the newer MMORPGs have this. Now it's just loot a random mineral spot, then it disapears and you gotta find a new spot. The crafting system is very simplistic. What's even more funnier is that in newer MMORPGs, like WoW, you can actually make more money selling the ressources rather than selling a crafted item. Mainly cause all the grinders just want to get their skills very high so they can just sell high priced items rather than selling Leather Vests and crappy non-magical Guns. :P
That was the fun part though. In SWG, you could become a millionaire within 1 month selling large quantities of items. Then once you're a millionaire, you can relax and work on your combat skills.
___________ ___ __ _ _ _
Stealth - Ambush - Hemorrhage - Sinister Strike x2 - Cold Blood - Eviscerate - Vanish - Preparation - Cold Blood - Ambush - ... you're dead! :P