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Could Ultima Online fit in a modern day browser/ smartphone app?
MMOExposed
Member RarePosts: 7,400
Could a game like Ultima Online fit in a modern day Browser like experience, or smartphone app?
I wouldnt mine more deep MMO gaming with lesser graphics, especially if they were cheaper in cost, and less to manage (client).
Also to play something like this on the go would be excellent. whats your opinion?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
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I think it could, but with less features. They would have to rework a bunch of things though, since your going from a system that requires a mouse to a system that uses your finger for the phone idea. And it would totally work in a browser.
Currently, no. As a scaled down version, very possibly, but you'd be removing a lot of what makes UO unique. For example:
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Sure but it wouldn't be a pleasant experience to play it. I've tried a few MMOs on IOS and Android and they really aren't able to pull it off, which says something especially considering many of the made specifically for mobile. Maybe on a tabler things will be diferent.
Submitted for your consideration:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2q0sV771Q4
Have you tried Order & Chaos Online for iOS and Android? Because that game is a true MMORPG like a PC game. Has the bells and whistles as well. There is another game coming out called Project Dragon that was at E3 and looks very promising.
Yes I have although it was at launch so not sure how the game is now but then it was a pain in the ass to play with the movement and camera both takign so much effort on the touch screen. Good effort and one of the better implementations but I'm pretty sure it only got popular for that fact that it was on a smartphone, as a PC game it wouldn't have lasted a day and there within lies the problem.
That's pretty much the extent of it - a character manager and chat program at slower than 1 fps. Although it's three years later now, so maybe movement might be possible but it would still be a rather sluggish experience.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
he's remoted to his desktop.. it is no actual app... he is using like teamviewer to play on his PC with his smartphone
Would not play.
For immersive sandbox game - I need comfort. Good chair, good keyboard and mouse, nice screen (at least 15').
Could not play UO on smartphone to be honest.
I agree, but I would play it on my iPad!Cheers!
MMO Vet since AOL Neverwinter Nights circa 1992. My MMO beat up your MMO. =S
A scaled down version sure...
Oh I don't know I was able to play all the old SNES Ultima games on my Android phone with an emulator, they worked pretty darn well so really couldn't see a problem with having the Ultima mmo on an android phone but stripped back to it's original classic look.
Which is a essentially a cloud-based app model - your end-device is just used as a viewer, not the main CPU doing all the crunching (I might be wrong, but I suspect that the game has evolved in complexity enough over the years that you can't just look at a tablet as a 15-year-old PC and hope for a direct port). Obviously it's a pretty crude attempt, but it's at least a proof-of-concept. The question is whether you could ever get the game to play with sufficient reaction speed or whether the latency of the extra hop is doomed to kill the game.
Unfortunately, the only similarity between the two is the word Ultima.
Emulating a 16-bit 1 Meg single-player RPG at max 512x478 is very different from porting over a 1.2Gig massively multiplayer game that barely runs on a P3 1Ghz at 800x600. Sorting through one's inventory in UO alone would be a rapacious drain on one's data plan, let alone actually playing the game.
The viable alternative to trying to fit it into a browser/smartphone app would be as another poster suggests - cloud computing.
Gaikai and Onlive already do that. Actually, when you start a new account in LOTRO, your initial experience is with Gaikai through a browser, so devs are already exploring these avenues and we might see more of this kind of stuff in the near future.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I think it could, with a client adapted to touch screens (including inventory management of course).
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
What if rather than trying to provide an entire game experience through these mobile devices you release apps/etc that work with small portions of the game?
PC game much like Ultima Online would be the primary game and how you play in the world, but you could have in-game activities be able to be "played" from outside the game. Very basic example: Farming/Gardening. In the PC game your garden would be on your property, but playing the Farming/Gardening app you would only have access to the garden, it is the entire game available via the app. There you can monitor growth, plant new crops, and take care of existing crops. What you do with the app will be carried over to the actual game world.
You could have a crafting app or a variety of other things dependent on what works within the game.
Most smartphones will have no trouble running the game if we are talking in terms of specs. It should run on any of the high end smartphones. My Galaxy S3 has a quad core at 1.4 Ghz. I doubt any of the PCs of 2000 were even remotely as powerful
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Agreed! I was gonna say myself, my iPhone 5 destroys the PC I had in what? 97 wasn't it when UO came out? lol