
I was a wide-eyed, naive kid when I first stepped into Ultima Online in 1997, and as it turns out, the developers were too.
That’s my takeaway from reading through the Ultima Online chunk of Raph Koster’s new book, Postmortems. Koster, as any dedicated MMORPG fan will recall, went by “Designer Dragon” back then as the creative lead on the game. Having come from a MUD background, he and his wife Kristin Koster were instrumental in shaping Richard Garriott’s seminal MMORPG and therefore the genre as we know it.
Koster kindly sent us a preprint of the book, unwittingly robbing himself of $35, as I was going to buy it anyway, and it’s massive, folks: over 700 pages spanning three decades and the majority of the online games Koster’s worked on during his long tenure in the gaming industry. Some of those games are definitely of more interest to our readers on Massively OP, in particular Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. It’s the Ultima Online chapters I aim to cover today.
I should note here that the book is essentially a long string of essays, talks, and scanned images, some previously published on Koster’s blog and around the internet, so it doesn’t exactly read like a complete narrative of the games’ development histories. Rather, the chapters wind their way through some of the most interesting and significant moments of the game’s development and everything he and his team learned along the way. I’ve plucked out a few that floated up and said, “OoooOoOoooOooooOO” at me.
The skunkworks

Koster’s descriptions of the working conditions for those working on the “Multima” game back in the ’90s are grim no matter where in time you stand, especially for anybody keeping an eye on modern causes like unionization efforts and the fight against abusive crunch. The game wasn’t built in a garage, but it sounds like the next closest thing: Origin effectively stashed them in a freezing corner of a building that was literally missing a wall, with little communication but lots of tension between teams. “You could literally WALK OFF THE BUILDING AND FALL TO YOUR DEATH,” he deadpans (I choose to hear the caps as mirth). Other Origin staff warned him against taking a job on the game, telling him it was a “sweatshop.” It sounds like a clownshow; the team built its own marketing website, logo, and pay-to-play beta on its own, flying under the radar. The devs cut three whole continents ahead of launch (and large swathes of the game’s dialogue) to make a release date exactly nobody believed was justified, earning reviews that were basically “middling to bad” in spite of praise from other developers who knew innovation when they saw it.
The interesting bit is that he’s not actually bashing the studio or the experience; if anything, being neglected and isolated probably kept Ultima Online alive.
“To me, the takeaway (which has only been reinforced for me over the years) is that skunkworks really works. UO was a skunkworks project, through and through. I am fairly sure that if we had not been stuck in the ‘closet’ on the top floor, it would not have been made. I should emphasize that this also means we were lucky it worked at all, and it was held together with chewing gum. I don’t mean to paint the team as heroes. We were young, arrogant, and blinkered to consequences of our choices.”
Koster’s anecdotes also include confirmation that the term “shard” very much originated with UO, if you ever wondered about that; in fact, he and Richard Garriott came up with it in fleshing out UO’s lore (each “shard” of Mondain’s crystal was, once shattered, a copy of the world, operating as alternate universes in tandem).
Ecology vs. the tech monster
If you’ve followed Koster for any length of time on Twitter, you surely know that he alternates between extolling the virtues of simulation AI and warning against its inevitable misuses by human interlopers. That superficial contradiction is no contradiction at all: He’s been trying to simulate a virtual world for decades and understands possibly better than anyone what can go wrong.
Ultima Online was essentially the Kosters’ grand ecology and economy experiment. Everything from the animals and monsters to the shopkeepers’ inventories was intended to be programmed according to a modification of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Each mobile had a hierarchical list of wants and activities based on those wants, like a dragon wanting to protect its hoard of gold when sated but risking that hoard by chasing down random adventurers to eat when hungry.
But the technology of the mid ’90s was insufficient to actually make most of that happen. Even had Origin been willing to fund the team’s wildest ambitions, the servers simply couldn’t handle the scripting underpinning – for example – NPC beggars who searched for and then followed around only rich players. The sheer expense of massive radial searching and pathfinding was just too much to process. And if you’re currently wondering whether players would even be able to tell the difference between a dragon whose AI had cycled it through 500 need queries and a dragon that simply spawns and tries to kill randomly, then you’re asking the right question – Koster asks it too.
“There were a fair amount of team members who saw the whole system as a boondoggle, and not worth pursuing,” Koster writes, and so most of the plans were discarded before the game ever got to beta.
That doesn’t mean Koster has given up on the dream; he’s just waiting for the tech to catch up. “I’d much rather be burning CPU on this sort of thing, frankly, than on 3-D collision,” he says, essentially arguing that scripted AI ecology and economy matter more than whether you can jump or whether every tile has been hand-placed. “The kinds of immersive power that a simulation like this can bring opens a lot more doors. In the long run, I believe that all the pressures are towards simulationist environments, rather than handcrafted ones. CPU power continues to outpace the cost of human capability to design static scenarios. At some point, reality will catch up to our designs from 1995.”
You red, you dead
Easily the most amusing – and horrifyingly frustrating – chapters of Koster’s Ultima Online reminiscing revolve around the game’s infamous early PvP mechanics. It’s clear the Origin team struggled with a naive sort of libertarian mindset when developing – or more accurately, not developing – the PvP at launch. As Koster’s now-ancient blog posts relate, the developers truly believed that their laissez faire “let the community police itself” philosophy was the best approach. You don’t even need to read Koster’s account; you can hear it repeated in the plaintive appeals of FFA PvP players even here in 2018, as the wolves desperately try to convince the sheep to come play victim in the service of the simulation.
“We must have playerkillers in UO because the world would suffer if we did not have them,” he once wrote. “But they also must be channeled so that their effect is beneficial and not detrimental. […] We don’t want to exterminate them completely anymore than we want to make rattlesnakes, black widow spiders, and sharks extinct because they fill a valuable role in the virtual ecology.”
Of course, we all know the story of how the rattlesnakes, black widow spiders, and sharks played out in practice: Rampant ganking and griefing and PKing drove players out of the 1997 sandbox by the thousands – “a truly distressing number of our new player acquisitions,” Koster laments – until the developers engineered countermeasures, patch by patch. They tried flagging. They tried a notoriety system. They tried reputation. They tried bounties. They tried a faction system. They tried guild wars. They tried newbie protection mechanics. But for every attempt to curb the PKs the devs put in, the reds invented some fresh hell for their victims, exploiting every ruleset change. It’s hard not to chuckle as Koster rattles off each new idea and how the players thwarted it (especially when I remember it happening!).
And that’s a theme Koster riffs on over and over – that “no matter what you do, players will decode every formula, statistic, and algorithm in your world via experimentation.” In fact, he argues, you don’t even need combat in your game for griefplay to be present (as anyone who’s read any comments anywhere can attest).
Eventually, the team, by then absent Koster, implemented Trammel, effectively creating mirror worlds safe from player-killers. “I wouldn’t have done it, personally, but there is no question that the userbase doubled once this went in,” he says.
“The result [of UO’s PK environment] was an exodus driven not only by the more modern 3-D graphics of [EverQuest] but by the safety. Everything I had thought about the impossible admin load of having a PK switch with a large-scale game was disproven in short order, and players wasted no time in telling me bluntly that I had been drastically and painfully wrong. In the name of player freedoms, I had put them through the slow-drip torture of two years of experiments with slowly tightening behavior rules, trying to save the emergence while tamping down the bad behavior. The cost was the loss of many hundreds of thousands of players. Ultima Online had churned through more than twice as many players who quit than EverQuest even got as subscribers that year.”
Even so, he frets over the loss to the verisimilitude of the virtual world. The griefer environment may not have been realistic, but it did create “endless stories and excitement, the stories that people tell and retell to this day,” as players were forced to work together to overcome the true evil in the game: the PK players themselves. That, he argues, was “empowering” in a way that “casual” post-Trammel player towns never were. Remember Kazola’s Tavern and the multiple PK guilds that ravaged Great Lakes, and the anti-PK guilds that rose up to fight them? I do; I was there, I defended Kazola’s, and I was once guilded with folks from one of the groups he mentions (SIN – I’ve written about that before). How many games have that sort of meaningful history? I can count them on one hand, and it’s no accident they’re all sandboxes. And what if participating in a genuine struggle against evil players – or figuring out ways to deal with the worst elements of society – “means [we] are more likely to dare to do it in real life instead of living in passivity”? In eschewing free-for-all games, are we just “giving up on the hard problem of freedom co-existing with civility”?
It’s intoxicating. But still maybe too idealistic. And Koster admits as much in essays written years after he’d moved on to new “experiments,” clearly having re-examined his ideas under the light of implementation and disaster.
“I like safe and wild zoning now. I really, really didn’t,” he pens. “I used to think that you could reform bad apples, and argue with hard cases. I’m more cynical these days. […] I used to think that people were willing to act communally for the good of the community. Now I know more about the Tragedy of the Commons and the Prisoner’s Dilemma and think that people are mostly selfish. This isn’t Ivory Tower theory gone looking for empirical evidence. It’s experience gone looking for explanation.”
When I spoke to Koster about this part of his book to get his most current take on MMO PvP, he explained that the massive shifts in the modern gaming landscape have changed his outlook even further.
“Now there are so many worlds and so many gamers that you can actually have a pure PvP game and it can survive. That wasn’t the case back then. I think we’ve even conditioned players to it over the years, and now we have stuff like Fortnite and PUBG. There are a lot of things in the survival genre which are reminiscent of UO, to me. Crowfall [the in-production PvP MMORPG on which Koster has consulted] is, of course, Todd [Coleman]’s game, not mine; I just advise on it. But if I were making my own game now, it’d still have wild PvP areas in it. Just, I’d find a way for Kazola to actually win, so to speak, by using the sorts of town mechanics we later developed in [Star Wars Galaxies].”
Yep, I’d play that.
Why we should bother making MMORPGs
All that said, the idea of mixing fundamentally different people in a truly virtual simulated world isn’t something Koster is willing to set aside for the next flavor-of-the-month online murder sim or social media platform – and we shouldn’t either. He refuses to believe that it was all a “doomed experiment” and that the future of games is nothing more than “little amusement park rides.”
“Niche products are all well and good, but we already know how to make those, and they aren’t going to teach us anything interesting about ourselves. It’s so easy to fall into ruts and niches in our real lives, and I want online worlds to offer us exotic experiences and interaction with people we wouldn’t interact with otherwise, and a chance to try out lifestyles and worldviews we otherwise wouldn’t have, a chance to try to solve problems that we find difficult to tackle in the real world. Otherwise, why bother making them? I am not that interested in them solely as games – games are all over the place, and there are plenty of narrowly focused communities out there. You can find a support group or hobbyist club for just about anything you want, but you’re mostly going to find other people like you there. And I am not nearly as interested in how people interact with likeminded souls as I am in how to bridge gaps between people.”
“Our wisdom,” he writes, “was in surrendering control to the awesome power of emergent behavior. The credit we can take is only for having created a fertile and dynamic enough environment where [emergent concepts like rares markets] can happen. Environments like this also produce house break-ins [and other things] that can be incredibly pernicious. But far more often than you would think, you get magic through serendipity. Your other choice, of course, is to assume that you are going to produce magic on demand.”
And when was the last game that could honestly do that?
I’d like to thank Koster for providing us a copy of his book to dig through; you can pick up your own on Amazon in digital or paperback format. We’re not finished yet, of course – I mentioned it was 700 pages, right? and that this is just the first volume? – and I’ll be tackling the Star Wars Galaxies sections next, so stay tuned for that.
Wondering how the game looks in the modern era? I put together a video for the game’s 19th anniversary that shows off some of its best features, and yes, it discusses the evolution of FFA PvP in the game too. UO turns 21 this fall, but I think the video still holds up!

Classic!
I find it sad to see this obsession with “mimic the real world systems” ideas. They are games. Spare time is rare. I don’t want to work in my sparetime (workification of game systems anyone? Grind is exactly that as is the pretense that making a game mechanic “realistic” is sparetime worth). I don’t want to copy the world.
Games are the ONLY entertainment option that keeps peddling what is work and would be rejected in any other sparetime activity (movies, books, hiking) as “fun” and reading the above there is still the dead on fix to “copy the world”. I absolutely disagree that an ecosystem is more important than the question if I can jump. The jumping and climbing in BDO allowed me to explore, to freely roam and make my own story. I spend way more time on this than any other “feature” (which was essentially predictable grind, even the combat is just killing something to be able to kill something else – but I never know if I find a cave or a camp or a beautiful vista).
When will designer become creative and realize that they can do in games ANYTHING they want? No laws of nature, no limit of resources or having to take care of bodily needs. Get free from realities and make it its own. I like to compare it to how the Western fantasy is all so intensely similar as pretty much everyone is just doing Tolkien copies, variations of the same. It is like having China doing tech/gadgets, just that the US scene makes elf/ork/dwarf copies with some real life thrown in. If people get REALLY crazy they add floating island and some flying whales! Whoa! Isn’t that incredible? /snark end
Compare that to Neverending Story for example. THAT is fresh, authentic, creative, leaving the beaten path. Not the repetition of the stereotypes and cliches.
One of his points, I think, is that most people get only one life. Yes, it’s physically possible to become a farmer in real life, but most people will never get to do it – and some people physically cannot due to handicap, location, finances, etc. Simulated worlds allow us to try out not just fantastic, impossible things but mundane and unreachable realistic things too. ;)
https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2014/QBlog171114A.html
1) Great article/read! 2) Koster admitting to being very wrong about pvp-only, but still admitting that he would not have done the pve server stuff, takes some courage, and I appreciate him saying so plainly, giving some insight into the man.
Great read! That’s all I can really add.
Oh man, this brings back memories. I too played on Great Lakes as the apothecary of OGD, and OCW. In my opinion, to date, there has not been a better MMO than UO.
I remember OGD! Good times. :D
Ahh, the paperbook is 54$! I’m sure its worth it, but I’m going to have to wait for the price to come down before I can indulge. Thank you for the article, Bree! I’ve always been fascinated by developer hindsight insights. Raph Koster and Richard Garriot are two of my favorite developers and I enjoy following their works and writings.
Wow, I cannot wait for this book. Raph is always so disarmingly insightful in his posts and writings (even if I don’t always agree with some of the seemingly super-logical conclusions). Theory of Fun was a brilliant read too, and that level of reflection and over-arching purposefulness is something our industry needs way more of!
Out of curiousity, is Amazon the best place to buy the book in terms of benefits for the author? I assume there’s no referral bonus for Massively?
I didn’t put the referral link in this one (it seemed crass for an academic book, you know?), but you can always use the generic referral – http://www.amazon.com/?tag=massivelyop06-20 – which should deposit the proper cookies for when you click through to the book. And thank you for asking! :D
IDK, it is partially that it is the non-crass who are still in business but mostly it is that which used to be crass no longer is. An email used to be crass relative to a dead-tree mail, but society’s norms change. Begging strangers for money used to be pretty crass; but I am glad you kickstartered.
Crass would be someone who was … “extremely comfortable in correcting others” … pointing out that Raph is foregoing his royalty percentage of MSRP not MSRP for that book. If Raph gets 10-15% of a physical book’s price for writing it and you get 1% of the book’s price for someone following your link, I bet he did more than fifteen times your effort.
I never fail to be amused by the naivety surrounding PvP when reading about the early development of UO. I’d already been playing online games — though, of course, no MMOs yet — for some time at that point and it just seemed pretty obvious that what was going to happen is exactly what happened in retrospect. And I already knew that sort of gameplay was not for me. Having been a fan of the single-player Ultima games, that decision regarding PvP is the sole reason why my MMO experience begins with EQ and not UO.
It sounds like something game devs should be reading about, instead of making the same kinds of mistakes post-2018.
There are many compilations of game and MMO post-mortems if you know where to look. Anybody serious about game design should already have read them. No clue if the diploma-mill games degree shops expose their student to any of them.
Doubt it, they’re too busy tightening up the graphics on Level 3, heh.
As a former grief player the first year of UO was basically PvP Valhalla. It only went downhill from there and it’s been pleasing to see the resurgence of PvP and open/free worlds and titles being designed and developed again.
Yes, most of them having learned absolutely nothing from the people who already tried and failed to make it work. :P Sigh.
I mean bad games are bad games whether they’re PvE or PvP or anything in between. UO was a frustrating game by all accounts and in today’s standards would be laughed off the stage if a game released like it did when it came out. The weekly new bugs/exploits, the wide swinging balance patches, the daily server downtime that deleted hours off the servers. Most other PvP focused titles have been similar, often designed by smaller studios, or just fail to materialize into a good product.
I meant the PvP specifically – learning absolutely nothing from people who already ran this psych experiment two decades ago.
And I meant the game environment being bad is going to have an impact on the outcome of the experiment.
Wait, are you arguing that lag and crashes is why people misbehaved?
As usual you focus on one part of what I said and ignore the rest. UO’s problems extended beyond lag and crashes. There were constant and new exploits each week in that game from busted and broken game mechanics. Balance would swing hard and fast between new builds where suddenly one character someone spent hours working up would be rendered useless in a single patch. Most other PvP (Shadowbane, Darkfall, etc) games have been the same hacked out and buggy messes as well.
I don’t remember it being this way at all. There were some spell patches that changed things, and when the support skills (like wrestling aids casting) came out, there were only a couple of super builds that every PvP took (fencing anatomy poisoning rekt all), but I don’t ever remember thinking “great, now I have to rebuild my character because of this wild patch”
Just off the top of my head from 20 years ago: The archery change (where Hvy Xbow of Vanq would one shot people), the wrestling/meditation change, the lumberjack (where if you had high lumberjack you could 2 shot people with axes) changes, of course the ever classic Dex monkey changes (I still remember that classic flash video pre Youtube from COMMANDO…still up I think). This wasn’t even the exploits from Harm wands that would one shot you to eating meat would give you infinite instant healing (GM Chef baby!) and innumerable others.
This kind of shoddy game design has an impact on the player base. You can look at BDO for a recent example of this where hacking went from relatively unknown to into everyone’s faces as the recent balance changes upset a great deal many folks who decided they were going to have “some fun” before quitting/banned by making everyone else miserable.
The game design/environment has a huge impact on how people play the game. You tweak the environment, you tweak the game play, you tweak the ruleset and you try again. You might end up with PUBG, you’ll pray to get a Fortnite, but there’s a good possibility you’ll end up with a Radical Heights. Game design is complicated and unfortunately is mostly trial and error on what sticks and what doesn’t.
I see, so you’re arguing that exploits and game imbalance is why enough people misbehaved that UO can’t be counted as a proper FFA experiment. That’s a… reach. It seems easily disproven by 1) the huge success of Trammel and 2) all the other FFA games and social environments without those precise problems but the same bones – and the same results.
I’m saying the reason they “failed to make it work” (what you said) was more because of their game environment (a bad game is a bad game, regardless of your audience) than players “misbehaving.”
Trammel came well after a year of game changes and fixes as Raph assuredly documents in his book. One of the biggest hits was the Murder count system which induced immense penalties for PKs and majority of the PK player base I knew at the time moved onto EQ’s Rallos Zek as a result (and then Asheron’s Call Darktide a year later).
More over I think there’s an over abundance of anecdotal evidence regarding assholes existing in any environment be it PvE or PvP so if the criteria is the whole elimination of grief play then one could equally argue that all environments have failed.
Finally other PvP game environments have all had the same style of problem. Shadowbane literally was hacked by it’s player base and players were giving themselves GM powers and destroying the game/servers. It was a complete joke. Darkfall equally had innumerable speed hacks and content exploits because they tried to be sneaky and hold off content so testers couldn’t get an advantage only to find out the content was broken because no one tested it lol…I don’t even know where to begin with that piece of shit Albion.
Yeah you should probably just read the book.