Hell (and Heaven) is other people...
                  an Ultima Online odyssey
                       by Dave Booth.

Part one - Intro and Day One

Not long after the first computer program was written, the first
computer role-playing game, Colossal Cave, came about.  Similarly
once computer networking came about, so did multi-player games.
Dungeons and dragons were early features in these games.  The
multi-user dungeon, or MUD, genre developed as teams of people on
LANs and mainframes all over the place sought to out-type each
other to fame and glory.  All in ASCII.

The boom in eye-candy-rich games in recent years included
internet-ready games. DOOM was instrumental in this; to this day
people worldwide 'frag' (kill) each other over the phone line.
QuakeWorld is one of the busiest places on the net.  Megabytes of
bandwidth are eaten up by folk running around with a BFG trying to
put one over on each other.  Remember that next time your web
search crawls.  Just kidding, the net has more than enough
capacity for us all.  Really.  Honest.

Single person shooters were naturals for conversion to internet
multi-player mode.  Role-playing games with high graphic content
less so.  The first such game to be widely available was Ultima
Online (UO), and so was the first massively multiplayer online
RPG, or MMORPG.

SynTax readers will be familiar with Ultima.  The gameworld of UO
is graphically based on the Ultima 7 engine : top down, isometric
view, with the player in the centre of screen.  Because of the
isometric perspective, North is top right, South bottom left.
This makes for a bit of fun when trying to get around at first.

The UO world is made up of a number of shards.  The reasoning for
this is explained in the introductory film.  The gameworld -
Sosaria - was a peaceful land of plenty (of course) until an evil
mage came along and entrapped the land (not surprisingly), inside
a magical gem.  He was sought out by the Avatar, who killed off
the sorcerer, but not before butterfingers dropped the gem on the
deck, shattering it into fragments.  In each fragment - shard -
was a perfect replica of Sosaria.  It is into one of these shards
that your character is born.

The shards in fact are nodes on a huge network, most in the
States.  In recent times Origin have expanded the network to
include Europe and Japan.  Two shards have been established in
London, on the COLT network.  This helps us Europeans, as the
internet lag time is much less for our local servers.  Very
important for online gaming.

On logon you are presented with the list of currently active
shards.  Select a shard, and it's time to create a character.  You
define their sex, basic character attributes of strength,
intelligence and dexterity, select three key abilities from an
extensive list, name your protege, and away you go.

The abilities available represent a range of skills, some relating
to combat, others appropriate to mercantile pursuits like
tailoring or blacksmithing.  At this stage, you are compiling a
template of your character which will initially define his or her
role in life : thus you can start out with a player character (PC)
who is to be a specialist money-maker, such as a miner/blacksmith,
or try for a battle-oriented type like the swordsman, or pick
skills like snooping and stealing for the thiefly type.  There is
a tremendous range from which to mix and match skills.
Accordingly you can build a custom character, or choose a template
from which the key skills emerge, such as a Healer.

Your new PC (i.e. 'newbie') emerges in one of the many towns in
Britannia, the main landmass of Sosaria.  My first character was
born in Vesper, city of industry.  Immediately I was struck by the
multi-player aspect of the game.  Players running around all over
the place, terse sentences erupting over their heads.  The virtual
air was filled with calls of greeting, offers to buy and sell, a
fair number of gratuitous insults, much delivered in a language I
initially did not understand... which I later came to know as
kewldood.  More on that soon.

Nabi (named after my priest character in Dungeon Master) had a
good old trek around Vesper, being greeted by calls of 'Hail',
'Heh a newbie', and 'Gimme gold'.  Then he found the bank.
Yegods.  Dozens of people milled round here. Some yelling the
obscure phrase 'Bank guards'.  This requests access to your bank
box, a secure container in which your worldly goods can be stored,
whilst simultaneously summoning the town guards.

The guard's job around the bank consists mostly of slaying thieves
who are caught in the act.

Didn't deter the stealers though.

Boy was there a lot of that.  You could tell the thieves, they
were the ones running up with no clothes on, stopping next to a
player at the bank, then uttering a death cry as a summoned guard
struck them down in the act of thieving.  It transpires that a
good thief could steal and drop the stolen goodies in his bankbox
before dying, so in exchange for a guard-whacking you could grab
and stow an expensive magical item or a pile of gold.

The towns are all guarded zones.  The guards can be summoned by
any innocent player who is attacked or sees an attack, to dispatch
the villain, or as mentioned to pop off thieves.  Outside town
however is the lawless wilderness.  No guards.  Of course I didn't
know that so...

I took Nabi out of town to find trees to chop.  Cutting trees
yields logs, which can be fashioned into bows and arrows, for use
by the player or sold to players or NPC shopkeepers in town.  Like
all other skills, your proficiency increases with use, so that you
can eventually make extremely powerful bows, which players will
pay good gold for. Or kill you to get.

As Nabi walked round the woods, he came across a band of men on
horseback straddling the road.  A glance at their character
portraits proved unnerving : names like The Dread Lord KiKAzZ (I
kid you not).  These names were in bright red, unlike the blue
names in town.  This spelt trouble.

'Gimme ur gold!' yelled one.  'Corp Por' called out another.  Corp
what?  Oh dear, that wasn't speech, it was a spell being launched.
As I stood there bemused, a wiggly line emerged from the hands of
the spellcaster.  Looked like a side-on letter W.  My bemusement
ended as the spell hit, reducing my paltry hitpoints to zero.  I
Was Dead.  Well that's what the screen said after I heard my
deathcry.

What was this?  Just into the game and dead already.  Plus unlike
any single-player game, there's no save/restore option.  Surely
this wasn't the end?

It wasn't, of course.  In death you become a ghost, leaving all
your possessions open to looting on your body.  Which the
attackers did (with disparaging calls of 'Damn n3wbie' and 'No
l3wt').  The attackers, as well as being after my possessions,
were also kewldoods.  This brand of player communicates in the
almost Orwellian speech of Kewl.  Here's a few examples of English
phrases transmuted into this dialect :

'Hail, good citizen' = 'sup dood' 'You are a mighty warrior!'=
'heh d3wd u r 3l33t' (3 is a side-on 'e') 'I must relieve you of
your gold, on pain of death' = 'Gimme stuf or ill rok ur a$$
!!!111'

Yes, the doods (or d3wds, to adopt their spelling) are not
commonly the nicest people to encounter in UO.  As I was to find
though, the speech did not always indicate a robbing murderer;
plenty of people speak in Kewl who did not actively try to put my
character to sword.  Leastways, not after I started improving to
the extent of wearing plate armour and carrying a meaty halberd.

Still, at this early point I was just plain dead.  What to do now?
I was still in the game, albeit as a shade, and unable to do
anything but move around.  Couldn't even speak, everything I said
came out as 'OooOOO'.

So I headed back into town to see if I could find another dead
man.  He might be able to show me what to do. Sure enough, shortly
a couple of fellow ghosts ran past me, so I followed them.  They
disappeared through the door of a building which I was soon to
become *very* familiar with - the healers.

Inside, the NPC healers were bringing them back to life!  I took
the hint and went in too.  One wave of the healer's hands and I
was returned to the world intact.

Well, semi-intact.  I was no longer dressed in my starting gear,
and the 100 gold I had been granted on access to the world had
gone.  I was dressed in a simple robe.  Checking my backpack, at
least I still had some of the equipment I started off with - a
dagger, and the hatchet I used to cut trees.  Poor again. This was
going to be a difficult life.

@~To be continued




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