UO veterans: how would you feel about UO-style PvP with active, deterministic defense instead of hit/parry/dodge rolls?
I've been thinking a lot about what actually makes UO combat feel like UO, especially when players are running, circling, chasing and trying to create opportunities.
I'm working on a sandbox MMORPG inspired by some of those ideas, but I'm experimenting with a different approach to physical combat.
Instead of having things like parry, dodge or miss decided mainly by hidden/random rolls, I'm testing a deterministic system where the player has to actually perform the defensive action.
For example:
- Attack: contact is resolved at the impact moment based on positioning/reach. Running away can make the attack miss, but simply moving isn't a passive dodge.
- Parry: you press the defense input before impact, opening a short parry window. If the attack lands during that window, with valid facing/equipment/stamina, you parry it.
- Guard: with a shield, holding defense after the initial parry window transitions into guard. It's safer than weapon parrying, but has stamina/guard consequences.
- Evade: you deliberately evade and actually have to move out of the weapon's effective contact. Pressing evade doesn't just grant an RNG dodge or automatic invulnerability.
- Miss: the attacker genuinely failed to maintain plausible contact by the impact moment.
Character skills would still matter a lot, just differently.
A high Parry skill wouldn't mean “30% chance to automatically parry.” It could mean lower stamina cost, better recovery, slightly more timing tolerance, better stability against heavy impacts, and access to things like Riposte.
So player execution determines whether you successfully perform the action, while character skill determines how efficiently and effectively your character performs it.
One example I'm currently testing is roughly:
Weapon Parry: ~83ms active window
Shield Parry: ~133ms active window
Failed parry: short punishable recovery
Successful parry: shorter recovery
No arbitrary multi-second cooldown; recovery + stamina are the limiting factors.
One important part is that I'm not trying to turn it into Souls combat where everyone constantly stops, rolls and animation-locks.
Movement during PvP is important. I want players to still be able to run, chase, circle and cross each other like you often see in UO. Attacks therefore need to remain compatible with movement rather than constantly stopping the character.
The difficult part I'm exploring now is readability: if attacks can happen while running, the defender still needs a clear enough visual tell to know when to attempt the parry. Otherwise active parry becomes guessing rather than skill.
That's the part I'd especially like opinions on from people who actually played a lot of UO PvP:
Would active defense like this preserve what you enjoy about UO PvP, or would it fundamentally change the feel too much?
And more specifically: what parts of UO combat do you consider essential to its identity — movement/chasing, timing, character skills, targeting, resource management, spell interactions, RNG, or something else?
I'm less interested in whether these exact numbers are balanced yet and more interested in where you think the line is between “modernizing UO-style combat” and “turning it into a completely different kind of action RPG.
