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MMORPGS and their heydays
zchmrkenhoff
Member Posts: 2,241
I feel like a total noob whenever I read intelligent people compare the post-WoW era MMO's with pre-WoW era MMo's. People always compare things to Ultima Online and how that was such a great game, or various others. I was wondering if it would be possible to give a brief description of what it was like to be a player in various MMO's during their heydays.
Games like: SWG, DAoC, UO, Anarchy Online, Everquest, EVE, and I believe that covers the majority of the list.
I feel left in the dark as I don't have memories of these games in my head, and it would be fascinating to know what I've missed.
For example, since the only true MMO heyday I've experienced is WoW, I remember back then when the world was full of great players and popular opinion of the game was high, and etc.
"Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up." - Robert DeNiro
Comments
You missed Asherons Call, while not as popular as some that you mentioned it definitly deserves to be on that list lol.
Its hard to explain why it was such a good game though. The community was awesome. It was full of great players. Even the not so great got by. There was no ! for quests. There was the talk to every npc and see what they got for you. There was no "Hey idiot go here" kinda help. Info was shared by the playerbase ect. I remember on my old comp desk I had sticky notes all over the place with coords to certain places. Notebooks full of info for what I found and where ect. Feeling involved no matter what my level was. For example during the Shadow invasions they added dungeons that higher levels had to rely on lower levels and vise versa to finish. Thats another thing AC did well. There where HUGE story arcs. Usually involving devs playing massive powerfull mobs leading up to a final fight. AC also had one of the best MMO writing staffs ever imo. There lore was there own and they did an amazing job with it.
Since you know wow, i will try to compare this exxample to tie into AC. In AC the major tradeing towns where Arwic (sp) and I honestly cant remember the other name off the top of my head. Anyway we knew it was patch day. It was during the shadow invasion story arc. Think of Arwic as say Iron forge. Always a massive amount of people there haggling and trading goods. Looking for groups ect. (there was no global chats at this time). Portal storms where your worst enemy on a mule. If to many people where in the area you where portaled out of the area which usually ended in a corpse to get back to. Anyway it was patch day. Time to log in. Logged in and you hear "Have you been to Arwic yet? You gotta go its gone!"
Believe me, there is nothing like logging in and seeing the shadows had destroyed one of the places near and dear to our hearts. If your mule was in a house upstairs and you logged in, it was dead. Arwic was a Huge crater never to be the same again.
Sorry I know I'm rambling but there are so many great memories from AC. Shadow invasion. The hope ender. (I think that was the name). Believe it or not, dropping loot on death. Full loot. Bodies decaying after a time during a PvE death and losing items. It was all great. I remember you could get married in the game. At one point Player helpers or Devs actually did the marrage for you. Anyway I worked for nearly a month to put togeather (through trade and luck) a white suit of celdon armor for the girl I was marrying (hey it was fun!). A couple weeks later she died and lost 3 pieces. Part of the fun of the game was trying to replace that armor.
Anyway, WoW was fun for a while but it will never hold the memories AC did in its hayday.
Ironically I did play AC... heh. But that was when I was still in elementary school! I remember it had a distinct feeling to it... I remember the housing, I remember some of the mobs. I liked the feeling to it... it was really unique. Recently I've been thinking about it lately and I remember WHAT I remember. Glad to that I was playing one of the greatest MMO's back then without even knowing it! (or appreciating it at the time.... = )
"Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up." - Robert DeNiro
While UO was a great game, it was not without problems.
It suffered at times from awesome lag, and roll backs were common.
Plus the free running PK players eventually started to drive the population down, which forced the Dev's to eventually seperated the game into two realms, and then the PK's had no one to prey on, so they moved on also.
A game with total freedom was interesting in the beginning, but when there are no penalties but significant rewards for preying on others, a high percentage of the population decided to vote with its feet.
And EQ benefited by those problems with UO and gained a crap load of new players.
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I, too, am interested in hearing about the older games. While I get about the MMO scene just fine, there's always a part of my mind that yearns to be younger again (I am 16, kind of a weird feeling wanting to be younger) so that I may experience Everquest from the start. I have tried many times to get into it, but always I felt shunned by the people. This was, more or less, a perception I crafted myself, but it was still there, as everybody else was far beyond me in terms of experience, equipment, and relationships with other players.
So, I always eat up stories of those early close-knit communities of games like AoC, Everquest and the like (I actually enjoy reading about EQ more than anything else, tbh). I feel that sort of environment is forever gone because of the popularity of WoW and other MMOs on the market. That being said, if this thread keeps getting added to, it will no doubt be like the Promised Land for me. So please, more stories!
blawr
I have very fond memories of EQ since it was my first love. I started in april 99' a good month after my friends had already started and gotten a good deal ahead. I think one of the reasons why i will never quite get over EQ was because i played in an internet cafe made for gamers. We were about 25 guys and girls playing EQ on the same server in different guilds. When the cafe closed at night or sometimes in the next morning we would stand outside talking for an hour or two, about our experiences in the game and some of the funny episodes that took place. I still have the friendships made in that cafe 10 years later.
I remember deciding to make a Dark Elf because playing an evil race sounded cool. You would start in Neriak, which was the dark elf city. It took a few hours just to have a basic feeling where things were, such as your trainer. Going through the city you couldn't help wondering what the NPCs around the city would drop, if you ever managed to get powerful enough to kill them. One of them was the Prist of Discord. He was particularly interesting because he was wearing a funky black robe with a cool pattern on it and a staff with a skull attached on the top. The interesting thing with EQ was that mobs would wear the item they would drop. If they dropped a lifestealing dagger, they would use it as a weapon against you. Anywho i knew that the priest would drop..a whole lot of newbs lol. There was something with the dialogue that would sometimes cause you to turn on auto attack, which was instant death and a lot of laughs for the rest of us. The Priest of Discord would announce to the whole area that he had just killed some fool trying to engage in combat with him...good times.
I remember the first time i entered Nektulos Forrest right outside the city to start killing mobs but getting killed myself by some roaming skeleton 5-6 levels higher than me. I would curse at the game for putting these harder mobs in the newbie area. It instantly gave me a sense of danger which i liked.
I quickly learned you could kill steal from other players. At first it was funny standing at the pyramids in Nektulos, hiding behind a tree throwing a fire bolt at a skeleton somebody was already fighting and then reaping all the exp plus loot but it quickly got old specially when somebody started to return the favor. The way the system worked was whom ever gave over half the damage to the mob would have full rights to exp and loot. It was later changed to combat KS'ing but never really fixed. This allowed for some major griefing unfortunally but at the same time gave you a tool to annoy the heck out of camp stealers and aholes
What i liked about EQ was the fact it was something completely new. People were very social both in general chat and when it came to groups. I have fond memories of the ingame friendships i made camping the dervish camps in North Ro. I remember this particular camp had a higher level Dark Elf NPC that would attack on sight should you get too close. If you aggroed him you had to leg it or get killed. I remember when i got strong enough to kill him i would take his place and pretend to be the NPC. When a group would pull the dervishes i would pretend i was chasing them and they would run for the hills screaming "TRAIN!"..more good times.
Since you had to share the good exp spots, you could find a group everywhere you went at the lower levels. This made for some great friendships that lasted a long time and often turned into guilds or guild invites. It may have been a grind back then but playing with different people with different personalities more than made up for it. People were for the most part very mature. Since game cards were not even realized yet, you would meet a few kids that borrowed mom and dads credit card but they were few and far between. Most players were in their late teens mid twenties.
Exploring was downright dangerous. Not only did you lose a good chunk of exp when you died you also had to go back and retrieve your belongings. This you had to do completely naked and defenseless making a second death with another exp loss very possible. You had to be careful of where you were going at all times. Even hunting a place like East and West Commonlands would be dangerous. Hunting for spiders and lions would sometimes made you miss a level 35 griffin above your head which would kill you in one or two blows. I remember seeing a bard kill one of of those things early on just by running around with his running song and how i was in awe of that feat. Later on the exp loss would mean a lot of hours lost. Thankfully you could get resurrected by a cleric giving you a big portion of that experience back.
The game had zones but no instances, so everybody had to share what exp camps there were, both outside and in dungeons. If a place were particularly popular you could be put on a list as a replacement for whatever class role you were be it dps, cc'er, tank, healer etc. It worked pretty well but was also somtimes a major annoyance, specially if you were high in level you only had a few choices to go for exp.
EQ made you fear dying. Because there was such a big penalty for it you remembered the names of the bad players. If you frequently caused people to die you would get blacklisted across the server and forced to either create a new toon or solo. Since peoples real colors always shined through creating new toons rarely worked. This would force you to be a better player. Either play well or play alone. in EQ reputation was everything. Everybody knew who the best players were and who the griefers and KS'ers were as well. If you had a bad rep you would be in for some hard times specially if you wanted to get into good guilds later on.
I could go on about EQ all night. Needless to say i wish mmorpgs today would add more consequences and punishing gameplay to add more risk. In todays mmorpgs it's all rewards and no risk. Exploration is discouraged and at so is grouping. Exploration is without any danger at all witch bothers me the most. Buffs no longer have the same impact on gameplay which is a shame. I would create classes in EQ for the buffs alone. It was fun to be wanted and needed. Today nobody needs you because we have tons of hybrids doing multiple jobs and buffs are no longer needed as they used to be.
Vanguard was my last hope of the good old glory days but alas it failed. Now i have to content with WoW'ish mmorpgs because mmorpgs have gone mainstream.
I absolutely loved SWG pre-NGE. I'm not saying that it was without flaws, it had a lot, but the other aspects of the game allowed me to look passed the bugs and design issues and enjoy it for what it was, and the potential it had before it was destroyed by SOE.
The skill system in SWG was awesome. 32 different professions, each with a novice skill box, 4 branches with 4 skill boxes, and a master skill box. You got 250 skill points to spend on skills(which roughly equated to mastering two professions and dabbling in another". There were 5 novice professions and 27 master professions. You could completely customize your character to be exactly how you wanted, picking up the skills you felt you needed to fill the role you wanted to play.
The economy and crafting were amazing. The economy was completely run by the players. Nearly every item in the game, along with the best items, were crafted by the players. Items crafted were not cookie cutter items that popped out with the same stats every time, but the stats of an item were determined by the quality of resources used, and the skill of the crafter. Resources randomly spawned accross the planets with different attributes and different qualities. These attributes determined which types of items they would be best to make with, and how good the final products were. Because it was a player driven economy, items came and went easily, avoiding the entire gear treadmill that is so prevelant in todays MMOs.
Each planet was a huge 16 km x 16km open, seamless world with no instances in which people could place houses and factories, create shops, build cities and build bases. You could drop pretty much any item in the game in your house, move it around, and decorate it. While the game provided some furniture and other housing items, the best, most amazing things came from creative players using non-decorative items in amazing ways to create astounding things. I loved going into people houses/shops and looking at the decorating.
The game not only had basic RPG combat on the ground, but also had twitch based space combat. I don't know of another game that provided such a wide scope of gameplay options.
There was true player interdependencies. Players needed each other to get everyday things done, and it provided excellent social mechanisms that helped forge the best communities I have ever seen in an online game.
Don't get me wrong, SWG wasn't perfect. It suffered from a lack of content, a plethora of bugs, and some pooly designed systems. But even with all of it's flaws, it is still the best MMO I have ever played, and with the direction new MMOs are going, I fear it will always hold that title.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic
Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW
Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike
Loved: Star Wars Galaxies
Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
EvE is still in its glory days and still have a player run econami. Its the last of its kind that is still going strong.. And I think more people should give it s serious try if they are fed up with the WoW=WAR=AION type of gamle play, Aion for one looks great but it looks to play exacly like WOW and WAR.
also Linage2 should go on the list of pree wow games with SOLID player controled worlds.
Just a little more information about UO in it's prime .. I haven't played it in years so I don't know what (if anything) has changed with the core gameplay. My memory is hazy on some of the finer details, so if I get anything wrong I'm sure someone will correct me.
The game world was pretty basic by todays standards, but at the time we all viewed it with awe because it was so completely new to us. To give you an indication of the timeline this was back in 1997, 2 years before Everquest launched, 6 years before SWG and 7 years before WoW.
It began as a single open world released on a number of "shards" (servers) and the gameplay features included full looting and open PvP. People who attacked and killed other players without provocation were called "PKs" which stood for "Player Killers". A colour system came into place here.
Every player started out Blue, you could be temporarily flagged as a criminal for some things like looting someone elses kill or looting the gear from their dead corpse. This turned your colour to Grey for a few minutes during which any other player could kill you without penalty. Now, if you attacked and killed Blue players, you would eventually be flagged as a murderer and your colour would change to Red. This was similar to being a criminal but was semi-permanent and didn't time out until your murders eventually decayed. Any criminal or murderer who ventured near an NPC town would be insta-ganked by the NPC guards the second that someone said the words "Guards!"
The death penalties were extreme. When you died, you lost everything that you were currently wearing and carrying. These items stayed on your corpse until it decayed, you returned to loot it, or someone else (sometimes even monsters) looted it. When you died, you turned into a ghost at the site of your body, and the only way to return to life was to be resurrected by another player or run to an NPC healer/resurrection stone. While you were a ghost, everything that you "said" came out as:
"ooOooOOOOOooOo oO OOoo OoooO Ooo" .. unless someone nearby had the Spirit Speak skill which allowed them to understand what you were actually saying. As a neat segue, that brings me to communication.
One thing we take for advantage these days in MMOs is the ability to communicate with our fellow players from a distance. Not so in early UO. There were no guild channels, no whispers/tells and no unique names. If you wanted to talk to another player, you had to actually go find them in-game or use an out-of-game medium. ICQ was popular at the time, most of us used that.
The control interface was also pretty basic, to open your bank you had to walk up to the bank guard and say "vendor bank" .. likewise, you would have to say "vendor buy" to get an NPC vendor to respond. You could own a boat, but the only way to pilot it would be to stand by the teller saying "turn left!", "forward", "stop!".
One of the more prevailing and endearing elements to UO's gameplay was the housing and crafting/economy. Any player, if they were lucky enough to find sufficient space, could drop a house (purchased as a deed from an NPC) virtually anywhere in the game-world. Some of the larger plots (for example, castles) sold for out-of-game auction prices of thousands of dollars. Thus RMT and the phenomenon of "gold selling" was born, along with the practice of decorating your house with "rares"; items that were difficult to obtain or uesless but decoratively pretty items created accidentally from server bugs.
Crafting was also a very important part of UO. As the progression wasn't level based, but instead depended on the player spending a finite budget of skillpoints (700 if memory served, each skill going from 0-100) and the crafting skills were included in this budget then it naturally followed that good crafters were relatively rare since people liked to save their points for combat related things. Because, (as mentioned above) the penalties for death were severe, gear often needed to be replaced and crafted gear was the best in-game .. the economy thrived. People converted their houses to shopping malls filled with NPC vendors that they (or their "franchise" tenants) restocked.
A side note about character progression; you didn't gain levels or experience .. to raise a skill you had to do the activity, therefore raising a craft skill resulted in making 1000 (for example) daggers, and raising your magery skill meant spending tons of cash on reagents (which you couldn't cast spells without) and repeatedly casting spells 'til your skills slowly raised.
After a while, the decision was made to split the world into two "copies" .. Felucca (the old open PvP world) and Trammel (a "safe" world where one couldn't murder). This resulted in many of the old PKs and anti-PKs quitting and is often touted as the first real "carebear" concession in the game, (and possibly in the entire genre).
I probably missed a ton of things, but in a weird way I really enjoyed making this post; the sense of nostalgia took me right back to the time when I was a miner/mage, teleporting around the world with my trusty pack mule Hairpile gathering Valorite to sell at our guild shop.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
SWG sounds like a game I would have wanted to play.... sounds truly sandbox. I hope that all of these games that advertise "sandbox" get some of their ideas from SWG.
"Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up." - Robert DeNiro
its hard maybe to define a prime but Everquest for me was it's best pre PoP when there were lots of people playing and enjoying the game, discussing the game on the popular community forums and when also I enjoyed playing it. Regarding the last point that was probably 2002ish, where you could get sucked in reading about quests on Allakhazam.
Hmm ironically recalling that I do recall as I say over and over that it wasn't a perfect experience- indeed my EC trading stemmed mainly due to a dwindling interest in the game. But it did have it's goodness in providing a likeable world with likeable and familiar mobs, with identifable and desirable loot, and with interestingly conceptalized dungeons. As well as being a unique kind of game that you could create your own fun. (though maybe that potential probably wasn't developed as it could have been as grind was too much the #1 focus).
Anyway sorry I digressed, to answer I'd say maybe a heydey moment was grouping in KC in a Lcy spot- which was a hugely demanded spot at the time, and due to a good group holding it well. It was a very dodgy spot as you were plagued by respawns, trains, healing mobs(curates) and your group needed to be pull well, maintain mana well,heal well keep things mezzed, and kill at an efficient rate. (as well as be prepared for a train from another group not handling their campspot) And all for mainly good loot drops as the xp was phenomenly bad.
Well, I consider myself to be part of the new generation of mmorpg players, and having never played WOW (and never will), I too do not understand the post-WOW and pre-WOW of gaming history. However, I have rich memories of the games I've played in the past, Runescape and Silkroad Online.
In Runescape, I had started my first mmorpg, and it was interesting. I was mostly a merchant-like person, because I took up cooking and mining/smithing professions to make alot of money. I had turned into a master blacksmith and chef, and realized my combat was still noobish. I had learned from this game that you don't necessarily have to do combat to have fun. Sometimes, the side stuff could be fun, and I learned that selling things and auctioning was fun.
Later, I eventually joined Silkroad Online. In the early days, this game was fun and the community hadn't degraded like it has now, plus bots did not completely infest the game (nowadays bots control about 90% of the gaming population on servers, which fills them up and forces regular players to buy premiums from the item mall). In that game, you could take up one of three jobs, merchant, thief, or hunter. Merchants went on caravan runs to sell goods to distant towns, thiefs attempted to kill merchants and steal the goods, and hunters protected merchants and kill thieves (and in return they were paid a certain percentage of the merchant's profit should the caravan run be successful). I was originally a merchant, but I later learned of a problem with the system. You could switch jobs outside town, so usually the hunters I hired eventually became thieves and attempted to kill me. Eventually, the system was improved, and you could only be one job, as well as only be able to switch between job and non-job situations inside town. But it made me paranoid of hunters, and I got so mad at them that I switched job careers and became a thief to get revenge against those traitorous hunters. Thus, my name became the RamenThief, like here on MMORPG. I didn't achieve wanted status (as a thief, you get this status if you kill and steal enough from hunters and merchants), but it was interesting to play as the darker side. And since most of the hunters were backstabbing traitors, was I the villian for attacking corrupted hunters?
Now, I find myself without a game, and I don't know what to play. I guess a pre-WOW game might be good (friendly community), but alot of newer games look fun. Does anyone know anything about Tales of Pirates or Mir2? Or does anyone know any good pre-WOW games?
Lineage 2 day 5 years ago, life as a noob:
It was quite amazing learning the free for all open PvP system. Start lvling as a noob, running around where theres all these high lvl PK chars trying to kill the dozens/hundreds of newbies in the starter areas. Pissing them off so much that every one in a while you see some red PK char being chased by like 2 full parties of noobs. Being able to attack anyone you want, going for the Sword of Solidarity quest (some noob sword that had a pretty cool quest to do), go to the elven ruins, you see some guy ks another guy's quest mob. The guy gets angry, starts attacking, accidentally PK's the other guy, "oh shiiiii" he runs away while everybody nearby starts to chase, OMG PKER FREE GEAR!!!!11. And every 5 minutes somebody accidentally aggros too many mobs, so they start to run away, aggroing even more mobs, then they start yelling "TRAAAAAAAIN" as they run to the entrance to port outside, you look in the hallway and see them running with like 30 mobs chasing after them.
Or maybe you just hang outside the starter town at the main gate, where theres about 50 other ppl all fooling around, running outside the gate attacking ppl, then running back in, then they wait til their pvp flag starts fading and running out again, hoping somebody they pissed off will attack them and PK them after their pvp flag fades.
The good old days before it all got ruined by bots.
There were no "heydays" for MMOs. The first MMORPGs were even worse, gamewise, than the crap you're paying for right now. I know there are plenty of peopl here that ABSOLUTELY DISAGREE with me, but I was there and I remember without rose tinted glasses. Here's a run down of what you missed:
Ultima Online - It was basically a multiplayer version of Ultima VII. It was also the only game in town for about three years straight. At the time this game was released, most games had a player cap of around 16 players at once. Mainstream RPGs were normally not multiplayer, with the exception being Diablo which allowed up to four players at once. The result is that the early UO community was comprised of Ultima fanboys, Diablo refugees and Quake 2 players that wanted to try something new. Needless to say, this made the community a complete clusterfuck of ganking and drama with the worlds worst user interface as icing on the cake.
The game was great fot Ultima fanboys who only wanted to RP in their favorite fantasy setting. It wasn't so great for the Diablo refugees who just wanted phat loot or the Quake 2 veterans who wanted to kill all the other players on the server. Considering that you had to make a gajillion skull caps / arrow shafts / iron ingots / etc just to get enough gear and skill levels to not get pwned by rabbits and deer, the game was a terrible grind. With this in mind, it's no wonder that most non-RP players just stocked up on exploding potions and arrows before setting up camp out side of the towns and ganking anyone that ventured out of them. Or hung around the banks dressed in rags, pickpocketing untill they had enough money for gear and skill training.
So it's really no surprise that when EQ opened up, most of the RP and loot crowded beat feet to the game where they could play without getting randomly zerged by leetspeaking punks. In a last ditch effort to save the game, Origin made a PvE only area of the game that caused all the gankers to lose the few unwilling victims that they had left. Once the griefers were gone, the population was just too damn low for most people to bother with anymore.
Everquest - This was basically a fan remake of TorilMUD with 3D graphics. Try to imagine World of Warcraft with no minimap, no indication of which NPC was giving out quests and losing all of your gear and a percentage of XP everytime you died. You could always get your gear back.... if you could make it all the way back to where you died before the body disappeared. Good luck with that because you got killed the first time wearing a full kit and now you've got to run through that crap again buck naked!! That was EQ.
Camping and grinding were the watchwords of this game and people would sit in the same place for hours on end, killing the same respawning mob, over and over again, in hopes of a rare loot drop that only that monster would provide. Dungeons were like the rides at Disneyworld with hordes of players camping the boss in hopes of ninja looting the item they needed to complete whatever quest they were all on. It was like some deranged juxtaposition of Kafka and cyberpunk VR. This "game" was proof that people wold pay monthly to be trapped in a Pavlovian Skinner Box.
Asheron's Call - Micro$oft's answer to EQ. Everything you hated about EQ, but with a new "classless" character system. The only saving grace of this game was a bug that caused ranged attacks to fly in a straight line from where they were fired. This meant that you could actually dodge arrows and spells which made the game more like a first person shooter. Since this was the only thing that differentiated AC from EQ, the bug was never fixed and actually made a part of the game.
And that's it. All the early MMORPGs were really just shitty RPGs with chat rooms attached. There really wasn't anything about any of the above games that you couldn't get from Angband or Yahoo Chat. What made old MMORPGs different was the communtiy. UO, EQ and AC were the MySpace and FaceBook of their day. The games sucked, but the community was why you played. Modern games have better gameplay, but their is nothing even remotely resembling the small, tight-knit communities of these old games.
We have a tendency to blame the games for the lack of community rather than forces from outside the genre. The reality is that VOIP tech like TeamSpeak and Ventrillo have become more widespread while the popularity of these games has made the MMORPG community feel less like a small town or neighborhood bar and more like a big city or a shopping mall. The only community you'll find in MMORPGs now is the community you bring with you because no one is really talking in game.
Bottom line: Todays games are better than the games that came before. It's the community that has gotten worse and that has nothing to do with anything hardcoded into modern MMORPGs.
I grew up with text based mmorpgs. Loved them. I have far more good memories playing those games then I do anything else since, and I haven't stopped playing games ever. The thing is, the games were all new to me then. I was young, it was so incredible and new, all these new worlds, and you could do anything you wanted to in them.
I mean, it seemed like you could. Really it was pretty limiting, and if you didn't have good friends, everything was kind of bland. But now we look back at things with rose colored glasses, and dream about how wonderful those days were, when really, it was just the newness of it all.
So I guess my point is, if you're new to the mmo scene, don't worry about missing anything. Most of the current games I personally may think suck, but I'm jaded and hate people now. Go out and make your own terrific times that you can reminisce about on the forums 10 years from now.
I'm not even sure what I'm rambling on about now. I feel old.
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lol i remember the chest camping and the dead newbs in starter towns (DT) during beta and release lol.. ++++
Considering EQ held my interest and kept me entertained for 4 years i would hardly describe that as having rosy red glasses on or it being the newness of it all. If the game sucked as hard as some of you feel it did i would have quit myself early on. Some of us loved what EQ had to offer and others hated it. It's no more complicated than that. Some had bad experiences some had good. I had more good than bad. No other MMO has held my interest for as long as EQ did and it had nothing to do with lack of competition.
Ninja looting wasn't an every day occurance as it is today. People cared about their rep. There were only a very few who dared to ninja loot something because they knew pretty soon everybody would know what they did. Reputation was everything. You couldn't just move to another server or change your name to escape a bad rep. levelling took forever so creating a new toon was not desirable. Look at WoW today. Ninja looting happens all the time and nobody cares. Should you announce somebody stole from the group you would get ridiculed in general chat. Far from how things were back then. You can go on a raid and ninja loot something very good then imidiately change server or name. As soon as you leave your group you are almost instantly forgotten because players are generic and without identity. You can litteraly group up for an instance, ninja loot. Then group with the same people weeks later without them recognizing you. There is no accountabillity today as there were back then
I consider myself an older gamer. I started out in UO, and I moved to EverQuest when it went live. Dark Age of Camelot held me for five years, and I played it from day one. I stll have maps of all the orignal zones in EverQuest. It is amazing how involved in a game we were.
To answer the question; It is quite simple. It was the players/people that we played with. I played with the same core group of players for years and years. We became friends and guild mates etc.. It was a different time for sure for the player base of MMOs. There were very few people who jumped from game to game or guild to guild. Guilds were constant. To give a example, I play WAR right now. I have been in three guilds, and all three guilds have folded. People come and go all the time. There isnt that same constant that there was in EverQuest or Dark Age Camelot in the early days. The players that I played with back then were awesome. To this day, I still talk to them, but most of all the old EQ players do not play mmos anymore, Sadly.
Well, lemme tell you a bit about two of those that I've played (AO and EQ) and why parts of them made the perfect MMO. Parts.
EQ. The two things I loved most about this game were the HUGE, open world (it took literally hours to cross on foot, and boat trips didn't have a stupd loading screen and voila you're acrtoss the world...you sat through the whole ride), and the open faction system. It made a real, solid world that felt gigantic and real. And the faction system made it so that anyone could group with anyone, guild with anyone, and talk with anyone. You could even learn other races' languages! Plus, with hard work and perseverance an evil Dark Elf could walk amongst good heroes in Freeport, or a halfling drink and carouse with evil Ogres. As much as I ike WoW, one thing I hate is the feeling that I can't interact with half of the playerbase because we're opposite sides. I want a game where alignment is something that can be altered by my deeds. Sadly, it suffered from being heavily group-based and grindy, and de-leveling is never cool.
AO. The skills system in this game is still to this day one of the most flexible and min-max friendly ones ever designed. The initial idea of three factions warring it out in the wastelands was cool, and Funcom had TONS of player events with sweeping storylines. It was kinda cool that my Fixer, while Omni, was part of a clandestine network of Fixers from all factions that formed their own underground community. But it was a Funcom product, and schizophrenia on the part of the developers has led to the games slow and painful decline.
So it seems that what made those pre-WoW games so fun was the communitiies and the world's themself. It seems that the communities in these older MMORPG's weren't commando style hardcore anythings, except for the select few who made the game fascinating for you all. I remember playing AC and having people being labeled as PKers... I find it interesting that on PvP servers in games now people just say "You're on a PvP server, ganking is implied" instead of it being discouraged and given penalties to.
I suppose the true games that we are looking for them are niche games that won't take the WoW audience but interest the same people who enjoyed UO, EQ, etc. Everybody is looking for the next 'big' MMO but we don't want that as WoW has introduced a bad community that is carrying over to all new releases. Going to be tough to find the next great game eh...
"Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up." - Robert DeNiro
I think you pretty much nailed it on the head there.
Not to say that the older games were just the best thing since sliced bread. For the most part they were far from it.
The thing is most of the gamers who played UO and EQ were players mixed 90% old MUDDERS and 10% Single Player RPG. The gmaes were not made for the masses they were made as a combination of the 2. These games that MMO were based on were games that were intended to promote RP and not necessarily just on graphics and End Game.
Today's MMO's are geared to ramp up players to the End Game which is where the MMO is supposed to be different from every other MMO out there. This lead the popular MMO's to come up with quest "floaties" and maps and icons and indicators of who has what for you to do. And another "cloatie" or icon or map indicator or locating device pointing you to where you need to be to accomplish what the first "floatie" or icon or map inficator or locating device indicated you need to go with a list of what to do.
Essentially, Today's MMO can be boiled down too ( forget about "ThemePark" or "Rails" or "Sandbox" ) a colored icon/map indicator that initiates another different colored icon/map indicator and a shopping list of items to be collected/returned/delivered.
THAT is what the MMORPGR's from old are complaining about. The games of yore did not have this. You had to read and decipher the text to get to the goal and then detemine what to do once you got there. That was easily 80% of the appeal of the games at the time.
Other than the way the quests have been watered down and reduced to the base element above, they have not really changed much. Essentially making them more "User Friendly" and appealing to the masses by taking the "tedium" of quests out of the game. THey are removing what MADE those games as popular as what they were. Strip away the LORE, the STORY, and BACKGROUND to WHY you are doing something and ALL MMO are the same 20% of the game play.
Which is why the thread on "WHO NEEDS STORY, PLEASE" in the SWTOR forumn has me so baffled.
Say hello, To the things you've left behind. They are more a part of your life now that you can't touch them.
I actually laughed out loud when I read that. But hey, that was part of the fun. Dying really sucked in EQ, it's true. But that's what got your pulse pounding when you were in a touch and go fight. Or when you agroed some big nasty and were running for your life...just a little further to the zone line..please God let me make it. heh.
And because death hurt so much it made you really appreciate it when somebody saved you. I mean it actually mattered to people. You really, truly felt a rush of warm gratitude to the guy who saved you from dying even though he didn't have to do it. I'm talking about random strangers helping out just to be nice. And people did that sort of thing a lot. People always remember the griefers but hardly anyone ever mentions all the times some random stranger tossed a heal on them or rooted the thing that was chasing them or jumped in to beat down the thing that was about to kill them. Nobody remembers the drive-by-buffs that people would put on others as they ran past.
But back to the death penalty. Man, EQ just wouldn't have been EQ without the death penalty. Sure it sucked when it happened but it was that fear of death that put some excitement into the game.
I actually laughed out loud when I read that. But hey, that was part of the fun. Dying really sucked in EQ, it's true. But that's what got your pulse pounding when you were in a touch and go fight. Or when you agroed some big nasty and were running for your life...just a little further to the zone line..please God let me make it. heh.
And because death hurt so much it made you really appreciate it when somebody saved you. I mean it actually mattered to people. You really, truly felt a rush of warm gratitude to the guy who saved you from dying even though he didn't have to do it. I'm talking about random strangers helping out just to be nice. And people did that sort of thing a lot. People always remember the griefers but hardly anyone ever mentions all the times some random stranger tossed a heal on them or rooted the thing that was chasing them or jumped in to beat down the thing that was about to kill them. Nobody remembers the drive-by-buffs that people would put on others as they ran past.
But back to the death penalty. Man, EQ just wouldn't have been EQ without the death penalty. Sure it sucked when it happened but it was that fear of death that put some excitement into the game.
I couldn't have said it better myself
I actually laughed out loud when I read that. But hey, that was part of the fun. Dying really sucked in EQ, it's true. But that's what got your pulse pounding when you were in a touch and go fight. Or when you agroed some big nasty and were running for your life...just a little further to the zone line..please God let me make it. heh.
And because death hurt so much it made you really appreciate it when somebody saved you. I mean it actually mattered to people. You really, truly felt a rush of warm gratitude to the guy who saved you from dying even though he didn't have to do it. I'm talking about random strangers helping out just to be nice. And people did that sort of thing a lot. People always remember the griefers but hardly anyone ever mentions all the times some random stranger tossed a heal on them or rooted the thing that was chasing them or jumped in to beat down the thing that was about to kill them. Nobody remembers the drive-by-buffs that people would put on others as they ran past.
But back to the death penalty. Man, EQ just wouldn't have been EQ without the death penalty. Sure it sucked when it happened but it was that fear of death that put some excitement into the game.
In WoW, as a rezzer that wasn't a druid, I would always rez corpses I would see on the ground out of pure goodwill, not even knowing how old the corpse was. Good will has not died!
"Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up." - Robert DeNiro