Mine was AION in its original form, partly because the cryengine made it look very pretty but also because the private servers were actually functional unlike the WoW private servers which were largely a mess at the time.

  • WoofWoof91 [comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    early SWG
    i loved Land Wars

    i played most of the old ones
    other than ff14, mmos are kinda bad now

    fuck it, i'm gonna gush a little about Land Wars

    i loved that (almost) everything was made by a real person
    the flamethrower i used was made by a person (who i met a couple of times entirely coincidentally) using materials they dug out of the (virtual) ground, with an extractor building (that existed! in the world! i could go and find it if i wanted to!) made by another actual person, then assembled with a schematic the weapon smith made, in a factory made by an actual person, then sold in a house made by a person, on a vendor droid made by yet another person

    everything felt so connected, i loved it

    • Yurt_Owl
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      MMOs suffer from their own success. The ones that lived simply have too much content and they have a few choices. Skip all the content and rush people into endgame like WoW does making the new player experience confusing with no investment in the world "oh im in a massive aztec temple dungeon populated with dinosaurs... why?"

      Or they keep the game slow and arduous keeping the layers of layers of content making it horrible to progress.

      Or they give up on both options and release a classic server instead. Or all of the above in the case of everquest which lets you join a server tailored to the experience you want.

      Personally I like the everquest model but at this point i don't think anyone knows where to take the mmo model anymore and its too much investment to make a new one.

      • WoofWoof91 [comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        for me they just feel so much less social now
        with convenience things like cross-server lfg features, it kind of diminishes the community feel of the old games
        though it is nice to not have to wait forever to do stuff like the old days
        idk, they just feel so... alienating now

        it's like this place compared to reddit
        here you see the same people a lot, and it feels more like a community
        reddit you would see mostly just random usernames that you would never see again

        • Yurt_Owl
          hexagon
          ·
          1 year ago

          Ah I was very antisocial in mmo's cos people scare me. I'd get a heart attack every time i got a guild invite. I'm one of those weird singleplayer mmo players who enjoys drab questing and trying to solo dungeons

    • quartz242 [she/her]
      ·
      1 year ago

      The Cantina scene in SWG is such a unique thing that has not been replicated since, even on the SWG private servers it isn't the same.

      • WoofWoof91 [comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        it was so nice
        anchorhead cantina used to be so full most days on ahazi, it used to lag my god-awful machine lmao

        • quartz242 [she/her]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Same, but that is the feeling of getting to be in a living, social world. Opposite of that was roaming the wilderness trying to level Creature Handler