MMOs Nostalgia Thread – Part 1

Over the last few days there has been a twitter thread going around the interwebs asking folks to Quote Retweet with a list of all of the MMOs that they have played even for a single day. There are a few of us old farts who have been joking about needing way more than one tweet. I tried to cram everything into a single tweet and failed, and even failed at trying to do two tweets. It was around this point that I thought I should probably just turn this into a blog post. I’ve talked about the games I have played in the past but never quite in this manner. So were we go… an attempt to rattle off all of the MMOs over the years that I have played for any significant amount of time. I am revising that up a bit from the original mission because I have probably technically touched almost every MMO at least once.

Phantasy Star Online

While this is technically a screenshot from Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst on the PC, my first foray into this game was on the Dreamcast. I was super hooked on it and I consider this to be the very first MMO I ever played. I even had a 50 ft ethernet cable run from my game loft back into my office so I could play using the broadband adapter. Great game that I am still ridiculously nostalgic about.

Everquest

The Juggernaut that made the Genre. Everquest is a game that I avoided in part because of the monthly price tag associated with it. However all it took was my wife being out of town and my friend asking me to come over and play one of his characters during a dragon raid and I was completely hooked. Before the end of the weekend I had gone out and picked up the base game, Kunark and the brand new Velious expansion and was memming spells and meditating with the best of them. I played a Dwarven Cleric shown above… that we jokingly referred to as Tiny Elvis since the Rygor mail I wore for a really long time was a bit bedazzled.

Dark Age of Camelot

This game represents the origins of Belghast as a character, given that it was the name of my Celt Champion. I remember testing this game during beta and then playing it at launch. Originally I was a Lurikeen Nightshade… which seemed super cool but was not the most soloable thing in the world. I was never really into the PVP aspect of the game, but when Gaheris the Co-Op server opened we all re-rolled there and it represents the golden age of the game for me. This coincided with the release of the Shrouded Isles expansion, which still goes down in history as one of my favorite game expansions. We played until shortly after the release of Trials of Atlantis.

PlaneShift

I originally started playing PlaneShift during alpha, and I have to admit at first I was simply enamored with the fact that a completely free and open source MMORPG existed in the first place. I was screwing around with Linux quite a bit at the time and spent some time playing around with the game client on that platform. I’ve not touched this in years, but I have fond memories of just how “very alpha” the game was.

Anarchy Online

This is absolutely not my screenshot, because I never made it terribly far in this game. I didn’t so much play the game as “tried to play” the game. It had a notoriously awful launch and I poked around at the game for about a month before giving up and moving on with my life. I am absolutely certain that I never paid for a subscription, so I never made it that far into the game as to use up the free month. The bad taste in my mouth left by it kept me from ever poking my head back in to see if it improved.

Earth and Beyond

This is another game that I have a soft spot for. This is not my screenshot because any that I might have are long lost to the ghosts of hard drives past. This was the last game I believe developed by famed Westwood Studios and it was an attempt to bring the MMO genre to the stars. There was so much creativity in the early era these games that more or less died out once World of Warcraft became the game that everyone was chasing. I remember extensively testing this in both Alpha and Beta phases… and then I was part of the problem and never actually purchased the retail game. This is from the era where I could not pay more than one monthly subscription cost at a time and I am pretty sure I was actively playing Dark Age of Camelot with a guild so that won out. Still wonder what could have been had this game gained traction.

Eve Online

It was shortly after Earth and Beyond that I stumbled onto another alpha testing opportunity to play a little game called Eve Online. Since once again my hang up with Earth and Beyond was the subscription fee… I absolutely jumped at the chance to play something similar for free and over the course of several months played it off and on. I mostly lived the life of an asteroid miner and I had zero clue that this game would become the absolutely massive phenomena that I eventually did. I just thought it was a super chill space game with gorgeous star system rendering. I’ve attempted to play it a few times in production and never really get very far. I am pretty sure every single time I have played I have played Gallente.

Horizon: Empire of Istaria

Yes I realize that this game was renamed at some point to Istaria Chronicles of the Gifted, but I played it back before it devolved into a game for dragon fetishists. This is one of those super pivotal games in my chronology because through it I met so many people who would continue to be important to me and my gaming habits of years to come. The guy who was ultimately my raid leader in World of Warcraft was someone that I met through the community events in Horizons. I think more than anything that was what was so phenomenal about this game was the community making its own fun… and in truth they sort of had to given that the game launched it a woefully incomplete state. The level cap was 80 and there was a single mob in the game over about level 45. The crafting is what made this game special as well as the multiclassing system allowing you to effectively build your own class. I will always wonder what might have been had this game launched in a completed state.

The Sims Online

This is a game that I only actually played during alpha and beta testing, however I was engaged with the game a bit longer as I had a coworker that was super into it. The internet as a whole was still in its wild west phase and Ebay was not quite the respectable institution that it is today. In fact there was a very real possibility that had things gone differently we would be talking about Yahoo Auctions instead of Ebay. My coworker ended up engaged in the real money trade for Sims Online and selling things in game for real world currency. I don’t remember what it was that he was selling but he spent all of his effort in game to create a factory to turn them out and then in turn lined his pockets with cash as a result. Thoroughly weird game that was probably ahead of its time.

Lineage II

There was a pretty constant theme among a lot of my early MMORPG experiences, and that was: could I play it for free and or without paying for a subscription fee? As a result I ended up getting in this cycle of alpha and beta testing gigs for various games. Once your name gets on the mailing list for one game it seems like you end up getting invited to a ton of them. This was the case with the localization of Lineage II and I played this off and on for the better course of a year through various tests. I remember almost always playing an Orc, which looked nothing like an Orc but more a greenish grey skinned anime character. The game was aggressively mediocre and I think you had to be super into PVP before it started to make sense.

A Tale in the Desert

I have to admit that I really don’t remember an awful lot about this game other than the fact that there was no combat and it was entirely crafting based. The group we hung out with in Horizons was very crafting focused and I remember that a few of them when that game ultimately came crashing down and turned into dragon fetish porn bounced to go play A Tale in the Desert. I remember firing up to hang out with a few of them there and trying to get the hang out this game. The deal breaker was the non-combat focus because at the end of the day… I want to smash things.

Star Wars Galaxies

Sidenote I realize this is a screenshot from the SWG Emulator client… but it is what I had handy and I want to use my own screenshots whenever possible here. This is another in a long line of games that I tested thoroughly but never actually played when it released. The truth is this game was way the hell too Everquest for my tastes at the time and felt like somewhat of a throw back to earlier times. I was playing City of Heroes beta at the time and that was a massive leap forward in MMORPGs and this felt like a step backwards. I know this is going to frustrate some of my SWG diehard readers, but whatever it was about the game never really clicked. I wanted to be a Jedi not a Dancer, and the game just wasn’t heroic enough for my tastes.

Everquest II

I have so much love for Everquest II, but it is also sort of the game that might have been had it released a year earlier. When it released I was fully on board with the World of Warcraft bandwagon given that these games launched a few weeks apart. I did not follow my EQ diehard friends into it until much later when the Desert of Flames expansion released. I had reached a lull in World of Warcraft and wanted something different and ventured into this game for awhile. I’ve returned several times over the years but probably my golden age was when I was in Tipa’s guild with their phenomenal guild hall. That was the period I was the most active and even managed to finish with their help my Shadowknight Epic weapon. The core problem with EQ2 however will always be its combat system because it feels clunky compared to more modern action oriented offerings. I still have so much love for the game, but it is so hard to get back into. I would love to see a modern game set in Norrath, but I feel like that is never going to happen.

Ryzom

This is another in a long time of tested it thoroughly but never bought games. I don’t remember an awful lot about it apart from the combat reminded me of Horizons. The thing I miss the most from this era of MMORPGs is there were a lot of chances taken. Ryzom was a thoroughly weird game that did not rely on the common fantasy tropes. This was more John Carter of Mars than it was Tolkien., and as I result I think it had a harder time resonating. Beau Hindman tells these wonderful stories about being a sort of war correspondent and hanging out when folks were having big PVP battles, interviewing both sides. I never stuck around that long and when the game went legit and started charging money, I parted ways.

World of Warcraft

What is there to really say about World of Warcraft. It was both savior and destroyer of the MMORPG genre and nothing would ever quite be the same in its wake. World of Warcraft was the first big success in the genre and as a result the suits with the money started demanding projects be a little bit more WoWlike often to the detriment of creativity. With World of Warcraft, Blizzard did what they do best and took an ugly and awkward genre and polished it to a mirror sheen. This polishing improved a lot of things but also ground off some of the interesting but quirky bumps along the way, and those are things that we have never really recovered. I don’t want it to sound like I necessarily think that the game was bad, because I have consistently replayed it over and over throughout the years. It is a comfortable place to return to and level some alts. Why it continues to have the gravitas that has however I think is in part because of the sheer critical mass of players that it still has. People play World of Warcraft because people play World of Warcraft. This romp through games of the past has made me a bit nostalgic about the what might have beens… so I am writing a much different intro to WoW than I probably would have otherwise.

To Be Continued

Well friends… at this point we are somewhere around the quarter mark on the list. This is precisely why I needed more than a single tweet to talk about all of the MMORPGs that I have played in the past. Chances are by the time I get to the end of the list I will have remembered a few things that should have been on the list but aren’t currently. I figure over the next few days I will keep plugging away at this collection of games.