Morning Friends! I am going to apologize for the rapid tonal whiplash of my posts right now, but like I said the other day I have a case of the inbetweensies and am bouncing around a bit. One of the things that I wish I was better at was staying engaged with Elder Scrolls Online. At least once a year I have this revelation of just how damned good this game is and what a phenomenal success it has been at delivering good story content on a pretty regular release cadence. I am weird when it comes to this game however in that I want to experience content in the order it was released. One of my favorite things about the game initially was that I could experience all the content on a single character and that is more or less what I have set out to do. So far I have tackled:
Daggerfall Covenant Campaign
Aldmeri Dominion Campaign
Ebonheart Pact Campaign
Imperial City
Orsinium
Thieves Guild
Dark Brotherhood
Morrowind
I’m in the middle of the Vvardenfell campaign, and I think I bounced the last time I was playing because some of the Morrowind area cities have a lot of Z-Axis nonsense on trying to find the next objective. Coming back over the last few nights I have pushed through this and gotten back out into the open countryside which is more my jam in the first place. This game is really damned good folks and if you have never played it, you should really check it out. I have a long history with ESO, and even I sometimes forget what a crowning achievement this game really is. The combat at times is a bit of an acquired taste, but I always find myself greatly enjoying the story.
If my calculations are correct, once I get to the end of Vvardenfell, the content order looks a little bit like this. Please note this is just me being weird and as far as I know none of the content needs to be tackled in any particular order.
Clockwork City
Summerset
Murkmire
Northern Elsweyr
Southern Elsweyr
Western Skyrim
The Reach
Blackwood
There has been an excessive amount of content released for this game and that is completely skipping over all of the dungeons. I’ve largely mentally done that because I didn’t have a good static group of friends to tackle them with. However more recently I have been hanging out with my good friends Clockwork Bells and Zuulzilla while we all sorta do our own things in game. They similarly have been disappointed by Shadowlands and looking for something else to latch onto, and apparently have some other friends looking to play as well. The big thing is so far we seem to have pretty drift compatible play times, which means in theory we could start tackling the dungeons.
I apparently am still fairly tanky as I managed to maintain threat on this world boss extremely successfully. I am consistently surprised by just how much activity there is for given encounters. Generally speaking when I roll up to a world boss spawn, I don’t have to wait terribly long before a crowd assembles and we can easily take it down. This all feels super organic and I even see calls for assistance answered in general chat, which is such a weird concept to me coming out of seemingly much more toxic game communities. Not saying it is this bastion for all that is good and wholesome in the world, but I have been relatively impressed so far.
There is a love applied to the content and you can tell it. These folks love what they are creating and moments like the freaking Buoyant Armigers like Captain Naros speaking in poems is pretty great. As she says… Warrior-poets are quite versatile. Each time I come back I enjoy myself and wonder why I left in the first place. I think I just sorta get easily distracted and the challenge with Elder Scrolls Online versus a World of Warcraft, is the moment to moment questing gameplay asks a lot more of you. A more traditional MMO I can grind mindlessly while catching up on my favorite shows, and a game like Elder Scrolls requires a bit more focus. There are times I want that and then there are times I just sorta want mindless busywork.
No matter how many times I leave and come back, one thing stays the same. My town of choice will always seem to be Shornhelm in Bangkorai. It might just be my Daggerfall Covenant pride, but I am pretty certain this is the most efficient town in the game. I posted the map so I could have a visual reference while talking about it. The portal is in a super handy place which is just up a hill from the bank, blacksmith, woodworker and stables. Additionally you can get to the thieves guild without encountering any town guards which may or may not be handy depending upon your playstyle. The only thing that isn’t super convenient is the wardrobe and enchanting/jewelry stations but given that the town itself is super small… you can get there expediently if you need to. If my character would have a home town it would be Shornhelm, and based on the high level player traffic I am guessing I am not the only one who feels this way.
The game is set up in a manner now that you can pretty much start any of the expansions and play that as your first content. I however still believe that the best content in the game to start with is the original starter islands of Stros M’Kai, Bleakrock and Kenarthi’s Roost. That is just my personal feeling however and it is entirely valid to start wherever you want in the content stack. The game will default to starting you in whatever the latest expansion is I believe and then from there you have quests that can take you to the other areas.
I have to admit that one of the major highlights of the evening was dusting off House Stalwart and inviting Zuu and Bells to it. I heavily recruited when this game first came out in 2014, and as a result we used to have a pretty massive and active guild. Largely I was just relying on my natural instant of trying to collect all of my friends into a single basket, but that doesn’t always work out in the manner I hope it would. The traditional MMO bounce happened and I quickly found myself in a pretty empty guild home. Over the years various folks have been active for various periods of time but for now we are mostly just using it as a shared chat room. I am hoping that we can actually make good on the idea of running some of these dungeons, because it would be awesome to see some of the more serious content that got added into the game over the years.
Hey Friends! I find myself in an old familiar rut that I have been in several times. Essentially I flail around at night trying to figure out exactly what I want to be playing, because nothing sounds quite right. This generally happens when there is a game on the horizon that I absolutely want to be playing but it isn’t yet available. Right now that game is Outriders and it is ultimately the game that I want to be playing. The challenge there that makes it all the more frustrating is I have access to play the demo as much as I want, but I also know that if I grind that demo into the ground it will ultimately spell doom for my long term engagement with the game.
I played a bit of Destiny 2, but found myself losing interest the longer that I played. Weirdly I think last nights problem was the fact that I didn’t engage this week until Sunday night, aka two days from reset. I think maybe tonight will be different since I won’t feel quite the pressure to wrap things up and get weekly rewards from things. I did manage to finish up Gambit and get that powerful engram. I am finding myself enjoying Battlegrounds quite a bit. This season has an enjoyable pattern of play where you do some other activities to get Cabal gold to “smash that like button”… aka hammer of proving and break a chest in the battleground. I am still bummed about Steelfeather Repeater being one season away from grandfathered into being a permanent weapon.
Valheim and I are in a weird place right now. I’ve pretty much done everything that I want to do with the game for right now. I have two massive bases and have been just sorta flitting around the map building a portal network and weird outposts. I may be finding myself winding down until the new biomes go into the game, which is a very familiar place for me as I went through similar patterns with Minecraft over the years. Mostly I have not taken down the final boss that is in the game right now, because I have heard in numerous places that when you take that boss down… Goblins become a normal spawn. I’ve already felt like my advancement has adversely impacted the server that I play on… and because of that I really don’t want to subject lowbies to such a painful encounter as random packs of Goblins.
Speaking of Minecraft… I guess I am winding down there as well. I hit it pretty hard and heavy for awhile between trying to record a daily series on YouTube while experimenting with Hardcore mode, to playing on BotchCraft to playing on my own private Realm. I think for now I am probably in a holding pattern until 1.17 drops officially and I swap over to a brand new random seed to explore the cave update nonsense. I’ve spent some time over in the Nether and found two blaze spawners that are beside each other… which leads me to want to try building a blaze farm… but that has yet to happen. Right now I mostly log in… say hi to my cats and log right back out.
So what did I do instead of all of the above last night? I apparently reinstalled Final Fantasy XV and attempted to get back into it. I feel like I am desperately searching for something to hold my attention for a month until Outriders launches. I also installed Bravely Default 2 on my Switch, but have not touched it. I could go for something mostly single player for awhile because I know when Outriders launches I will be engaged with lots of people once again as I attempt to do groupy content. I think in the back of my mind I am looking for another Dragon Age Inquisition style experience to tide me over until it is time to poke my head out of my hole again.
Being in-between the game you want to be playing and the games you have access to is maddening at times… but also a supremely first world problem. My life seems to always been perforated by moments of being unsatisfied with everything. I wish I could get rid of that feeling because it is not terribly enjoyable to go through.
Well folks, we are here. We have made it to the end of this list thing… and I feel a little battered for it. Going through all of this has been a bit of a mental journey. I started out thinking that it would be super easy to list out all of the MMOs that I have played in the past but then you run into challenges of which ones deserve to be included and which were far too brief to even mention. Further compounded is the fact that as I sit down and list these out I am certainly going to miss a few in the process. My memory as I age has become terribly fallible. Hopefully you my fine readers have at least gotten some measure of enjoyment out of the process.
Destiny 2
I love Destiny and when I refer to the game I sorta blend together the gap between the first and second games… but there was most definitely a gap. When I first sat down and played Destiny 1, the only thing that I wanted more than anything was to be able to play it on my platform of choice with my gaming implements of choice… aka PC and Keyboard and Mouse. With Destiny 2 it seemed like that reality was finally going to come true… albeit with a significant lag between the console and PC versions. The problem with Destiny 2 at release is that it felt like a massive step backwards as far as content and functionality. The thing is when Destiny 1 finished its run it was in a really great place. Rise of Iron was a phenomenal expansion and improved so many things in the game and with the launch of Destiny 2… it was very clear that this was in progress for some time and completely missed the memo on a number of those changes. It wasn’t really until the Forsaken expansion that Destiny 2 saw the same sort of greatness that its predecessor did. The core problem with Destiny however is that they have landed on a seasonal model and it feels very much like I need to play ONLY Destiny in order to complete everything before the next season ticks around. Additionally I hate the model of a revolving door of content that we get some new activity and then a few months later it is removed in favor of something else. Finally more recently with Beyond Light they began the process of removing large chunks of the game for the sake of progress and I just cannot get on board with this. I love Destiny but I am in a frustrated state with the experience right now.
Anthem
Anthem had so damned much potential but launched in an incomplete state and never really got their feet back under them. I legitimately love what this game could have been, because it is hard to actually love the final product. I love the Javelins and I love the flow of content, but the games content was an exercise in trying to come up with the minimum viable product. Anthem feels like getting the first novel in a Wheel of Time style epic story… and then the Author walking away from it. The story was great, but it felt like we got only the first chapter and the thing that every single game like this seems to struggle with is nailing the release cadence because content is just harder to create than anyone plans for it to be. The team got mired in post release patching which was desperately needed and started missing windows and before long the entire roadmap was tossed out. Do I think Anthem Next will fix the problems and deliver the product we wanted all this time? I somehow doubt it… not everyone gets to be FFXIV or No Man’s Sky and have the comeback tale where everyone embraces it later and cheers it along. I want this to happen because there were so many phenomenal moments… but we just needed more of them and for someone to fucking learn the right lessons from the itemization failures of the past. You can’t be a game with diablo style randomized (often times useless) loot and then be stingy as hell with it.
Dauntless
Dauntless was a cool concept and it saw a niche that was not being served. Up until this point there really was no true Monster Hunter experience on the PC and when I first experienced it at Pax South I was intrigued… and also really damned bad at playing it. The monkey wrench thrown into this plan is the fact that I doubt the Dauntless team expected Monster Hunter World to be launching on the PC. Once that gauntlet was thrown down it became a race to market and Dauntless did not launch near fast enough for it to gain the sort of platform traction required to stave off the assault of the real deal. All of that said Dauntless has done a really good job of carving out their own niche. Platform agnostic cross play is a HUGE part of this equation, but for me personally it still feels like I am playing a clone of Monster Hunter with maybe not as many highly detailed systems. The monster design feels a bit more generic and the art style isn’t really my jam for this sort of gaming experience. I played quite a bit of the game when it first launched and then have not really touched it since apart from occasionally claiming Twitch Prime rewards.
Warframe
Warframe is the best game that I cannot stand at all. There are multiple layers that get in the way of me playing this game. The first is the uncanny combination of the POV, camera position, and the speed of movement ends up giving me motion sickness. That right there alone is a deal breaker and while it lessens a bit when I am on my 4K display it is still there. The other core problem I have with the game is the art style. I do not love the whole biomech Guyver thing going on with the suit design. If you had put them in Gundam/Robotech/G1 Transformer looking mecha bodies then I probably would have fought through the first problem to keep playing. When I look at Warframe suits I just see the dumb choices made with the Michael Bay movie Transformers. Lastly what I find I really want in the game is some sort of big open world leveling mission equivalent to a Destiny patrol. I am told this thing exists but every attempt I have made to play the game in this style has ended up with me feeling like I am forced down a mission path. All of this said… there is no team out there that supports a game quite in the way that Digital Extremes does and the product that they are delivering at least on paper is phenomenal. I am jealous of the folks who are super into this game much the same as me being jealous of the folks who enjoy Guild Wars 2, but similarly I just can’t get into it.
Genshin Impact
I was so damned into this game for a few months last year, but recently I have struggled to get back engaged. Genshin Impact is a weird mishmash of an Action MMO, Breath of the Wild and a loot box Gacha game. The combination can be super addicting and as such there are folks who have legitimately spent tens of thousands of dollars chasing characters from the loot box pulls. I spent a fair amount of money myself but nothing even vaguely close to that order of magnitude. I really need to get back into the pattern of logging in and at least doing my dailies, but the problem that I run up against is the artificial caps. Like everything that I seemed to need came from the weekly boss fights, so if I fought them and got bad luck I was locked out of meaningful progression for another week. Traditionally XP boosters in a game are a way of speeding things up… but in Genshin Impact there is no viable way to level characters without using them, meaning that you can’t even focus on leveling alternate characters when the things that give you meaningful progression are on cooldown. The game is constantly changing and evolving and I need to catch back up at least on story… but I would love to see them address the experience gain issue.
Devilian
In the “Games No One Remembers” column, I present to you Devilian. There was a period of time where Trion games was spending a lot of effort localizing a number of games. One of these was a Diablo clone from South Korea called Devilian. I honestly enjoyed it quite a bit but had some key problems with the game. I remember it suffering from the F2P MMO trope of having gender locked classes which always feel awful. I was super happy when I got into testing on the game because I am a huge fan of the Diablo ARPG genre. Going back through my posts about it I am remembering now that the community was sorta toxic. I liked playing the Berserker and apparently that was “casual mode” and anyone that wanted l to play that was trash that you shouldn’t ever invite to a group. The other challenge is that the game didn’t feel like it had any sort of a Sword and Board tanky character, which is another trope that I really enjoy in this sort of game. I love the Diablo 3 Crusader for example. The game had a lot of potential but ultimately was shuttered in January of 2018.
Animal Crossing: New Horizon
So I realize you are just about to say “But Bel, Animal Crossing isn’t an MMO” and I am going to say bullshit. The way that the community interacts with this game and the complex systems of player based trading that has evolved and visiting each others Islands… ABSOLUTELY makes this game an MMO. Animal Crossing New Horizon was my very first foray into the franchise and I was super freaking into it for a month… and it got me through the worst of getting adjusted to this post apocalyptic pandemic hell that we now live in. I bounced once I realized that I felt a sense of urgency to do all of the things each day for fear of losing imaginary progress. At some point I want to return but when I do I am going to time travel like a fiend and do things on my terms rather than the real world day/night cycle of this game.
Crowfall
Crowfall is a game that I keep periodically booting up and trying to play, but I can’t for certain tell you what in the hell the game is actually trying to do. There is a crafting system and then there is combat… but everything else about the game feels sorta wishy washy in between. The combat is vaguely interesting as is the crafting but the two of them combined do not necessarily add up to be a compelling gameplay experience. I have not followed the Crowfall community and as such I am largely viewing this game as an outsider and I can’t say I get it yet. This is a long time of games that I backed once upon a time and I keep poking my head into it. I would love someone to explain to me what Crowfall wants to be when it grows up, because right now at this very moment it feels like it is trying to be a chaotic mess.
Lineage II Revolution
You ever find yourself playing a game and you don’t really know why? This was me for a few months as I was poking my head into Lineage II Revolution each night on my phone. This is probably the first game that I tried to play from the “mobile mmo click a button to have the game do the thing for you” genre. It was pretty short lived because I rapidly realized that the gameplay itself wasn’t really anything worth completing on your own… which is why they give you the button that just makes the game do it for you. I am sorta glad though that I played through something like this so I at least feel like I understand this genre a bit more. I was trying to approach it as though it were a traditional game, when instead it is just a loot box with pretty graphics.
Moonrise
This is another in a long line of games that I remember fondly… but likely no one else does but the developers. When I met with the Undead Labs folks at Pax South, they were showing off two games… State of Decay: Year One Survivor Edition or YOSE and Moonrise which was intended to be the second game released from the studio. It was this amalgam of a Pokemon pet battler with an online MMO and I honestly found it really enjoyable. You were a Warden and something made the local fauna get angry and start attacking people so you used your trained pets to battle them and calm them back down. At least that is what I remember of the core story. The battles were really enjoyable though and it was targeting PC and mobile platforms with cross play. Had they managed to bring this to market I think it would have been a pretty big success. I have no clue what happened in the development process but it was ultimately canned in 2015.
Project Gorgon
If the Uncanny Valley were a video game it would be Project Gorgon. Gorgon is a game that I believe strives to play like your memories of Everquest and Asheron’s Call. What ends up causing the uncanny valley effect is the high fidelity rendering of the world with very low fidelity gameplay. The other challenge I had with the game is just how universally awful your characters gear always looks because you wear things out of availability, not because they look good. In fine art and music there is this concept of “Outsider Art“, or artists who are completely self taught without any mentorship or contemporaries and the end result often ends up both brilliant and wildly jarring at the same time. Project Gorgon feels like an Outsider Art video game.
TemTem
Have you ever found yourself uttering the phrase “There should really be a Pokémon MMO”? Grats it exists and it is called Tem Tem. This game is a love letter to the Pokémon Franchise delivered originally on the PC and in MMORPG format. I originally backed this game when I believe it was on Kickstarter and then played it off and on during Alpha and Beta tests. It evolved slowly from very much not a game to a fully fledged designer impostors Pokémon game. Tem Tem is the game that made me realize that I don’t ACTUALLY like Pokémon games that much. I didn’t grow up with Pokémon and I first played “Blue” on a Gameboy Emulator and then it wasn’t until X/Y that I picked up the series again. I enjoy the collection of new critters but I do not really like pet battles at all. That is not to say that I won’t get sucked into the hype of a Pokémon game at some point in the future, but I am realizing my own tastes a bit more.
Lego Minifigures Online
Did you know that Funcom created a Diablo Clone that involved you buying the collectable blind bags of Lego MiniFigures and then using the code inside to register new characters? It is okay, no one else did either and that is I guess why this game more or less just sort of faded away. One series of MiniFigures had the codes and the next didn’t and the project was never spoken of again. The entire thing officially closed in September of 2016, but I remember the game fondly. It was actually rather enjoyable and many of the characters had wildly different combat methods. You built a team of three characters and then could switch back and forth between them freely allowing you to focus on the strengths of each and rely on the team as a whole to solve any challenges you might encounter. This is yet another game that tried to ride in on Skylanders mania only to flop when the Physical Toys as DLC thing faded from the zeitgeist for everyone but diehard Amiibo collectors.
Diablo 3
Diablo 3 right now is probably my favorite MMORPG, but mostly because of the concept of seasons and the way we interact with them. Diablo 3 itself is a great gameplay experience and I have so much freaking love for this game. However the parts that I really love are the intangibles that come from the way that I play it. Namely my friend Grace and I and occasionally other folks have this tradition of staying up and playing Diablo 3 on the opening night of a season. As we have gotten older we have lasted shorter periods of time in this initial grind, but we more or less treat it like the launch of a new MMORPG, which for me is the most exciting period for a game. We have this condensed week or two of serious play and then get as far in the season as we care to get… and then walk away for three months until the next season starts. It ends up being this great cycle of intense activity that we can walk away from easily without feeling like we are missing something.
Monster Hunter Online
Sometimes I do some really dumb things and go through a lot of effort for very minimal enjoyment payout. When I get into something I have a bad habit of getting super obsessed with that thing for a period of time. When I was into Monster Hunter World I was trying to engage with as many Monster Hunter things as I could in a short period of time… and among those rabbit holes I found out that apparently there was a Monster Hunter MMORPG that only came out in China. This process involved me faking some sort of Citizen ID that is required to sign up for any sort of online game. The end result was a really poorly playing online MMORPG that was immediately forgettable, but I kept playing it because I felt like I needed to get something out of the effort I just went through. Sometimes I think I do these dumb things just so I will have a story to tell about it.
Sky Saga
Sky Saga was the first game that I remember playing that was very much “Minecraft but an MMO” that I played. It had its moment in the sun as the new hotness and so many of us played it for so brief a period of time. One of the great things about my blog is it serves as a journal of what I cared about at a specific time. I apparently cared about Sky Saga in February of 2015 when I got into the Alpha and then stopped caring about it when that phase of the alpha was over. I am sure I probably got invites to other phases but I can’t really remember playing it much other than that initial push. It did lead me to discover Creativerse as well which I played for a time. I am not sure what happened during the development of the game but it permanently halted in August of 2017.
Wolcen
Wolcen and I have this wild ride. I bought into the game when it first showed up on the Steam store and it was very much not really a game at that point. More recently it shaped up into what was a pretty solid adventure with a completely reasonable story. When it officially launched the first chapter of the story I played it hard and heavy for a month, got through the main story… survived its awkward bugs and then then just sorta wandered away because some other shiny object caught my attention. I need to return to it and see how it has progressed in the time I have been away from it.
The Division 1/2
I am going to largely lump the two games together because I have ended up with a very similar experience from them both. I really enjoyed Division when it first launched, in part because I was enthralled by just how detailed the world was. The world was completely miserable and joyless… which sort of ground on you as you played it and I think kept me from engaging much further. Division 2 improves on a lot of that giving you a reason to care about what you are doing in helping out the fledgling survivor communities. The thing I have learned about by playing both games however is that I am not really that into “Military Fantasy” as a genre. I like blowing up aliens and monsters far more than I like killing folks trying to survive in the burnt out husk of society. The other core problem I have had is that there are a very limited number of weapons that I enjoy using, and because of the way in which the drops work… it is somewhat hard trying to make sure I have a current and viable version of one of these weapons on me at all times. I do want to get back in and play some more Division 2 because I think I COULD like it… but I also don’t want to use the level boost and skip all of the story.
Marvel’s Avengers
Marvel’s Avengers has a delightful coming of age story featuring one of my favorite characters Ms. Marvel aka Kamala Khan. I had a lot of fun experiencing that story and that is pretty much the end of positive things I have to say about this game. The problem with that game is that the moment to moment gameplay of Avengers is just not enjoyable. It ends up being repetitive tedium as encounters are way tankier than they should be and the attacks land without feeling any gravity to them. Then there is the whole uncanny valley that is the facial models of this game. They are clearly going for a MCU feel but did not get the rights to the actual actors… leading to the game sorta feeling like you are playing as the stunt doubles. That eventually faded as I played more of the game, but the lack of enjoyable gameplay really was the thing that caused me to bounce. I leveled 2 characters to the level cap, geared out out pretty much to the max and then as I was leveling a third character I asked myself what the hell was the point.
Fallout 76
Fallout 76 has been lampooned by gamers, the press and influencers as this bug riddled money grab by Bethesda. However my personal experience was considerably different and I had a lot of fun running around with friends in the Fallout setting. The whole taking of territory and defending of a base was some of the most fun I have had in a game like this. My schedule did not align with the others and as a result I sorta faded away from the game, but I would love to return to it at some point soon. Since I did not really make significant progress, part of me wants to just start fresh so I can experience what the new player experience is now as compared to what it was previously before the introduction of NPCs. I think there is probably a compelling game here and I just need to sort out the time to really engage with it.
Tired of Typing
Well folks… I think that is it. Todays post ran considerably longer because as I was thinking about games… I remembered other games that I figured I should probably include. The second I create this it will immediately be out of date given that I am constantly engaging with new online games. For those wondering the final tally at the end… is 82 games. Now I am ready to not do this thing and talk about something else.
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.
