MMOs Nostalgia Thread – Part 2

I am getting a bit of a late start this morning for reasons. I had originally taken today off for the purpose of hanging out at home and watching BlizzConline. BlizzCon traditionally started about noonish my time and I figured the online rendition of it would function pretty much the same. It is not and as a result isn’t starting until 4pm my time so I could have in theory worked today. I decided to go ahead and keep the day of vacation because why the hell not just chill out and play games all day. I was also expecting this year to be the year of Diablo 4, which is why I didn’t want to miss any of it. That however doesn’t seem to be the case and as a result I am not even that hyped about BlizzCon in the first place right now. All of this lead me to sleep in which is getting me started on trawling back through the list of MMOs gone by.

City of Heroes

In yesterdays post I made a vague attempt to keep things fairly chronologically correct. However in a push to wrap things up I apparently jumped a game in the list and as a result we are starting off with City of Heroes. This is the game that I was playing when I first got into the World of Warcraft closed beta and unfortunately… that ultimately killed me joy with this title. However prior to that I had a great time roaming around Paragon City and fighting baddies as a Magic Origin Katana Scrapper. This game was such a leap forward in MMO combat as compare to where we had been previously that I was instantly hooked in late beta testing. A good number of the folks that I had met from Horizons were also going to be playing the game, but instead of guilding with them I stuck to the crew of friends I had been playing Dark Age of Camelot with. I probably would have gotten more out of the game had I stuck with Vernie and Mags and joined that group, but it was still a really fun time and I look fondly upon the game.

Guild Wars

Guild Wars is the first of many games I remember trying to lean really hard into the “WoW Killer” advertising. I specifically remember a pre-launch magazine ad, but this morning I have been unable to locate a picture of it… in part because Guild Wars 2 dominates the search algorithm. It was as untrue then as it is untrue now when someone tries to kill off the undead juggernaut of Azeroth… but this game did find a pretty significant following. I have to admit it was super appealing to me because it was a “Buy the Box” experience and each time an expansion came out it was completely standalone. However there is one thing about the game that kept it from really working for me… the absence of a jump button. I cannot fully express how important this simple thing is to my enjoyment of an MMORPG… because I am a jumper. I also struggled getting engaged with the card based system because everything I wanted to build… seemed not to be very functional. I kept trying to make a Warrior/Necromancer deck work since I loved Shadow Knights… but I always felt way weaker than I expected to. I’ve attempted to recover my original account but I cannot for the life of me remember any of the character names on it.

Matrix Online

Like pretty much everyone that was of movie going age in 1999, I was enthralled by The Matrix and wanted more of that universe. When I found out that there was going to be an MMORPG set in that game world I was super intrigued. I managed to snag Alpha access and played for quite awhile, but never actually played after the game launched. I am not sure what it was about the game that didn’t work, but I think mostly it was that the combat didn’t really feel cohesive. The roaming around the city felt great but I also remember there being a lot of technical issues with not being able to access missions. The game used a door based system sorta like City of Heroes did, but it seemed to be significantly less reliable when it came to teleporting the player to the actual content. I remember this one staircase that was full of players because they could not join the next mission and just ended up languishing there trying over and over. It was a really cool concept that needed some work on the realization of it, but I am still super nostalgic for it.

Auto Assault

Much love to everyone who helped me out the other day in trying to remember the name of this game. Auto Assault was this weird Mad Max/Car Wars/Carmageddon MMORPG where you drove around a wasteland blowing things up and collecting parts to make your own vehicle stronger. Like I still think this concept could work today if someone did a high fidelity looter shooter variant of it, and maybe this was a little ahead of its time. I remember playing this in either Alpha or Beta and loving it, but once again the challenge of having a second subscription kept me from digging in when the game actually launched. You are going to see that as a common pattern with these games… I was happy with it when it was free but could only afford a single subscription and as such said goodbye when the game launched. I think that might honestly have been a challenge for a number of these titles… they were good but not enough to replace World of Warcraft which was the subscription most of us were paying.

Dungeons and Dragons Online

I was so phenomenally pumped when in 2005 I managed to get into the Alpha of Dungeons and Dragons Online. D20 was still the king of the pen and paper scene with 3.5 only coming out a few years prior to that. I had all of these images in my head for what a D&D based MMORPG might look like… and ultimately as cool as that concept was I think this game failed to gain traction for one simple reason. No one had an emotional attachment to Eberron. It was a thing that Wizards of the Coast attempted to make happen really desperately… but mostly folks preferred to either play Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk as their realm of choice. On the PC gaming side we had a lot of nostalgia for Forgotten Realms thanks to phenomenal games like the Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter series. It was a critical flaw NOT to make Dungeons and Dragons Online set in Forgotten Realms. Apart from that the game was very tactical in nature and didn’t feel as fluid as the other MMORPGs on the market. Among its devoted fanbase it was loved but I didn’t personally make it too far past launch.

Lord of the Rings Online

I completely missed the hype surrounding this launch. Some of the folks in my raid absolutely disappeared for the WoW Tourist month when it launched, but I mostly skipped it because we were progressing through content I didn’t have any time for this nonsense. Years later however I came back and played the game and completely loved it. I believe it was around the launch of Riders of Rohan, but it might have been just ahead of that. For me personally Lord of the Rings Online this is weird amalgam of the things that I loved about World of Warcraft and Dark Age of Camelot rolled together combined with the awesome Tolkien setting that is so comfortable to roam around in. The game does a really good job of telling the story without also just being the tale of the Fellowship. It leaves plenty of room for you the player to carve out your own space in the world. I don’t play it a lot but I have returned a half dozen times over the years to revisit the amazing Landroval community and piddle around on my little Human Champion.

Tabula Rasa

This is another game that I think was probably ahead of its time and would have been better served by the “looter shooter” genre. I only ever played this in testing and even then mostly because my good friend Elowynn from our sister guild Silent Strike was super into it. The problem with Tabula Rasa is my memories of the game sort of blend together with my memories of Defiance because they felt very similar to me. This is yet another game that leaned heavily on trying to be the game to win the MMORPG arms race with the pedigree of Richard Garriott. It was a big game with big ideas that never quite translated to compelling gameplay for me. I still think were this a Destiny style game it would have worked though.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Brad McQuaid had a vision for a game and throughout the course of his career before his untimely death in in 2019 he attempted to build this vision three separate times. Everquest was the first, Vanguard was the second and ultimately the unreleased game Pantheon is this third attempt. Having played the first two games and watched the development of the third, each seems to be a higher fidelity version of the previous and that more or less is how I would have described Vanguard. The challenge for me personally is that Brad seemed to feel like accessibility was the enemy of this vision and wove enough punitive gameplay elements into it to keep me from really wanting to try it at launch. I remember playing the beta of the game and noticing that it was a throw back to Everquest in that I really could not play as a solo player that effectively without choosing one of a few specific classes. When the game was long past its prime I finally gave it a proper shot and enjoyed myself. It had a really deep crafting system and I loved the political card game that you played to gain faction with individuals. The game had a bunch of interesting concepts and it is one of the main reasons why I have any interest in Pantheon. I just fear that there will be too many punitive gameplay elements for me to ever really sink into it. I don’t want a game that I can only play with other people. I am past that time in my life.

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

I have no real attachment to the Conan mythos. I was too young and it was too R rated for me to have watched the Conan movies when they were current. By the time I eventually watched them, other much cooler fantasy movies had come out that I had already bonded with. I played this game in part because it was supposed to be the next big thing and my friend Aigie was super into it. I think she just liked being able to play a character and running around topless but who am I to judge. I don’t remember an awful lot about this game but I remember not making it terribly far before getting sucked back into WoW. I think Aigie maybe lasted a month or so before doing the same. I remember it having nonconsensual PVP which was a massive turn off for me personally. Additionally I just didn’t really feel terribly connected with my character. I’ve heard it is a good game if you could get into it, but it never really grabbed me.

Aion: The Tower of Eternity

Aion was the new hotness and there was this curious buzz surrounding it, in part because you could supposedly fly… which was still a fairly new an exciting concept at this point. For many of us this was also our first experience playing a localized South Korean MMORPG, because as new MMO development started dying out in the United States it was booming there. Everything was still new and exciting and we had yet to realize just how poisoned the well really was at that point. I was not a huge fan because I could not have a beard, which is a massive thing for me… kinda like jumping is. The only character creation options seemed be either pretty boy or pretty edgelord boy which caused me to bounce. I remember my friend Rae being into this game and playing for awhile. I played off and on quite a bit while it was in testing, trying to attach since I had friend that were but it never really took.

Warhammer Online

I was so completely all in on Warhammer Online it was painful. Behind me on the shelf sits the Warhammer Online Collectors edition box… and legitimately it is still one of my favorite product offerings ever given how much cool stuff they crammed in it. Everything about me was fulfilled by the Dwarven Ironbreaker, which was this freaking awesome tank class with two meters allowing you to never end up in a situation where you were “rage starved”. I also loved that I could tank in PVP, legitimately because I took up physical mass and could guard objectives by cramming myself in between the horde of players and what we were trying to protect. I made my best effort to transplant House Stalwart into the guild Stalwart Order and it worked for awhile. There were many of us who were super engaged with this game, but the problem for me at least is as I moved up through the ranks it became significantly less fun. I was actually super down with PVP in this game… but not all of the battlegrounds were created equally. The pinnacle was Mourkain Temple… aka “Kill the Dude with the Thing”, and I am not sure what it is about that specific incarnation but nothing has ever felt that fun PVP wise. As you leveled higher you also got less and less PVE content… which made the leveling seem to drag on and I remember bouncing around level 30. If they had managed to maintain the ratio of content at Tier 2… all the way up… I think this game would still be successful.

Champions Online

I have so many mixed feelings about this game. I played through Alpha and Beta and the game was phenomenal. I could relive the glory of my Katana Regen scrapper character from City of Heroes in a more modern interface with really good cosmetics. Then something tragic happened, and I am not entirely certain the calculations that lead to this point. There was a day one patch that effectively nerfed everything that felt good about the game and caused the leveling to turn into a slog. We still tried to make it work but everything that worked literal days before in Beta just didn’t function any more the way it once did. The game didn’t really give you a way of switching things up when you were mid stream without a very costly respec system… so effectively I ended up building down a path that was no longer viable which destroyed any enjoyment. I tried going back recently and the game is still not terribly enjoyable. Poor Thalen bought in at the lifetime level, so he spent a lot of money on a game that ended up being somewhat horrible. That gamble worked out for LOTRO though so I absolutely get why he did it.

Fallen Earth

There are times when a game sounds absolutely perfect on paper but the execution ends up lacking. This is the story of me and Fallen Earth. Fallout New Vegas is one of my favorite games of all time and I am deeply attached to the Fallout universe and more importantly the Post-Apocalpytic genre. All of this made me super interested in Fallen Earth, but what I expected was a Shooter/RPG/MMO hybrid… like if you had taken Fallout and “mmoized” it. What you get instead is this awkward hotbar combat hybrid that has shooting elements… but you have to toggle back and forth between MMO mode and Shooter mode and the entire process feels awful. There are times that a user interface kills a game for me and this was also the story of Fallen Earth. Again I think this is a game that would now work in the Looter Shooter construct considerably better. I would love to see this revisited with modern interface design.

Allods Online

I love Allods Online but not for the right reasons. It is this super interesting study on what happens when a totally different culture recreates World of Warcraft from the ground up. Russian sensibilities are slightly different than North American sensibilities and the end result is this beautiful hybrid steampunk WoW-like game that also has crazy Spelljammer aspects to it with strange space flight. It is a glorious mess of a game that ends up being pretty freaking fun to play. I’ve returned a few times to this in free to play mode and always end up enjoying myself. The game however has never really been compelling enough to keep me there for long. To be truthful I feel the same way about Skyforge which is also developed by this group. Really enjoyable and really weird but also really forgettable when I am not playing it.

Final Fantasy XIV 1.0

At this point we all know the story of this game and its eventual redemption arc with “A Realm Reborn”. If you don’t know this story then I highly suggest you watch the excellent documentary series from NoClip. I remember being super excited about this game because I never really got into FFXI but heard through the grapevine that this was going to be a game that would end up being Final Fantasy meets World of Warcraft. So color me shocked when I got into the closed beta and I ended up with this completely unfun mess of a game. I remember specifically trying three different times to get into this game but the questing was just a mess and the combat felt less responsive than I was expecting. I never bought into the game when it released, so I thankfully missed a lot of the pain that folks went through. There is a part of me that sort of wishes that I had played more of it so I would have better memories to compare to the phenomenal game that eventually turned into A Realm Reborn. I bounced fast and never looked back, although I do own a copy of this largely to get the Onion Knight helm code that came along with it that still works in FFXIV 2.0 and beyond.

More to Come

I think for today I am going to break it off here. We are a little less than halfway through my list so I sat down to do this thing and then immediately realized it is probably going to dominate most of next week as well. I am enjoying sitting down and remembering each of these games and writing about them, and honestly that is probably all that really matters. I doubt anyone is that terribly interested in the process, but I am having fun. I will see you all next week as I continue diving into my gaming past.