11 Accidental Video Game Events That Cost THOUSANDS
5. Ultima Online - Ecology Destruction
When Ultima Online was released back in 1997 it was one of the first big MMORPG’s. Because of this, the team had very little to look at for inspiration. Producer Richard Garriott had a fantastic idea, he would implement a virtual Ecology to the world.
The team at Ultima Online did not take one thing into consideration. Players will kill anything that moves, The Ecology was destroyed, as soon as something spawned it was killed. Garriott later said in an interview “Players ran over the world like a swarm of ants, that consumed every living thing as fast as it was possible to spawn it”
The team first idea to fix this problem was to split players into “Shards” splitting players into separate worlds would reduce the pressure on the ecology. This idea didn’t fix the problem but it was the start of what we now know as servers or realms
Eventually, after trying to solve the problem they had to just remove all the code from the game, deleting three years of work. The worst part? The players didn’t even know, it wasn’t until Garriott told the story years later in an interview that people would find out what was happening behind the scenes.
The team lost a lot of time and money learning this lesson. Garriott comments that this sort of Ecology would be a hard challenge for any developer and he hopes that a young game developer will achieve what he couldn’t.