[HN Gopher] Tibia (1997) is one of the earliest and longest-runn...
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Tibia (1997) is one of the earliest and longest-running MMORPGs
Author : doener
Score : 71 points
Date : 2022-02-13 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| Related: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Lord
| dang wrote:
| Related: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3bka3w/one-players-nine-
| year...
|
| (Posted a couple times to HN, but there weren't any comments.)
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Can we also get the submission title changed to something less
| useful, please?
| johncoltrane wrote:
| FWIW, the "Mathias Bynens" in the article happens to be the
| JavaScript VIP Mathias Bynens, which, for some reason, doesn't
| surprises me at all.
| wngd1 wrote:
| I actually met my best friend because of tibia. Heard him talking
| about it in school. Many great memories. No game would get your
| heart beating like tibia when you're about to take a death.
|
| Medivia is actually very close to old school tibia if anybody is
| interested in checking it out. https://medivia.online/
| miki123211 wrote:
| Over here in Poland, Tibia seemed to be what WoW was in the US.
|
| I might be misremembering things, I am too young to remember much
| from that period, but I definitely heard the word Tibia much more
| often. I don't think I've heard of WoW before I learned to speak
| English proficiently and encountered random articles from that
| period.
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| Back then the polish and brazilian community was huge. During
| my childhood in brazil, everyone and their mothers were playing
| tibia.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| This game defined my childhood. All of my friends played it.
| We'd log into it just to hang out at the temple south of
| Thais. Training skills and chatting. It was like IRC but with
| a MMORPG built-in.
| INTPenis wrote:
| In Sweden too among my circles Tibia was more talked about than
| WoW.
| harles wrote:
| I haven't played much Tibia, but I'm fascinated by its camera/art
| style. As far as I'm aware, it was the last game to use the
| orthographic projection with a shear as popularized by the Ultima
| series. Folks seem to love it or hate it, but it certainly makes
| controls convenient as it eliminates odd movement angles typical
| of isometric games.
| qnsi wrote:
| I wasted countless hours when I was young playing Tibia with my
| brother and father. It was a brutal game for children. Spending
| two weeks gaining 2 levels and then losing them when the Internet
| broke or another player killed you.
| ace2358 wrote:
| Remind me of Everquest which started in 1999. It has similarly
| been updated to death over the years and is now free to play.
|
| However I still get me 'classic' fix through Project 1999 and The
| Al'Kabor project (for varying definitions of 'classic').
| achillean wrote:
| There are still nearly 800 OpenTibia game servers available:
|
| https://www.shodan.io/search/report?query=product%3A%22OpenT...
| tester756 wrote:
| One of the most addictive games
|
| How do I know?
|
| I've been playing it for 15 years and I still have PACC (prem)
| account.
|
| Developers are greediest fucks I've ever seen.
|
| It's insane that game this old can be this profitable - just
| google "tibia income" and go to graphics
|
| Most people play this game in "grind-style" nowadays, so
| basically team-hunt everyday for 1? 2? 3? hours (idk what are
| optimal strats nowadays), get levels and cash, do bosses, yada
| yada.
|
| _________
|
| but this game has impressive OSS community
|
| https://github.com/otland/forgottenserver
|
| https://github.com/edubart/otclient
|
| and more
|
| they basically recreated tibia game client & server
|
| people were playing on private servers with real clients
|
| and nowadays as I see custom private servers use custom clients
| that are impressive as hell imo.
|
| I've had a lot of fun debugging those C++/Lua game mechanics when
| trying to create my own server but since its time consuming to
| create nice game play then I gave up
| [deleted]
| rchaves wrote:
| Good old times, in Tibia ~2007 you actually feared for your life,
| as you could lose weeks of work when you died, and most servers
| where pvp enforced
|
| Talking to the NPCs at the store was also very interesting, you
| actually had to talk, using the chat like a normal human being,
| not click the options, and they only answered one player at a
| time
| qnsi wrote:
| also a training ground for scammers. I learned about scams when
| I felt into one, signing with my credentials into fake tibia
| site, when I though I am joining a clan. Lost 10 levels and got
| a red scull. I was 12.
|
| But my cousin, learned to scam other people and got some spare
| cash doing that. Not that I condone that behaviour. He would
| befriend OTS owners and somehow get admin rights on multiple
| OTS servers (unofficial servers) and then sell items or levels
| via prepaid cards, without the knowledge of an owner. Sometimes
| he stole ownership of whole OTS servers and ruined them just
| for fun.
| [deleted]
| lmas wrote:
| > Talking to the NPCs at the store was also very interesting,
| you actually had to talk, using the chat...
|
| Yep I remember people would form orderly queues in the shops,
| waiting for their turn to talk with the NPC. Not sure what
| happened with line cutters, but I assumed they got hunted down
| afterwards.
| samstave wrote:
| >>but I assumed they got hunted down afterwards
|
| As a seasoned PVP clan owner on the UO shards in 1997 - I
| approve of this message.
|
| God those were the days -- but we had a Massive God Mode
| Advantage in 1997... we ran Intel's Game Lab with a T3
| dedicated to our groups' needs, and 6 local accounts in the
| Intel DRG Lab (Only two of us worked there, we ran three
| login-accounts a piece - but we had a Guild Member (there
| were only three actual humans in the guild - but 8 accounts)
|
| PvP in UO was sublime. Golden age of gaming for this old
| gamer.
| sjaak wrote:
| It used to be an amazing game where dying was supremely painful
| and meant the loss of tens (or sometimes hundreds) of hours of
| work.
|
| It used to also be possible to player kill in all sorts of
| creative ways which made the game a lot of fun. If you were
| clever in using game mechanics (uh traps, etc.) you could take
| out a much higher level with several low levels this way.
|
| Over the years many interesting game mechanics were removed and
| the death penalty has also been reduced tremendously.
| cloudking wrote:
| EverQuest lit the torch for MMORPGs, nothing really compares
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EverQuest
| andersonmvd wrote:
| There are other long running MMORPGs that are worth mentioning
| like RuneScape (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneScape). A few
| years ago they realized they changed the game so much that they
| decided to 'restore a backup' from the good old times and launch
| it as 'Old School RuneScape'. If I'm not mistaken this retro
| version has more users than the 'main version', currently called
| RuneScape3. This game has a documentary on youtube and such. The
| main problem I found about being a 'long lived running MMORPGs'
| is that although the game still exists, the company was bought
| twice as far as I am concerned, and that changes a lot of things
| in a game, specially regarding to monetization. For example
| adding some gambling features and not standing much for ethics
| inside the game (e.g., bug exploitation) as a measure to keep
| paying customers. In the documentary the founder & ceo (Andrew)
| explicitly regret selling the company after seeing how the game
| (or at least some part of it) turned out to be.
| toivo wrote:
| There were some really brutal tactics in this game. If someone
| with a higher level was ighting with a tough opponent, you could
| wait for them to be low hp, kill them and take their stuff.
| Apparently the friendlist system in that game worked in a manner
| where you didn't have to accept the friend invitation to see if
| someone was online and their location in the world. This was
| useful for stalking. When you saw people you had beef with come
| online at the same time, you knew you were in trouble. Especially
| with a system where if you died, you could lose levels. My friend
| told me that he had sometime angered a Swedish clan they started
| to stalk him. His solution was to make fake account that
| pretended to be a member of this Swedish clan, and he then used
| it to bait an even bigger clan to attack this Swedish clan by
| pissing them off.
| greiskul wrote:
| Yes, you could add anyone to your list of people you wanted to
| your friends list to see if they were online. And if they were
| online, there was a spell that told you the cardinal direction
| they were from you, plus a fuzzy distance (they are very far to
| the north). So people used to hunt each other when they got to
| disagreements, and at higher levels, it was common for entire
| groups of people to get into wars with each other. The lack of
| instancing of any kind, made it so to advance you would need to
| go hunt monsters in an always shared environment, and with
| monster respawn rate sometimes being too low to support
| multiple people hunting at the same spot, and monsters not
| spawning in view of a player, made disagreements on who got to
| hunt where be bound to happen.
| carom wrote:
| I played this game a lot and loved it. It was brutal and I lost
| a lot of interest as it became more player friendly. Some more
| things to note -
|
| You could not pass through other players so in a single person
| hall way you could be blocked. You could click and drag them to
| push but this could be counteracted by placing certain objects
| behind yourself (parcels for example) or another player.
|
| You had to chat with NPCs to sell things. Hi. Sell plate armor.
| Yes. Yes. Things could only be sold one at a time.
|
| Spells had to be typed out in the chat box. I do not remember
| if there were always hot keys, but if there were early on they
| did not auto cast.
|
| Sorcerers and druids (healers) did something called mana
| sitting to grind up their magic level. Usually they would be
| making runes (stored up spell) that could be used in battle.
| These did not stack so you would sell backpacks full of them.
| Runes did not have hot keys for a long time so mages were pro
| at clicking them then clicking enemies or party members.
|
| Knights (tanks) could train their melee skill by attacking
| monsters with a weak weapon. Basically just sitting around and
| chatting.
|
| Rope, to go up holes, had to be used on a specific spot on the
| ground. You could pile items on this spot and block its use.
| This was used to trap people to be killed by players or
| monsters.
|
| Luring was a big thing. You had to take these tedious walks
| between cities. Higher level players would lure monsters from
| further areas to the main path. You could bring both giant
| spiders and dragon lords to this path. I died a lot this way
| but it made travel very exciting. You could yell so it was
| often seen GS AR DWARF BRIDGE as you approached one of the
| larger barriers to monsters on the path.
|
| The death penalty was very harsh as well. You lost like 10%
| (iirc) of your experience which amounted to your last level
| gained. Additionally, you had a 100% chance to drop your back
| pack slot, and a 10% chance to drop each piece of gear (helmet,
| weapon, shield, armor, legs, boots, ring, arrow slot). This
| hurt. Tears were shed.
|
| Paladins (distance fighters) had to pick their ammo up off the
| ground. So they would throw a spear then have to pick it up.
|
| To sell things you would advertise by yelling in the city you
| were in. The screen was always full of offers as you approached
| the depot in the city.
|
| There was a game called fast hands where you tried to move
| items onto a mutually accessible square and off before the
| other person could grab it. Many people used scripts to cheat
| at this.
|
| Tibia was absolutely brutal. Guilds operated very much as
| gangs. Tons of pl, br, and mx players. I loved it though. It
| was a very big part of my childhood. I loved it because it was
| brutally difficult and lost interest as some of these flaws
| were fixed. The other game I played was early America's Army,
| which also had a very different pace to most fps, it was
| another really fun game and kinda died when they switched
| engines and may the play loop more traditional and faster
| (added respawns).
| guilhas wrote:
| One of the games I had most fun
|
| My heart would pump a lot every time, something unexpected
| happened, it felt very real. Someone appeared, and I was alone...
| Exploring, hiding, killing, running...
|
| Dying was very costly. So it was very personal, a lot of people
| would go to the killer and ask "why?". Noting the killer's name
| and plot revenge was certain, you could follow someone for days,
| or ask for help
|
| Team was important, but if you didn't have friends playing Tibia,
| or at all, getting a team in the game was hard and because there
| were a lot of scammers just waiting to double cross you. I think
| that was one of it's biggest problems
|
| The funnier things in this game were not fund in most similar
| games
|
| * Using the environment to make traps, like blocking the path
| with boxes and set them on fire
|
| Just block someone in a room with too many monsters, collecting
| the loot when dead
|
| Or block the path of someone running after you
|
| * Running away mechanics, very funny, could go up and down walls
| to roofs, by piling boxes or using a spell
|
| * Hiding your loot under a tree, while running away, most would
| not look for it, you could recover it hours later
|
| * Manual aim of spells, to hit people you would need click on
| them, so they could run erratically to make it harder
|
| There was even a flash site just to train your aim
|
| But unfortunately eventually changed to automatic aim since there
| were a lot of people using aimbots
|
| * The quests had to be found, which made it exciting, there were
| secrets everywhere. You had to explore. But also worked against
| it making it harder to just start a random quest. Even though
| there were a lot of community sites curating many of them
|
| Other games just felt like sandboxes compared to Tibia
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| This game changed my life. It forced me to learn English to be
| able to properly interact and play the game. Eventually I started
| dabbling with open-source tibia servers(AKA otservers) and it
| didn't take long before I was writing some lua scripts. It was
| fascinating being able to program the game world like that.
|
| If today I'm able to work remotely abroad as a software engineer,
| I owe a huge part of that to Tibia. My favorite game ever.
| vector_spaces wrote:
| Tibia was great in the early days. It had phenomenal player
| driven politics where in principle anyone could kill anyone, but
| in practice people had friends, and some people had really
| powerful friends who could make life hell for you if you bothered
| them. Eventually the game operators restricted the pvp system and
| added a formal system for having guild wars. Today I understand
| why they did it, but it effectively killed any interesting player
| driven politics.
|
| The server I played on was pretty stable for years because it had
| an ultra powerful ruling guild (the Liches of Archinare on
| Lunara). Eventually they were their own downfall, having
| persecuted enough people over the years -- myself included --
| that the uprising, when it came, was overwhelming. And after that
| came endless wars as various factions vyed to occupy the power
| vacuum that appeared
|
| I learned a lot about culture and power from that game. For
| instance, in the early days of Lunara, pretty much nobody
| targeted the friends and loved ones of their opponents during
| wars, and the idea was highly frowned upon. But in the beginning
| of the uprising against LoA, I opened that door, and it became
| standard practice after that in all the subsequent conflicts
|
| Another aspect I particularly enjoyed about the game was the
| diversity of its player base. I learned Swedish and Brazilian
| Portuguese and bits of Dutch and Tagalog and other languages
| because I always had friends to practice with there. I even
| picked up a bit of Papiamento
| freeflight wrote:
| _> anyone could kill anyone_
|
| Getting killed also meant all your equipment and inventory
| could be looted and stolen by whoever comes across your corpse.
|
| The exp penalty was also crazy; Players could lose levels from
| dying, even levels on trade skills, which often would take many
| hundred hours, and materials, to level up.
|
| So it was very much possible to gank a very developed high
| level character, with hundreds of hours in progress, back to
| basic lvl 1 with no skills if one was dedicated enough.
| foobarbaz33 wrote:
| I played this back in the day. It was amazing. Before the skull
| system. You wielded real power in this game if you could attain
| it. There were real heroes who held their ground against tyranny,
| risking years of work on their character.
|
| Now days it feels a bit cartoonish, and auto-managed everything.
| The community of English speaking players collapsed when World of
| Warcraft came out. The game is not what it was.
| [deleted]
| atum47 wrote:
| A friend who went to college with me says Tibia was his first
| programming experience. He says he used to write scripts for it.
| As others have mentioned, lots of my friends here in Brazil
| played Tibia.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Same here. Touched C++ and Lua for the first time as a kid when
| I customized an open tibia server.
| andrepd wrote:
| How come in the post WoW era no MMO has ever been _even remotely
| as close_ as the old MMOs, like Tibia or Ultima, to fulfilling
| the promise of a _shared, persistent, virtual world_?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Negative scaling: the bigger it gets, the more potential for
| people to cause problems, on a larger scale.
|
| This leads to features being removed to sanitize the world and
| make it more manageable. The community governance - among the
| players and between the players and the owner - becomes worse.
| For the overwhelming majority, making a game _more_ like a
| theme park is better.
|
| That said, I think 2nd life is still going and mostly
| delivering this?
| awelxtr wrote:
| What about Eve online?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Does Minecraft count? What other MMOs are people playing and
| why don't they come close? I've dabbled in some post-WoW MMOs
| over the years and they are no less "shared" and "persistent"
| than WoW--they're basically the same thing.
|
| Tibia and Ultima were brutal games that can't really compete in
| the sea of choices people have in modern gaming. Just look how
| many games reduce any sort of grindy or hardcore mechanics they
| had in an attempt to appeal to a wider, modern audience instead
| of just the few people who want and have time for a more
| hardcore experience.
|
| I saw an interview with one of the high level people involved
| in the modern Pokemon games who said as much when asked about
| the complaints of the modern Pokemon games being easier and
| less grindy and less complicated.
|
| Should modern MMOs always cater to a wider audience than a
| smaller one? Well, just imagine you were the one bankrolling
| such an expensive, risky project.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Minecraft doesn't really hit the "shared world" part in the
| same way. Most players play alone, or with a small group of
| friends. There are a couple of Minecraft "anarchy" servers
| that come close, but playing on one of them is a pretty
| deliberate decision.
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