Hi all, This is a sincere question, so snide answers please. I understand from the lore that there were a series of events that occurred including the creation of "The Lost Lands" T2A. My question, what progression has/does this lore make, for example is Lord Britannia planning on conquering the rest of the lands, are there forces that are currently a threat to overwhelm city after city unless vanquished?, etc... or is basically the world static with the exception of the Player Character interacting with each other and the environment. I knew that monsters re-spawn after a certain period of time and that the people you escort returned to where they were but I want to know specifically how dynamic is the environ itself if at all? Thanks for reading.
UO's original story/lore started right after the first Ultima game ended, i believe! Lord British summoned the "Stranger" from a different world to help save Sosaria from an evil man named Mondain. Mondain was a gifted child who studied magery and had a lust for power. At a young age he killed his father, the wizard Wolfgang (after trying to stop Mondain from turning evil) and took his prized possession: a ruby gem that held the power of the sun. Mondain turned the gem's power against itself, creating a black gem to make him (nearly?) immortal. It was then called the Gem of Immortality. Since then Mondain craved more power and sought to control Sosaria. When British was young, he confronted Mondain and they fought. British won, but did not successfully kill Mondain. He was henceforth known as Lord British, protector of Akalabeth(sp). Mondain summoned aid from all forms of evil, including an alien species, whom eventually rallied together, attempting to take over Sosaria. Somewhere in there time passes and Mondain's army endanger Sosaria, seeming to doom the lands. At this time lord british summoned the Stranger to help save his lands and rid of Mondain for good. Stranger eventually succeeded in killing Mondain, by shattering his Gem of Immortality. The Ultima game story goes a different way from here. When the Stranger shattered the gem and killed Mondain, 3 of the 4 continents(?) vanished, never to be heard of again. They say ships would appear from the deep seas from other lands, but were never able to successfully return. These eventually were known as the lost lands i believe. UO took an approach that would better suit itself. Once the gem was shattered, divergent realities were instantly created- one reality contained within each shard. One reality continued on its course, this became known as Ultima Prime and is the setting for the game series. The other pieces housed realities or shards of UO, where we are! They did not intend for the shards to contain a Stranger, nor a huge presence from Lord British, so that we can make our own history and stories. Lord British has been interviewed a lot on youtube about the early years of the game and what he thought of it all. I remember her him saying that they built a system that they couldn't even predict at the beginning. It was built to be a truly unique world that could operate and sustain all by itself. I remember he talked about how he wanted a world where if a player kills a large amount of a certain particular animal (let's say goats) wolves would eventually migrate to look for other prey, making them go into towns to try and eat people. They couldn't cram all of that code into a single game back then so he was forced to use a different approach.
i know that may be MORE than what you were looking for but it's difficult to explain one part of it without getting into a LOT of it, apparently.
Hi. You might wish to read some of the in-game books, such as "My Story. By Sherry the Mouse" these can give you a lot of background information...and different points of view from the main characters "Lord British and Lord Blackthorne. To access these books you can go to any npc building which houses bookcases, simply click on the book which title interests you, flip through the pages as you would a spell book, and enjoy Best Westra
From what I understood about that system, they actually got a "Working model" of that dynamic world up. The problem was that the player swarm they experienced overwhelmed and broke it due to being beyond their prediction. It worked on a series of charts, recording X number of animals, gold, etc and had things shift based on the amount dead and taken out of the region. This then worked on some simple cause and effect code that caused some spawns to alter and other things as well. But the code proved pointless and didn't work out as well as planned so was removed. That said: There were world events at times that did have a notable impact in OSI. The more consistent impacts were things such as player governments, where in a number of shards neither lord british nor GMs were put in as true monarchs, but rather players created an entire system using the britian castle and such. Often times the GMs or even major characters would sit in on notable events such as the coronation of a new player king or such though. Some shards also had drasticly non-standard spawns due to events during the time of the seer system too. Some were leftovers from improperly cleaned events, some were actual alters due to player outcomes. These varied heavily based on the staff on a shard, and the first global such event was blackthornes invasion of Yew later on. This was a win/lose scenario but the only effect it had to the shards that lost was no more escorts asked to travel to Yew from what I heard(Mine rather won-and that's not any better than nothing anyways). As for how deeply the players can change the landscape of this shard outside of things like housing and player towns I don't know. There are certianly options if you reach out(For instance I'm part of a fledgling RP guild of dwarves, and there's a fairly major orc clan that causes trouble in it's territory), but it depends on luck, help, and a bit of skill for that.
He did get better though. http://www.uoguide.com/Lord_British#Trivia Plus, he's arguably died a lot more often in the single player game timelines. He obviously knows how to deal with being a ghost. That page also talks about all his other absences. Although it seems outdated. Dawn was suceded by Lord Blackthorne more recently. Now King Blackthorn-with his castle designed entirely by Chuckles the jester. Because Chuckles is apparently an expert of castle design. But that's OSI lore and completely irrelevant to UOR.
I thought the system was there at th start, but was removed as the player base killed everything off too quick for it to come into effect? Or at least I thought that's what I heard.... But that's one idea I always loved about this game, but for that to work properly and with more fun, we need free spawning dragons in th hills, and guards to ignore the hungry beasts =P
