I kicked the MMO habit a while back, but I remember really enjoying Dark-age of Camelot and Everquest.
I never played them in their prime, but my experience playing them solo with a neutered chat and microtransactions was still fun; Wish I could've played them back in the day with proper Realm chats and folks/guilds/groups and without microtransactions/Today's management at EA and Daybreak, But I can dream.
The hamster-wheel I don't miss but the theme, whimsy, and faux-comradery was killer; I feel the spirit of it all even watching old-school WoW videos.
Cut my teeth on Ultima Online. Played for years with real world friends. After that, we moved to Dark Age of Camelot. Never really liked Everquest. Played it just for a little while to say I did try it.
Played a metric fuckton of World of Warcraft. Was in the Blacksky Company guild from RPG.net and had a lot of fun raiding with them. I quit when the game went wonky after Cataclysm.
Got back onboard for Classic, and lost interest when my work schedule interferred with my raiding schedule. I plan to get back in with whatever comes after Wrath if I can.
I still play Anarchy Online. Something in that old, janky game appeals to me. I got my Froob up to level 200 just this year, after literally years of playing off and on.
Many honorable mentions, like Eve Online, Champions Online, Star Wars Galaxies and KOTOR off the top of my head.
I used to be really into them at one point. Ultima was my first but Everquest was the mmo I was "into". I still remember fondly my first descent into the gnoll cave in Surefall Glade.
But... and I hate to be so predictable.. but World of Warcraft was my main MMO, even more than EQ, wich i played a lot. Yes I was one of those guys that took down Ragnaros in Molten Core, Nefarian in Blackwing Lair and all the Naxxramas wings in 40 man raids during classic. I was there at the opening of Ahn Qiraj!
I played that game "hardcore" right through to the end of Wrath of the Litch King. It never got as good as Molten Core again.
I played Cataclysm, but that was when I started to run out of steam and was playing out of a kind of habit rather than enjoying it. Skipped Mists of Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor completely....
But have been playing a month or 2, here and there, in each expansion since Legion.
As a super casual, I have to say that, imo, WoW is in a really good place for a player like me. The inclusion of these "story quest" markers that allow you to play like a single player game with cut scenes and story beats, is actually awesome. It is easy enough that my old man reflexes can handle it, and is full of dopamine rewards. You can just zone out and chill while listening to music.
eq was the first - probably played that one the most.
then wow - it was good in every respect, but at the same time my old gang of mmo nerds all grew apart, so left that one.
played a fair bit of the secret world - liked it a lot conceptually, but the execution by funcom kinda ruined it from within.
playing swtor now - mechanically, it's a good mix of wow and the secret world AND it's star wars, which tickles the fan of the franchise in me in all the special places. joined a small guild of very nice people in this one, so doing good right now.
I was trying every single major MMO when they came out at one point.
Played WOW up until it introduced the honor system, where you could get honor for killing another PC who was up to eight levels lower than you (couldn't play an MMO on Carebear). Spend the next two weeks getting ganked by 60s because my main was only 52 at the time, uninstalled, and have never looked back.
Mostly played EQ. There was something charming about the primitive nature of the game and the way it developed its own language and tactics, just based on the jankiness. I still get nervous reading "TRAIN! TRAIN TO ZONE!"...
Does Hellgate: London count?
In spite of preferring solo games I've tried a number of MMOs over the years. I think the longest I ever played one would've been just a couple of months. The other players don't always play well with others, and rarely meet my expectations, so I soon start running solo. My biggest issues are that I have no patience for whatever penalties they come up with for dying, I hate grinding, and if I get mobbed too many times I just quit. There are less frustrating ways to spend my time.
Anyway, I know I played Kesmai, NWN, Yserbius, The Realm, Meridian, EQ, Asheron, Anarchy Online, LOTRO and Star Trek Timelines. There might've been others.
Quote from: Baron on May 20, 2023, 10:17:52 PMIn spite of preferring solo games I've tried a number of MMOs over the years. I think the longest I ever played one would've been just a couple of months. The other players don't always play well with others, and rarely meet my expectations, so I soon start running solo. My biggest issues are that I have no patience for whatever penalties they come up with for dying, I hate grinding, and if I get mobbed too many times I just quit. There are less frustrating ways to spend my time.
Play wow then... it has a completely solo play focused "story mode" where you play though the saga of the expansion... it is designed for solo and you to never need to group ever. Also, there is zero penalty in wow for dying. I mean you need to run to your body or resurrect at the graveyard. There is a legacy item damage mechanism but you earn so much gold nowadays it is completely trivial, you will not even notice it. The entire game's dungeons, including raids, is now handled by a group finder. Just click, in a few seconds (depending on popularity of the patch) you will be in a raid or dungeon. No need to ever even speak to other people. Getting "mobbed" is just a "learn to play issue". As for grinding... well they is still a thing. The Story Quests are not grinders though. They are just quest chains. All the grinding is for collectables and mounts and rep and stuff and that is all optional.
Wow is basically a solo game now. With an option to gropup with mates if you want. The only people in big groups are the guilds that focus on PvP or Raiding. Most players I run into are not even in guilds anymore.
Quote from: Summon666 on May 21, 2023, 01:43:37 AM
Quote from: Baron on May 20, 2023, 10:17:52 PMIn spite of preferring solo games I've tried a number of MMOs over the years. I think the longest I ever played one would've been just a couple of months. The other players don't always play well with others, and rarely meet my expectations, so I soon start running solo. My biggest issues are that I have no patience for whatever penalties they come up with for dying, I hate grinding, and if I get mobbed too many times I just quit. There are less frustrating ways to spend my time.
Play wow then... it has a completely solo play focused "story mode" where you play though the saga of the expansion... it is designed for solo and you to never need to group ever.
same goes for swtor. it's completely free to play through its eight whole story lines and twelve character classes to try. it's not, unfortunately, a follow-up to kotor worthy of the name it was hyped up to be, but it's okay imo.
City of Heroes. Even today, it's still a testament to how to make a game fun. You start out punching street gangers and cultists, and work your way up to slugging it out with demigods and invading aliens. Good times.
I started with World of Warcraft. I played it for about 12 years. During that time I fell in love with the gnome race in that game, (hence my avatar) and began looking for other games that had similar. Although I tried many others, I never stuck with them for long. Then there were two things that happened that made me stop playing WoW. First was the increasing wokeness of Blizzard that kept creeping into the game. Second, I bought a gaming PC. All the years prior I was gaming on a Macintosh.
Once I got the PC, I was overwhelmed by the never ending tsunami of games available. After a while I couldn't justify paying a monthly fee to play a game when there were, and still are, so many wonderful games that DON'T have a monthly fee.
Quote from: Greg Bruni on May 26, 2023, 08:25:49 PM
I started with World of Warcraft. I played it for about 12 years. During that time I fell in love with the gnome race in that game, (hence my avatar) and began looking for other games that had similar. Although I tried many others, I never stuck with them for long. Then there were two things that happened that made me stop playing WoW. First was the increasing wokeness of Blizzard that kept creeping into the game. Second, I bought a gaming PC. All the years prior I was gaming on a Macintosh.
Once I got the PC, I was overwhelmed by the never ending tsunami of games available. After a while I couldn't justify paying a monthly fee to play a game when there were, and still are, so many wonderful games that DON'T have a monthly fee.
Greetings!
OOH RAH!
"FOR THE ALLIANCE!"
I played WOW for more than a decade, as well. I more or less unplugged it and quit in the waning days of Battle for Azeroth. Blizzard became too WOKE and, even from a game-pay perspective, narrative--it all sadly became to annoying and stupid. I could write many, many paragraphs about my frustration, and love for the game. The whole glorification of Sylvannas, how stupid the Horde was, as well as how pathetic the Night Elves are, as well as the Alliance. Sylvannas BURNING TELDRASSIL DOWN. AARRGGHH.
Game-play issues with raiding, raid drops, grinding, grinding, grinding. Yeah. Eventually, it all ads up to too much stupidity. Then tack on the WOKE BS, and yeah. I'm done with them. Sad.
Like some famous gamer once said,
"WOW died when the Lich King died. Remember, Arthas. NO KING RULES FOREVER." ;D
I'm paraphrasing, but I always go back to that early quotation. The game declined after Wrath and never really recovered. Such days, man! The GLORIES! The epic raiding, the guilds,the awesome people and friends. It really was an epic, magical time.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
There was a time when I was playing many text-based MMORPGs on Valherru engine. They were more like forums with some RPG elements in fact.
Quote from: Adeptus on June 27, 2023, 10:24:32 AM
There was a time when I was playing many text-based MMORPGs on Valherru engine. They were more like forums with some RPG elements in fact.
Ah, the halcyon days of MUDs and MUSHes. Which are, interestingly, still around -- though the codebases are old enough to vote at this point.
There has been a new innovation, though: AresMUSH code, which kind of combines web and client functionality in intriguing ways. Fascinating stuff.
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.