I played Rift a long time ago. The player community was wonderful there. Had to stop playing when their app quit working properly. (That stupid launcher/app setup that is never reliable.)

Currently playing Guild Wars 2. It has tons of single player content. Haven't joined a guild or anything yet.

Star Wars Galaxies. I recently played it again and it made me think about just how broken and backwards modern MMO design is nowadays. I remember when developers understood that MMORPGs were a niche genre where every feature had to serve the primary feature of BEING SOCIAL. Having this world that was dynamic, reactive, and had potentially infinite content to play because of the other players who you HAD TO SOCIALISE with. That was the game.

The crafting of SWG required you to talk to other players who specialized in various niches because it was impossible to do everything, if you wanted the best gear it was crafted and you either needed to craft it yourself or pay a crafter. You couldn't just have an alt to craft every last thing for you because your alt could only specialize in a few different things with the amount of skill points you were given. And there were various parts to crafting something. Everyone had to talk to and rely on one another in order to craft things. And that was just crafting. You had all these different features like player housing, the GCW, space content, and you could do all that with friends till the next expansion. It all fascilitated talking to people. Which makes things way better than just mindlessly grinding to get some numbers up in a void. Quests weren't super important. You did them for the XP and what made them fun was doing them with friends. It was nice to have more elaborate quests over time with the NGE. But that wasn't the core focus of the game or MMOs in general.   If you didn't like being social than you didn't like MMORPGs. The end. It's okay to not want that. Just don't play MMORPGs.

WoW came along and trained people to treat MMOs like single player games. You got to complete the next bit until the end. And then Blizzard and other companies start scratching their head wondering what to do about player retention. So they overwork themselves on this hellish treadmill of content that is beaten quickly so they have to make more content quickly. So on and so forth. They created a problem through their design that wasn't there.  But there's now two generations of people who think MMOs are all like WoW and complain about issues that were solved or didn't exist over 30 years ago when Ultima Online came out.

I'm not going to lie to you all and say SWG was a flawless game. It had several issues that contributed to it's eventual failure. But it also inherently fixed several of the issues plaguing modern MMOs today. Which is why it frustrates me to see people complain about those things.

Quote from: King Tyranno on July 02, 2023, 10:09:17 AM
Star Wars Galaxies. I recently played it again and it made me think about just how broken and backwards modern MMO design is nowadays. I remember when developers understood that MMORPGs were a niche genre where every feature had to serve the primary feature of BEING SOCIAL. Having this world that was dynamic, reactive, and had potentially infinite content to play because of the other players who you HAD TO SOCIALISE with. That was the game.

The crafting of SWG required you to talk to other players who specialized in various niches because it was impossible to do everything, if you wanted the best gear it was crafted and you either needed to craft it yourself or pay a crafter. You couldn't just have an alt to craft every last thing for you because your alt could only specialize in a few different things with the amount of skill points you were given. And there were various parts to crafting something. Everyone had to talk to and rely on one another in order to craft things. And that was just crafting. You had all these different features like player housing, the GCW, space content, and you could do all that with friends till the next expansion. It all fascilitated talking to people. Which makes things way better than just mindlessly grinding to get some numbers up in a void. Quests weren't super important. You did them for the XP and what made them fun was doing them with friends. It was nice to have more elaborate quests over time with the NGE. But that wasn't the core focus of the game or MMOs in general.   If you didn't like being social than you didn't like MMORPGs. The end. It's okay to not want that. Just don't play MMORPGs.

WoW came along and trained people to treat MMOs like single player games. You got to complete the next bit until the end. And then Blizzard and other companies start scratching their head wondering what to do about player retention. So they overwork themselves on this hellish treadmill of content that is beaten quickly so they have to make more content quickly. So on and so forth. They created a problem through their design that wasn't there.  But there's now two generations of people who think MMOs are all like WoW and complain about issues that were solved or didn't exist over 30 years ago when Ultima Online came out.

I'm not going to lie to you all and say SWG was a flawless game. It had several issues that contributed to it's eventual failure. But it also inherently fixed several of the issues plaguing modern MMOs today. Which is why it frustrates me to see people complain about those things.

From everything I heard and read, not only did the NGE completely wreck Star Wars Galaxies, it actually invalidated content from one of the paid expansions (Jump to Lightspeed, I think).

Which was sad because original SWG was, as you say, a game where you couldn't go it alone and grind. You really did need other people.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on July 05, 2023, 08:38:36 AM
Which was sad because original SWG was, as you say, a game where you couldn't go it alone and grind. You really did need other people.

One of the things I like about Guild Wars 2 and liked about Rifts is that most of the game you could do single player.

Some things required groups. (Dungeons, etc.) But these were not required for storyline or progression.

But, in the open world, there were constantly large and small events constantly occurring. So, you would have a chance all the time to group up on an ad hoc basis to defeat bosses of different strengths. Or you could ignore such events if you weren't currently interested.

The only MMO I ever played was DC Universe Online. It had a kickass teaser video, so I decided to give it a try.

The good part was the character creation, I found it pretty easy to come up with concepts that suited me, and all of them basically worked in game. There was no way to build an unplayable character. Also, the game was pretty solid, very few bugs.

The bad part was sense of immersion. The game felt more like a superhero themed amusement park than a real city.  Part of that was that there were only heroes and villains, nobody was normal, and the city didn't feel alive. But it was also the way that you would go to these big events at fixed locations, which ended up feeling more like floor shows than anything genuine and spontaneous. At no time did I feel like I was actually in Gotham City or Metropolis.

The real problem for me personally was the time commitment. For me, gaming is something I do in my free time, and I don't always have free time. So a game where I was supposed to be putting in a lot of time every week, and meeting up with other players on a regular basis just wasn't going to work.

I think it was a good game, it just wasn't for me.

I played Asheron's Call, WoW, and Lord of the Rings Online. In all three cases, I had fun for awhile.  Then I went in a matter of days from having fun, this is great, can't wait to get on with people I have met ... to I'm sick of this, got to get out.  I think it was a similar dynamic in all three cases, but it was most obvious in LOTRO. 

I got in LOTRO when it went free to play, but before they standardized everything. (And the free to play part was interesting too, in that it was all about trading time for money, not power.  Plus, you could do it regions by region, either play for points to get the regions or pay for it with money, case by case.)

It was quirky.  You met other quirky players who enjoyed that about it.  Every class worked a little different. The "warden" was all about fighting combos, for example, while all the other classes either ignored such or barely had them. There was stuff that only worked in certain situations, and the locations often had differences.  It was more about exploring the world with a few acquaintances you met along the way, and because it was kind of a hodge-podge of content, some things were just ridiculously easy (for you playing a particular class) whiles others were just as ridiculously hard.  Then you played a different class through the same stuff, and it might flip.  Then the developers realized that they wanted to balance everything before they added their new content, expansions, mounts, etc.  Every time they did, the game got a little more homogeneous.   Finally, after 2 or 3 rounds of that, I realized that all the charm had gone out of it.

Xenimus  - anyone here ever played it?

City of Heroes. Full Stop.

It was the only MMO I could bring up years after it officially shut down in just about MMO I was playing and have people chime in with fond memories and how whatever MMO they were presently playing was poor substitute.

And then it came back.

Check out City of Heroes: Homecoming for a 64-bit update of the classic 100% free to play and supported by monthly donations for which the window is closed within hours of it opening (because its a non-profit).

They've even been able to finish and add to the existing content, add new costume options (their character designer is second to none in terms of the sheer amount of crazy options that are available.

The original Guild Wars. It was great that you could have a real life interruption to your playing and still be able to play with your friends, without them having to create new beginner characters. Having the skill mix be more important than the character "Level" was a great thing.