THE VIDEO SHELF · mmo game development
Classic Game Postmortem: Ultima Online
A 2018 GDC panel where Raph Koster, Starr Long, Richard Garriott and Rich Vogel look back on what went right and wrong building and running Ultima Online. They share candid stories from the early days, including player behavior and server architecture.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN recommends it as a transparent MMO postmortem and as the source of the story that the term 'shard' originated with Ultima Online.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- GDC Festival of Gaming
- Topic
- mmo game development
- Format
- talk
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 5
- HN mentions in dataset
- 13
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2018–2024
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
I'm loving this UO talk, I just found this Postmortem by GDC published in Sep 2018 (so I think it's new? I've never seen it) [VIDEO] This is a much watch if MMOs fascinate you. They're very transparent. Absolutely great video. edit: Oh my god …
swozey on Hacker News · 2018-12
In Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by playersFun fact: the word "shard" in this context was coined by the dev team of the first major commercial MMO, Ultima Online, as an in-universe explanation for why the game world was split into multiple servers. If you're looking for an exemplary server architecture for …
chongli on Hacker News · 2020-04
In Custom Game Engines: A Small Study> While not rioting in real life, it feels familiar. The Ultima Online postmortem session from GDC 2018 has some similar stories about in-game protests. The stories in said session are quite entertaining, and there is a lot of other interesting information too in the …
codetrotter on Hacker News · 2022-10
In Ask HN: Have you ever heard of users demonstrating against software?
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.