For me it's Diablo II. Granted I've played my fair share of D2 since launch, and also recently on a private server with a comrade from hexbear, but I still feel like years later the game didn't grab me as much as D1 did.
Granted I don't hate D2, but for a game that I keep coming back to, D1 takes the prize.
Guild Wars 1 was a MMORPG-lite that had instanced territories outside of towns (and even those were instanced, albeit much larger) where you could take up to 8 people with you. Crucially, every class had about one thousand skills you could combine pretty freely and you could second class. You could do some DnD-Tier bullshit combinations of stats with those, given all the weird status effect thingies it gave you to play around with
And then Guild Wars 2 is just WoW
I enjoy GW2 a lot but they really should've called it something else.
I do like some GW2 but I totally understand. Hell of a game that was, wish I could find my account info lol
Guild Wars was one of the only MMO's I didn't hate. It was a unique world, with cool as hell classes like Paragon in my favorite expansion. Then 2 just turned into standard high fantasy. A beautiful world to be sure, but I liked the flavor of the old one.
I'm in the same boat, GW1 was my favourite as a kid, I put truly staggering hours into it and ruined my development probably
But GW2 just has zero charm. The Mesmer was my jam in GW1, with its broad build variety from high DPS to caster shutdown, whereas GW2 has them as a clunky melee/ranged hybrid
My man!
Did you know the severs are, inexplicably, still running?