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Which MMO really gae you the feeling you were at home?
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Asheron's Call, no other MMO captured towns like that game. The feeling of running into Holtburg, Glenden Woods, or any town had a feeling of excitement and you never knew who you were going to meet, especially on Darktide.
FFXI.
It was absolutely my "home away from home". It was also kind of my "sanity" for a few months, when I was out of work and had more time than normal to burn at home, in between job searching and interviews... the latter of which were sparse. Even with my limited funds, $13 a month was well worth it; there's no other form of entertainment I could have gotten so much time and enjoyment out of for that little money.
It was the World, the lore.. the people I met/knew. The community in that game was amazing. Nothing like hanging out in Lower Jeuno, chatting with people, and watching what shenanigans would ensue at any given moment. Always a great time, even sitting around doing nothing. I knew the world like the back of my hand. You could blindfold me, drop me in the middle of a zone, unblind-fold me, and within moments I could tell you where I was, and how to get to the nearest zone, etc.
Wish I could go back about 11 years and do it all again... Minus the unemployed part.
The Runner-Up for that would be Lineage 2. That was my "other home away from home"; my PvP counterpart to FFXI's PvE. Lineage felt like home for much the same reason.. the people I knew, my clan/alliance-mates, the world was awesome and massive. The music remains, to this day, among my favorite in all of gaming. L2 was a tough shell to crack, especially for a new player, and from the outside, it seemed like nothing but a pointless grind. Once you got past that and started to become part of the community on your server, became part of the goings-on, it became so much more than that. Grinding levels was no longer just grinding xp... It was hanging out with your friends and clan-mates online, talking, joking around, getting drunk, whatever... and killing mobs was just the backdrop to it all, with the occasional PvP encounter to punctuate it.
To this day, I'm still friends with several people I met in both of those games. And I mean real-life friends.. not just "people I chat with online".
Star wars galaxies !
40 classes to choose 2.5 from. Best crafting system, one of the best housing ever. Fishing Dancing playing in the band master strippers ! Taming the first rancor, camping, farming exploring, and some mad pvp action. 3 deaths and your Jedi was a ghost !!! JTLS space the way if should be played.
Mad fun times this was the only game my wife and I had more then 10 accounts just to support them.
and then Sony happened,,, dumbed the game down to suat to try and get wow players. We told them even did a petition with over 150 thousand active players.
allods online. spent 4 years on that game from the beta launch.
at first the game was not a money grab, nothing was necessary in the cash shop, then it gradually became more and more pay2win, at a point, you needed to spend hundred euros to keep up with the other players. the most reckless people were spending thousands of dollars on the game. i kept playing despite the awesome amount of pay to win (actually this is the most pay to win game that has ever existed) because of my guild mates. it was not possible for me to leave the game because i knew those people for 4 years. that however changed as the game kept pushing the money grab to astronomical levels...
i was almost FORCED to quit the game, because it was not fun for me anymore.
to give you an idea: around the beginning of the game, 1 gold equaled 1.5 gpotato (cash shop currency) and when i quit, i left the exchange rate at 89 gold = 1 gpot.
the most important item in the cash shop is the runes. a complete set of runes of the highest level (6 x level 13 runes) bought only using cash cost you 24.000 euros, and i am not joking about this.
a mount costs 30 euros, god dammit how many months of warcraft is that? 3 months?
let's not forget about the tens of other essential items that you HAVE to buy to be relevant... all sold through lucky chests. in the end you would need to waste 300 euros worth of chests to get your item.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
Well said. I would say Pre-CU SWG gave me that feeling for pretty much the same reasons caine6621 listed.
I started out wandering around with no real direction and, as I traveled from place to place, organically made friends and contacts that continued to keep me immersed and enjoying the game. SWG was not my first MMO and was not perfect. It didn't have all the socialization and grouping features we see today, but regardless, I found it to be the easiest game for striking up conversation or going off in a hunting party.
As time has passed, some of this is certainly "rose colored" glasses, but I still recall a sense of sadness as friends would leave post-CU. This is not meant to debate the merits of the CU, but more to establish the time frame. I played after JtL through about a week or so after the CU hit. It's a bit silly now, but I haven't really had a similar sensation or sense of immersion since. EvE is the next closest and that was more due to the real life friends I've played with.
ahh nostalgia...
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
The last game I truly felt at home was vanilla LoTRO. I loved the setting, the world - everything. I didn't find myself looking for reasons to love it, I just did. I could immerse in the world provided without question, something I haven't really felt since. The original Guild Wars was that until my friends moved on, and I had hoped that Gw2 would have been the same, but it wasn't. I could spot the illusion too quickly. LoTRO didn't really require company to enjoy, I just went about my business and enjoyed myself.
Currently, the trinity of Diablo 3, Destiny, and Minecraft are home. I'm not looking to MMOs, too many disappointments and too little reward. I've moved on.
I really wish I gave this game more of a chance, along with SWG. Sadly, I don't think we'll see another game like it.
Yeah man! I remember crossing the Brandywine bridge and just being enraptured with the surrounding town. I wish that game never went f2p, but at least I can try it again anytime for a nostalgia trip.
Same here.
Current: BDO
Looking forward to: Crowfall & Chronicles of Elyria
1. Dark Age of Camelot
It was my first very first MMO. It was fun because of the guilds I had there and the fun with them. The game offered enough things to do, no matter if you were alone or had some friends with you. I will always reming that epic moment when I was Taxi (Skald) for a bunch of bombs (Spiritamasters). I speeded them to the Hib relic where they then vaporized the Albion relic raid. Was fun.
I loved the variety of classes (~40), the three realm setting with its own lore that felt just right (Viking Saga, Arthur Saga, Irish Saga (Tuatha). The Realm Ability System is another great aspect of the game. You could improve your character in RvR and the improvement did not only have impact on PvP. Some abilities enabled you to farm stuff on a grand scale.
2. EvE Online
Experienced the whole thing. From G Alliance in early ... hum was it 2003 or 2004? ... to D2 and then at the end when I no longer had time to play, roaming around with some Evoke friends. The game is the ultimate sandbox and allows for the wildest things. Downside ... it eats up your time and you barely will have something like a real life, if you choose to play EvE on a high level.
Dozens of ships, ship classes, an interesting skill system that is different to all the other grind based systems and freedom make it a great game.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
Anarchy Online ...before everyone left to play WOW instead.
And while this happened years ago I never felt at home in any MMO since then.
I hate WoW and what it has done to the MMO genre.
World of Warcraft was the last one.
I played Everquest from '99-'03 and loved everything about the game until Planes of Power came out, guildies started dropping out of the game left & right after PoP came out, I finally left in early '03 since I was rarely logging on to play anymore.
I played a variety of mmo's afterwards but none of them sucked me in liked EQ did. I didn't try WoW when it first came out either, I started playing in early '06 (almost a year before BC came out) and was immediately sucked into the game in a way that hadn't happened since the early days of EQ. My guildies were awesome and kept me interested in the game when my interest waned, I sitll poke my head in every now and again but haven't played regularly since WotLK, which I enjoyed although burn-out set in by the time we started raiding IC.
Even though I poke my head in every once in a while I haven't really played Cata or MoP and have been on the mmo-treadmill waiting for the next one that will eventually come out that will suck me in again. I have a STRONG preference for Sci-Fi over Fantasy and hoping that one day there will be a sci-fi mmorpg that can suck me in like EQ & WoW did (I've tried many of them -- Eve Online, Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies - Pre-CU & NGE, Fallout, Star Trek Online, Star Wars TOR, Planetside and others, even though I enjoyed most of them none came close to feeling like home).
Anarchy Online
Maybe "First Love Syndrome", but still. It felt like a breathing world. When you arrived at the space station, talked to everyone and learned about Clan, Omni and Neut, went to the shuttle and were shot down, swimming to the starter region... The music when you entered the Subway was so atmospheric, especially when you went deeoer... All Borealis bustling, people running around, lfg, trading, looking for buffs... The cooperation, calculating of imps, squeezing in that weapon, talking to everyone to get the buffs you needed... Acutal flora and fauna. Animals that were there, because they lived in that region and made sounds (or comments, if it came to leets XD). No "Queue up and do nothing". Been there for years.
Ryzom
Ryzom gave me the same living world feeling. Animals actually wandering about, deep crafting, herbivores, carnivores. Took another look at it some months ago and again felt drawn in right away. The deep crafting system alone was great. harvesting nodes, taking down mobs for their bones, fur and skin... Unfortunatly time constraints kept me from playing. Perhaps I will return again, since I loved the atmosphere and open world feeling.
So to say: What gives me the "home" feeling is a deep world, which feels alive, people actually running about and interacting and atmosphere, like animals that actually make sounds, or a great soundtrack.
*Nostalgia Warning*
As many people have said, for me it was Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. The immersion in this game was amazing. There were times where I would just sit on a sand dune on Tatooine listening to John Williams' "Binary Sunset" play in the background. Then I'd go check my harvestors and stop off at the cantina for a few minutes before hopping in my space ship and flying to Dathomir or Dantooine to hunt or visit friends at their houses.
Another great feature about this game was that I lived in a player made city, governed by players ( yes, we even had a city planner/mayor that spent their whole time working on our city). Player merchants became known for making quality weapons, items etc., and players came from other player cities to shop at our mall in our Guild Headquarters. We even had a Rebel base located near our city that would be attacked by players and Npc's occasionally. PvP is a lot more fun when you're defending your own city instead of an npc one.
Ah, nostalgia. These, along with everything others have said and so much more are the reasons I felt at home in SWG.
*nostalgia off*
SWG is the only mmo that has given me that "This is my game" feeling.
The only other mmo that comes close is WoW.
No, it used to be that after your sub ran out any skills you had in training would continue to train until they completed, however they corrected this "feature" some time ago since too many people were actually subbing, triggering a nice long 40+ day skill and letting it expire again.
You do however level up while you are not playing if you have an active sub which is a feature that has kept me paying for my subs while exploring other MMO's from time to time.
I will say another MMO that feels like home, but only when I play on a freeshard that is code locked to a 2003 base is DAOC. I really enjoyed the pre-TOA ruleset and feel the game was at it's peak during that era. Modern DAOC is a totally different game to me and I feel totally out of place when I'm there.
But back on the old ruleset, the old frontiers are still in place, the realm abilities aren't totally out of control, and there's no TOA gear /abilities involved which I really like.
Fact is, I don't like my MMORPG's to change too much, which is why EVE suits me, since 2007, despite any changes, I still understand enough when I return to feel right back at home again.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
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