If you're one of the devoted nation of Ultima Online players, you already know that EA are making good on their agreement to continue to develop the game, and that there is another expansion coming. What you may not know is that the developer team is currently looking for some good players - especially those with beta testing experience - to give them a hand testing the new Stygian Abyss expansion!

Beta testers will have the chance to step into the claws of the new Gargoyle race and stomp around the new areas before anyone else. This expansion purportedly has 'the largest dungeon area ever introduced to Ultima Online', as well as PvP zones and of course, the new Gargoyle homelands. Those who are interested in joining the beta test have to be current Ultima Online subscribers, and will be based on "computer system specs, previous testing experience, community involvement and other criteria." Signups are currently open on their site, so you'd better hurry if you're interested.

Tom Endo over at The Escapist has written an interesting editorial in which he suggests the idea that we all need a villain as a vessel for people's frustration with authority such as Bonnie and Clyde or Robin Hood. In the case of MMOs, that anti-hero is the Griefer, who will push the game mechanics to and past their breaking point or intended use in order get ahead.

Second Life has had more than its fair share of griefers over the years, and it's true that in games such as Eve Online, the actions of the players have had a massive impact on the game. Some might say that with some games they have had more than the developer itself. Such is the case with the various self-styled bad-boy corporations and alliances throughout the years in that game, or the actions leading up to the Felluca/Trammel split in Ultima Online. But Endo puts forward the idea that players need these griefers and the stories that they create, despite the true nature of their actual actions.

Head on over to The Escapist to read the full article and see if you agree with his ideas.

Publishing giant Electronic Arts have announced that the latest expansion for Ultima Online will be released this summer. Stygian Abyss is the eighth expansion pack for the game and promises a slew of new content to explore as well as a new playable race: the Gargoyles.

The Gargoyles have a slew of racial abilities including the ability to fly, which in turn unlocks special Gargoyle-only areas. However, players will also be excited to hear they've not been forgotten. There are a host of new lands and dungeons to discover from Ter Mur and the Gargoyle homeland to the Stygian Abyss dungeon itself.

EA are touting the Stygian Abyss as 'the largest dungeon area ever introduced to Ultima Online' which 'will contain new boss monsters of unparalleled difficulty including the Medusa, Primeval Lich and the Stygian Dragon, as well as Player vs. Player zones where adventurers will be turned against each other.'

Ultima Online: Stygian Abyss will require the original game to play, and more information can be found on the game's official site.

Game designer Soren Johnson has written an opinion piece titled "Game Economics", essentially his analysis of the sticky problem of creating a balanced game economy, which is of course integral to massively multiplayer online games. Johnson has worked as a designer and programmer on titles like Civilization 3, Civilization 4, and Spore, and his "Game Economics" originally appeared in Game Developer Magazine.

Johnson writes, "Game design and economics have a spotty history. Designing a fun and functional economy is no easy task as many design assumptions tend to backfire when they come into contact with the player." He discusses a few MMO economies in light of this issue. He mentions the early game economy issues with Ultima Online, and how things have since progressed to the auction houses of World of Warcraft, and even how CCP Games hired an economist to analyze the economy of EVE Online. The bulk of his article isn't necessarily MMO-centric, but no less interesting a read.

[Via GameSetWatch]

Raph Koster couldn't help but wonder when he read the blog post entitled, "Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups," if he had a hand in creating that terminology. Sharding, as this blog post put it, was a method of running databases parallel to one another and making sure that the program could look in the right one for the information it needed. All of the older MMO users in the audience, however, know that this was not the first time the term "sharding" was used with parallel databases.

Raph had coined the phrase "sharding" years before during the inception of Ultima Online. The story writers were looking for a way to tie in the concept of multiple servers running parallel copies of the same world into the lore of the Ultima universe. It was at that point where they got the idea that each server was the reflection in one of the many pieces of the shattered Gem of Immortality from Ultima I -- a shard world. So, is MMO terminology leaking into mainstream database programming? Raph has the whole story over at his blog, where he traces the origins of the term "shard," how it may have gotten used over at Flickr thanks to Game Neverending, and expanded into a term of it's own right. Check out the story, it certain brings back memories of the old days.

Mythic CEO and Warhammer Online lead designer Mark Jacobs is a man who speaks his mind in the face of opposition and criticism. In truth, it's an admirable trait, even if it might occasionally cause some trouble. In the face of criticism from forum trolls and Blizzard COO Paul Sams, he posted a super-long defense of his game and himself. That's interesting on its own, but there's a gem hidden inside. Jacobs claimed that EA wanted to shut down Ultima Online, but he saved it!

Jacobs was defending himself against the accusation that he has a thin skin to criticism by listing things he's weathered and done over the course of his career. Listing those, he said he was "blamed for the state UO is in," but went on to say that "EA wanted to shut down UO when they gave it to us but I convinced them to spend more money on the game."

While it's not surprising that EA wanted to can UO, we're not sure whether to believe he was solely responsible for UO's rescue -- but if that really did happen, well, uhh... thanks, Mark Jacobs!

[Via Kotaku]

Mythic passed on word that Ultima Online, the game a lot of folks think of as the grandaddy of modern MMOs, is getting a new expansion. Alongside games like Meridian 59 and EverQuest, UO launched the US fascination with massively multiplayer games, as well as the careers of several of the country's biggest online designers. The expansion continues that fascination with the realm of Lord British in a new content pack called Stygian Abyss.

Stygian Abyss will offer a number of new features and gameplay elements for die-hard UO players. First and foremost is the ability to create a new character of the gargoyle race! The gargoyles have come through a portal in the land of Sosaria, visiting the lands of Britannia from their original home on the world of Tel Mur. As a gargoyle, players will be able to fly overland and have basic familiarity with missle weapons and Mysticism from the get-go. Other features of the expansion have yet to be fully detailed on the website, but it sounds as though there will be at least one new dungeon, new spells, and new equipment. The full release is below the cut.

I've been thinking recently about loss. Having been incredibly lucky with my own brush with the possibility of losing my World of Warcraft characters, I got to thinking. Not only about what I would have done if things hadn't worked out for me, but about how loss works in MMOs today.

Last week, Gabriel wrote a fantastic column about item decay in games past, present and future. I've been playing Diablo 2 again lately, for obvious reasons, and I had found myself thinking on the similarities and differences between the durability system in Diablo and WoW.

I've said before that my MMO career started with Star Wars Galaxies, so I don't have the long-term experience many of the other writers here at Massively do. I've never had to worry about making corpse runs in Everquest, or had to concern myself with losing my items in Ultima Online. While Galaxies did have item decay, it wasn't set to a punishing degree – items did wear out eventually, but at a reasonable rate. When an item eventually gave out, you crafted yourself a replacement, or you picked one up from another player. By doing so, you knew you were contributing to the economy, so if you tried hard you could convince yourself that you were actually helping the game.

Specie (n) - any type of coined money, usually of metal. Also used to describe commodity metals.

The crafting systems of MMOs have taken their queues from many different sources to find minerals for mining professions. The usual, generally lower-level, metals such as copper, tin, or iron, are seemingly universal. But as you level you may run across some rather odd materials that are difficult or impossible to find in real life.

Today we will be looking at where the metals seen in games came from. Common or rare. Real or created for the sole purpose of sounding like it could be, these are the metals of our games.

It was an age where there were no rules. You could kill who you wanted, sail where you wanted, build where you wanted. In all the realm, there was nobody with your unique mix of talents. It was the age of Ultima Online, and there has never been another like it before or since. Although not the first MMO, its popularity created a market later joined by EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and many, many more. Razakius of Razakius.com spent a lot of time in Brittania, and takes a long look back at Ultima Online and what made it a game where stories were told and legends began that are remembered with fondness a decade later.

The Green Skin has up a post wondering about the future of EA Mythic as an MMO service provider. At this point, the EA subsidiary is now responsible for three separate virtual worlds: Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, and the in-development Warhammer Online. Snafzg ponders the great cross-promotion that Sony Online Entertainment gets from its Station Access program, considering whether the same sort of offering would be worthwhile for Mythic's games.

Certainly, other multi-MMO publishers have considered similar services. NCsoft has made no secret of their intention to eventually offer a pass of some sort for their games. Turbine, likewise, has previously indicated they aren't opposed to the idea. With EA also sponsoring the development of BioWare's as-yet-unnamed title, the possibility exists that Mythic's games could exist on the same subscription as the RPG legends' offering.

If EA offered a 'golden ticket' for all of its MMOs, would you subscribe?

Having been trapped in the Hell that we call flood recovery SLASH redecorating over here in noble Caledonia, I have had precious little time to play anything this past week other than 'World of Pry the cat free from the slowly drying gloss paint Craft', so forgive me is this week's column is a little unfocused.

Still, as I was slopping on the third coat of paint on one particularly irritating wall, something MMO-related managed to penetrate the paint fume-induced fog in my brain, and I began to wonder about how the ease and difficulty of accomplishing certain tasks in MMOS – how hard are they really, and should they be easier of harder than they are?

This is becoming a popular topic. Adam Martin, lead core programmer at NCsoft, tackled this topic today in one of ION's morning sessions entitled "Web 2.0: How I learned to stop worrying and love the internet." In light of the low cost, high audience model of web destinations like Facebook and Myspace, are MMOs even a good idea at all? Is WoW the last major MMO we're going to see?

Martin started off with a brief history of MMOs starting with Ultima Online and Lineage in 1997. UO did well for years, remaining in the top 3 or 4 properties in terms of subscriber numbers, while Lineage was absolutely dominating the Asian market. When Everquest came along two years later it addressed a number of the technological problems that had been massively underrated previously, although patching was still a big and painful issue.

For most fantasy MMOGs, the basic classes you can expect to be playing aren't too hard to predict. Whether you're a stalwart warrior with shield in hand, a crafty mage raining fiery bolts of destruction, a sneaky rogue with poison on his knife, or a benevolent cleric healing the wounds of his allies, you make up part of what's known as the holy trinity of MMOs: Tank-DPS-Healer. You need someone to get your foe's attention, someone to whack them over the head until they die, and someone to keep everyone alive until that happens. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

We can debate the merits of that particular combat system as long as you like, but what I really wanted to point out is how boring those three specialized roles are. The four archetypes I mentioned are a staple in almost every single fantasy MMOG on the market, but they're far from the most interesting ones. While it's true that you can't get by without them, they've become so vanilla-flavored at this point that they're practically passé. Whenever I log into a new game and look at their class list, I wince a little. "Oh, a chance to be a brave warrior... again. Hmm. Mage? Rogue? Meh."

I've always been a big fan of classes that went against the grain, played outside the box, and did something a little different from the "core" classes. Not everyone needs to fit nicely into those three archetypal slots. The classes that don't often turn out to be the most rewarding and fun to play, in my experience. That said, I thought I'd take a look at some of the more interesting class designs in the games I've played and discuss what made them so cool.

To say that delays are common in the MMO production schedule would be a fantastic understatement. Warhammer Online and Age of Conan's now almost-comical dancing act away from a release date can probably be traced right back to last year's launch of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Rob Pardo's well-known mantra of "polish, polish, polish" finally has a sort of anti-hero poster boy; a sterling example of what not to do when making one of these games. But, of course, WAR and AoC are just the latest examples of this trend. MMOs have been delaying or dying off since the days of Ultima Online.

Over at 1up they have a whole feature dedicated to notable game delays, and the Massive genre is proudly represented among those titles. At least, standing cheek-by-jowl with the likes of Daikatana and Sin Episodes, the MMOs on the list represent a lot of (wasted) potential. From the recent Gods and Heroes collapse all the way back to the on-again-off-again development of Ultima Online 2, the list takes in the long messy road of dead and dying MMOs. Probably the one I regret most is the 2004 cancellation of Microsoft's Mythica - a unique norse-themed instanced heavy fantasy title. Everyone that even knew about MMOs back then was very excited for it, as the designers and developers were very gung-ho about the creation of real storytelling experiences inside these crazy 'instance' things. Whole tiny pocket worlds! Amazing!

Living the dream, of course, was not to be. At least the game's idea lives on - along with the likes of Auto Assault, Imperator, and the quirky title-that-never was: Middle Earth Online.