MMOs Nostalgia Thread – Part 4

Hey Friends! I have been doing this thing where I run down the various MMORPGs that I have played in the past and talk a bit about each of them. We are on part 4 and up until this point we have covered 45 different games and today we tackle another fifteen. Why fifteen? I have no clue that jus sort of worked out to be where I lost steam and was unwilling to keep moving forward on that first day… and then after that the format stuck.

Runes of Magic

I knew once I started down this list I would think of some other games that I played quite a bit that I failed to throw on it. As such yesterdays discussion of Echo of Souls… made me remember the first soulless free to play WoW Clone that I ever played. I am talking about Runes of Magic which released by Taiwanese developer Runewalker and at the time was what felt to be one of the most shameless copies of World of Warcraft out there. Of course it didn’t actually feel anything like WoW, but that is sort of the charm of these low rent knockoffs and I remember it being extremely popular for a while among my friend who specifically were struggling to pay that monthly subscription fee. It too was what I would term as “aggressively mediocre” but I had some fun. It introduced me to the concept of temporary bag space and item rentals… which seems to be part and parcel with the RMT game nonsense. I’ve often wondered if the game ever improved.

Forsaken World

If Runes of Magic was the first for me… I think the one that FELT the most like World of Warcraft was Forsaken World from 2012. This was built by Perfect World which at the time was a nonsensical name that meant absolutely nothing to me… little did I know that they were just about to go on a buying spree and snap up a bunch of games that I actually cared about. What Forsaken World improved upon was the general feel and flow of combat and the art style. It felt significantly less asset flip and while completely copying the art style of World of Warcraft, the world felt cohesive. I was particular partial to the Stonemen… which was sort of a Granok before Wildstar kind of vibe. The key problem I had with the game is that each race was SEVERELY limited in the number of classes they could choose from… so for example as Stonemen I could be Protector… which admittedly is probably why I went with that race in the first place whereas my more traditional Dwarves could only be Marksmen. This game also suffered from another favorite from the free to play genre… gender locked classes. If you could look past all of that bullshit however the game itself wasn’t half bad.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

After that brief aperitif we get into the actually good games. However I have to admit when I first heard that Final Fantasy XIV was being re-released I threw that notion some significant side eye. Were it not for Ashgars insistence that he wanted to play it and ultimately dragging the rest of us into this nonsense I likely would have been a lot slower getting into the game than I was. Fundamentally Final Fantasy XIV is the greatest comeback story of all time as far as video games go. It went from being a game that I struggled to engage with back when I was testing 1.0 to a game that I cherish almost above all others due to the extremely Final Fantasy story. Now when someone asks what my favorite Final Fantasy game is I often times rattle off VI out of habit. In truth if I get to count the entire run of the story starting with A Realm Reborn, through an entire expansions worth of post patches, to Heavensward, Stormblood and now Shadowbringers… the story arc presented is the best Final Fantasy experience you will probably ever have. I just wish I was better about sticking around the game once the story is over, because I pretty much bounce immediately after hitting the level cap each expansion.

Marvel Heroes

I was admittedly late to this party, because I did not play Marvel Heroes by Gazillion until 2014 or so and didn’t really get heavily engaged until 2015. By that time the game had sorted out a lot of its early problems and had one of the best feeling free to play implementations I have experienced. The game had a nonsense number of heroes available and when I started you could play any of them through level 10 and then choose a single hero to unlock all of the way to level 60. I went with one of my perennial favorites Captain America… and thinking back that character might be the reason why I am so focused on tanking with a Sword and Shield. The loss of Marvel Heroes is still a tragedy that I feel all of the time and I had hoped that Marvels Avengers would replace that niche in a loot focused beat em up… but it very much did not. I want this game back so badly and I keep hoping at some point someone out there will leak the source code and maybe get some emulator servers.

Neverwinter

Neverwinter is a bit of a tragedy for me personally. It is a great game but it is a game that is shackled to a less than amazing free to play design. Had this come out during the heyday for World of Warcraft and the subscription model, I think it would have been a significantly better gaming experience. The thing that kills me about Neverwinter honestly is bag bloat. You end up with so many items of questionable usefulness that personally takes me out of what is otherwise a pretty great action MMO. The constant need to do bag triage as I sort through the countless items that drop but aren’t actually useful at all along with a handful of competing currencies and the shop interactions all take what would otherwise be a really fun experience and taint it a bit. That said I still poke my head in from time to time and it is very much an enjoyable experience other than these few frustrations. I really enjoyed all of the user created content that was once available for the game and it is sad that the system was removed.

Trove

When Trove released into alpha I was so completely on board. As I probably hinted at in my discussion of Rift, I had a lot of love for anything Trion. I mean you want your friends to do well in the world right? When they released this “Minecraft with a Purpose” game I was super on board because around the same time I was still poking my head regularly into Minecraft. The game still has one of my favorite concepts called the Cornerstone where you get a plot of land allowing you to build a base on the structure and then move that base to any available and unclaimed plot of land later. This really suited the adventure nature of the game allowing you to build up a functional base of operations and then move it around the world as you shifted up your adventures. Mine ended up being towers with exits and different levels because you ever knew for any certain what biomes might have interesting things going on underground. If you are curious what Trove looked like in Closed Alpha… I recorded a number of videos on it.

The Elder Scrolls Online

Oh god I have so much emotional attachment to The Elder Scrolls Online that it is going to be very hard for me to talk about it in any sort of a partial manner. ESO released in April of 2014, but at that point I had been regularly playing the game since February of 2013 when I was invited into the first wave of private testing. My good friend and AggroChat staff Tamrielo was a game designer on Elder Scrolls Online and as a result I got pretty attached to various aspects of the game. The experience of launching this game and the subsequent toxicity from the player base and literal death threats he received are also why he is no longer in the games industry. For me I had always wanted an MMORPG set in the Elder Scrolls universe and when this released I knew I wanted to take it seriously… and as such I organized some epic levels in that our day one guild had something like 140 people in it which was silly. I stuck around far longer than most of my friends and I still return pretty regularly to play some of the story since I am several content drops behind. This comes from an era when I was pretty regularly streaming so there are a lot of videos of me playing Elder Scrolls Online out there from the launch of the game.

Destiny

I will always carry a torch for Destiny 1 on the PlayStation 4, because this is the game that I wanted to play enough not only to buy a console…. but also to learn how to play an FPS game with a controller. You have to understand what a level of commitment that is because I am a diehard “Keyboard and Mouse for Get the Fuck Out” player when it come to video games. I will use a controller for platformers and “Nintendo” era games but if there is any sort of a 3D camera I want a Mouse and Keyboard. I purchased my PlayStation 4 and timed it to coincide with getting into the Alpha test for this game, and then desperately tried to catch up on twenty years of learning how to control a first person game with two thumbsticks. I have so many cherished memories but my favorite times were raiding Oryx with then Axioma Clan which eventually turned into Tequila Mockingbird that I am in today. My favorite thing in the game however was probably the Prison of Elders, which I used to have a reoccurring date with Jex and JazSquirrel on Thursday nights to do. God I wish I could get back in the habit of playing with other human beings again.

Wildstar

Oh Wildstar… you were such an interesting mess of a game. I wanted to love you so much but there was just something about the interface and combat design that always kept me bouncing. This will go down in history as having the single most interesting housing system in existence and even though I struggled to love you… I still did begrudgingly love you. I have several friends who were super into this game and admittedly a lot of why I kept trying to play was so that I could hang out with them in their native environment. I think in many ways this game is a victim of the hype and attitude that the marketing pushed in front of it… as being sort of the last best hope of achieving the “WoW Killer” status. As such we expected way too much out of this game and when it didn’t deliver on all of those hopes it was treated like a complete failure. Instead I view it as a bit of a beautiful and chaotic mess that was the first game in a long time to compete for the WoW space while evolving the genre in a bunch of meaningful directions. The soundtrack and art design were so damned good, but I think the combat was a little bit ahead of its time.

Landmark

Today’s remembrance is just going to be full of some twelve sads out of ten moments and I am sorry… it just sort of worked out that way. I loved Landmark and I miss it greatly, especially now that I am currently in a binge of playing games like Minecraft and Valheim. There are honestly so many times in Valheim recently that I wish I had the tools that were available in Landmark. Yes I realize that Landmark was less a game and more a development toolkit sold to the player base… but I don’t really give a shit to be honest. I enjoyed what it was for what it was… and the glimmer of hope that it might end up in a magical game called Everquest Next was just the cherry on top. Thinking about this whole situation and the death of Sony Online Entertainment always makes me nostalgic in the wrong direction that makes me want to go downstairs and fix a drink. I had so much fun playing around with these tools and I would love to see this game resurrected at some point…. even though I know it won’t. What I want more than anything is a modern game set in Norrath, which I also doubt is going to happen any time soon.

Skyforge

Such a great game with such a weird gameplay model. Skyforge is one of those games that I always enjoy when I am playing it, but also something that I never think about when I am not. I am not sure exactly what the pricing model for this game was designed to accomplish because I have never once had any desire to give them money for currency. There was never anything that I wanted to buy and I feel like they left so much of that money on the table. For all I know they may do this now, but once upon a time all I wanted was the ability to purchase class unlocks because the leveling system in this game was some grindy nonsense. I think this is also one of the games that plays better with a Controller than with a mouse and keyboard. The storyline is kinda nonsense but it doesn’t matter because the action combat is really fluid and enjoyable. I know Obsidian partnered with the Allods team to develop this game… but I have no clue WHAT they did because the story isn’t exactly a strong point. Well worth checking out however if you have never played it.

Albion Online

This is another game that dates back to that period of time when I was attempting to write gaming news. I got the key and I believe wrote a review of it and largely put the game to bed until it eventually released on steam. I feel like I lack the requisite nostalgia for Ultima Online to really enjoy this sort of game. It does a bunch of interesting things and the game world itself is charming enough, but I always sort of just felt like I was going through the paces. Eve Online is a game with a bunch of interesting things going on, but whenever I play it I just end up mining the Asteroids. Albion Online is similarly a game with apparently a bunch of interesting things going on… but when I play it I end up lugging stone and metal back to town to craft things and then repeating the process over and over until I get bored and leave.

Monster Hunter World

This friends was my first real Monster Hunter experience and I loved it so immensely… and then suddenly stopped playing it and I have no clue why. I was super hooked and I think the big problem that came between me and this game is that it split the game community into a bunch of different bubbles. Remember earlier when I said that I was ride or die for the Mouse and Keyboard? My platform of choice for MHW is the PC… but it released the better part of a year later than the PS4 so I started my adventures on console. The challenge there is that most of the people that I used to play with… also still play it on console but now that I have tasted the forbidden fruit of KbM I struggle going back to a controller. I’ve also been in hyper turtle mode since the pandemic started and other human beings are scary even when it is just playing a game with them online. I need to get over that mental block because I had a freaking blast with this game.

Pokémon Go

That is right friends… I just called Pokémon Go an MMO and there is nothing that you can do about it. You have friends and have the ability to play with other people in the real world and digitally trade things… so that seems like an MMO to me. Like most of the country I was super obsessed with this game starting in July of 2017 and continuing on for a few years of regular play. When the pandemic is abated I have considered picking it back up as a way of convincing myself to actually go out and walk the neighborhood. I remember those heady days after release of going all sorts of strange places in search of unique and interesting Pokémon. There was one specific shopping center that had a high concentration of Pokestops, and at lunch you would see folks parked in their cars doing the telltale motion of throwing a pokeball. I still from time to time launch the app and catch anything that happens to be around me… but I have to say playing in the suburbs always sucked because of lowered density problems.

Dragalia Lost

I am also going to blaspheme and call Dragalia Lost a MMO as well given that we had a guild and played with friends online through mobile phone. This is ultimately the “Gacha” that got me, because I was super into this game for a period of time. I still fire it up from time to time if I am bored in bed, but the magic has sort of faded. For awhile though this was a nightly occurrence of me at a minimum playing through my daily quests before falling asleep each night. I would still love to see this game ported to the Nintendo Switch where you could have significantly higher fidelity controls than a touch screen. If you think I am sassy about a controller… I really hate touch screen interfaces. Great game… interesting characters and just the right amount of friction. Shit… now I sorta want to fire it up and play it again… dammit.

Sixty Down

There we go folks… that is sixty MMOs down and in theory I should be able to wrap things up tomorrow. It is going to be a bit of a jumbo sized episode because I have more than fifteen games left to talk about. I started down this path and now am committed to finish it.

3 thoughts on “MMOs Nostalgia Thread – Part 4”

  1. Ah, so many I never experienced, and others I, like you, wish had been a home I could stay in. I still listen to the Wildstar soundtrack regularly, and wish they hadn’t doubled down on chasing the hardcore gamer that was never going be present in enough numbers to justify the cost. I still love the concept of the spellslinger and incorporated that into the RP characterization of one of my TSW characters.

    The other huge disappointment on this list was Landmark. We “invested” money in it hoping for something amazing to come. Remember they had enlisted the folks from StoryBricks, which was going to revolutionize the game world of Everquest Next. Then when SOE crumbled, it took hopes for EQN and a practical StoryBricks implementation with it.

  2. I’ve never understood what was supposed to be so groundbreaking about Wildstar’s housing. It didn’t seem to be as flexible or creative as either EQII or Rift and I didn’t see that it provided any more utility or gameplay functionality than EQII either. But then, I’m pretty sure most of EQII’s housing utility flies completely under most peoples’ radar. That said, Wildstar’s housing was solid enough, as was the game in general. It is surprising there’s no functioning emulator yet.

    • The housing was this interesting blend of useful and easy to use and I think that is what is so compelling about it. I loved EQ2 housing but it was a bit of a chore to get things to work the way you wanted them to and often involved using objects in a manner that they were not intended. Wildstar used housing snap points as rewards for a lot of activities and some of their late state ones were super interesting. My friends had entire minigames that snapped in complete and granted you access to things you might not have before. Like I said EQ2 probably had more things going on but it asked an awful lot out of the player to get the most out of it. Wildstar was a very insert tab A into slot B sort of system making it very easy for someone to come along and feel like they did something cool with it.

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