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.
I too played it when it came out and it was good fun until the router broke and my parents refused to replace it because it worked for their email and facebook. Came back years later and the world was empty :(
The zurg rush of players in early zones doing the public quests was a sight to behold for the 2ish weeks i could even play the game.
Final Fantasy XIV had one of the best MMO stories ever. It's just so hard to recommend to people when you say "just wait to you see what happens after 500 hours"
I've been playing ff14 recently and am quite enioying it so far. Does it really take that long to progress the main campaign? Cos I'm speeding though it quite quickly with the road to lvl 80 xp boost
What part of the story are you at? If you're enjoying it, press on. It's worth it.
Lvl 22 quest in the campaign so still realm reborn. But I'm grossly overleveled at 38 and have been playing it on and off in rotation with ESO, Aion and WoW so didn't spend much time getting there.
It's been a lot of fun so far although all the reading does make me miss ESO being fully voice acted. Also the people playing the game seem very chill and friendly.
If it helps, at and after level 50 there's a lot more voice acting, especially as you enter Heavensward.
I didnt play the NG+ but apparently they trimmed down ARR quite a bit to make it more palatable to newcomers (especially when grassroot marketing is all about "Heavensward is the greatest story ever in a videogame, btw you need to play 250 hours of the most mind numbingly boring shit before you can access it)
I almost gave up on it, because I was getting so tired of 'Pray return to the Waking Sands', iykyk
Also, even tho I'm too socially maladjusted to find a random group of people to grind it, the endgame stuff is pretty great, they make a serious effort to give the
quality slop to enjoy
I'm old school enough that it was Ultima Online. Nothing since then has had the same sense of freedom to explore the world and tell your own story. I've even played on a couple of pirate shards (servers) over the years. Private shards where there the whole community is on the same page regarding having fun without being a jerk is one of the few places I've seen full pvp full loot work. The last shard I was on was structured around wars between large player factions and running around invading towns and skirmishing with other armies was. A blast.
I got this from Dark Age of Camelot and Shadowbane but I am sad that I didn't get to experience Ultima Online at it's height.
I hate to admit it, but I spent countless hours on WoW back in the day, I was quite dedicated from vanilla until Wrath, and then played on and off between Cataclysm and Legion. I'd say that made it my favorite MMO because of all the memories and people I met on there. It even got me laid at the time lmao. The game eventually stopped being as enjoyable though, with more and more RNG stuff and an increasingly elitist community
, so I quit. I also figured I could do more useful things with my time.AION's PvP always seemed interesting to me, but I never played it. I've played many other MMOs, but none were able to grab me as much as WoW did back then.
Speaking of private servers, I remember running a Wrath private server on my computer that my brother and I would mess around with, and do things like spawn random bosses and shit.
It was very functional, but it wasn't the latest version of the game. If you wanted to set up a private server for the latest expansion, you'd have to deal with a buggy unstable mess.I was very happy on a wotlk private server that was very stable and then they went and upgraded it to cata for some reason and it became unplayable
ESO because it's barely an MMO and is actually a real game even if you play it alone.
It's very well made and polished but didn't give me the scratch for the itch of "right click on exclamation and collect 20 boar arse". I also found it hard to play with someone else since if they didn't care about the lore they would just be waiting for me to go through every dialogue option and read every book. Tbh the majority of the content didn't even need to be an mmo.
yeah im a big TES lore nerd and played it with another big TES lore nerd, so we just spent hours slowly walking through every quest and going
at every building, NPC, and animalThat's what I got out of ESO, too. It's a tour of parts of Tamriel that haven't been seen for a long time, some since TES1: Arena. Grouping optional.
FFXIV definitely was a high water mark when I reached the end of Endwalker. I had such wonderful vibes there.
The first mmo I played was star wars galaxy. I had no idea what I was doing and it was the most fun I've ever had playing an mmo. I remember starting a riot in Anchorage because we were being ganked by a bunch of Imperial players. I got really good with edged weapons. Only wore clothes that looked cool
Final Fantasy XIV and RuneScape 3.
And yes, I prefer RuneScape 3 over the ORS, no offense to anyone.
prefer RuneScape 3 over the ORS, no offense to anyone
i do mean offense to ORS fans tho
Eve is probably the closest thing to ultima there is but the main issue is over time there becomes the long time players who run the biggest corps and new players who get destroyed in low sec then the world becomes stagnant in need of a reset. Maybe eve would be more interesting if they added some kind of AI driven calamity though it forcing corps to actually do anything other than hoard endlessly until the servers shut down.
Fortunately and unfortunately, I was a Runescape guy.
Pros:
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The soundtrack. IDGAF what anyone says, both OSRS and RS3 have good music (although the creator of all the classics is a pedo). Here's Sea Shanty2 and Draynor Market. Put the latter on in one tab and rainy mood on another: you're welcome.
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The lore isn't half bad, especially around the up to 2011 era. I prefer OSRS because they have an opportunity to rewrite the lore, and RS3, for lack of a better term, explained the magic away to the point where it feels more like you're playing a Steampunk Sci-Fi than a fantasy game proper. The Mahjarrat are interesting, and I loved The Chosen Commander quest as a kid
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No really, the quests are really fleshed out and I would watch the shit out of a possible Runescape anime series, because every quest feels like an episode of a tv show.
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Although the map is now small to me, I do like how it can be both a game with a deep lore, and also a cozy game at the same time. I'll never forget just vibing with complete strangers shooting the shit while fishing in Catherby
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OSRS brought back Runescape's bad but iconic graphics.
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Runescape did one thing I appreciate. They portrayed the fascists as primitive goblins, ogres, trolls, that kind of stuff following Bandos. Bandos is a fascist taking advantage of a horde of idiots that feel powerful by working for him. This is genius because while it recognizes the fascists' predisposition for bloodshed, they portray them as the nearly animalistic beasts they are.
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You don't have to buy expansions on top of your subscription
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In comparison to others, Jagex is a relatively small developer and in OSRS many things need to be polled before they're added into the game. Quality > quantity is the way to go
Cons:
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Yes, I'm one of those people still somewhat angry about the EoC. I like the concept, but it just made melee, archery, and magic feel too interchangeable, and I was hoping that EoC would do the opposite: add more variety between being a warrior, and archer, or a mage. Think of how many items aren't unique and have two separate carbon copies for each of the only three ways to fight stuff.
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As I mentioned, RS3 explained a lot of the lore away. One of the saddest examples are the Gods, which feel more like politicians than actual Gods. Even some of the "young" gods comment that they are not truly gods, but should be more seen as super powerful mages. The "true" gods are the Elder Gods and they are mostly the same, with only one of them getting any characterization at all. Again, they feel less like Gods and more like lovecraftian space vampires. And there's already a little-known lovecraftian god that has been slowly getting characterization since 2006 called Xau-Tak (which was only mentioned by name just shy of a decade later). The story is just kind of all over the place in RS3
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the micro-transactions are ugly and they are omnipresent in RS3
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The community is INFAMOUS for it's toxicity, especially in OSRS. Thank God the grand exchange was added in OSRS because the amount of times I was told "I don't trade with noobs" was infuriating.
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Runescape has infected me with some brainworms that you need to be optimal before you are ready to even handle mild challenges. "Muh efficiency" is almost a meme among the community. It fueled some perfectionist issues that I had, although that's also a me problem.
OSRS is my favourite comfort game. I was never good at it but lots of fun memories playing with friends. RS3 I just couldn't get into it just feels wrong. It moved to a more standard mmo combat system which i dont necessarily have an issue with in concept but it made no sense to me and i had no idea how to use it but also last time i played it felt like it had absurd input lag. Like i expect the thing to happen when i click the button which just didnt happen in RS3. I sometimes log into my RS3 character and stare at the screen for a bit and realise I just cba to learn it and log out again.
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I still like MMORPGs, btw.
I don't think they've "declined." Changed, maybe, but not declined.
Everquest because it was my first one and the immersive role-playing was fantastic.
Shadowbane because I loved the PvP and GvG content as well as the player-driven world/towns.
Black Desert Online because I loved the controls and how it was different from any other MMO i've played before and since. Too bad it became P2W garbage.
Ragnarok Online because it had such a great aesthetic & music combined with decent PvP/GvG
SWG before the relaunch, as it had the best role-play aspects of Everquest with fantastic PvP, GvG and player-driven gameplay.
I've played so many of them I'm probably forgetting some, easily my favorite genre of game, but I had such a terrible experience in Mortal Online 2, Archeage, and BDO that I'm kind of over the genre. I still hold out hope that either Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen or Camelot Unchained will eventually release and not suck. Crowfall was intended to be the spiritual successor to Shadowbane, but it was terrible.
I will say that Project: Gorgon is really fun and taps into the old mmo nostalgia, has a fantastic community but no pvp, which may be a good thing.
Other than Everquest I have been a competitive (sweaty) player in the top pvp guilds in each server but I also recognize at this point in my life I have no desire to pump that amount of time into it.
early SWG
i loved Land Warsi played most of the old ones
other than ff14, mmos are kinda bad nowfuck 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 personeverything felt so connected, i loved it
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.
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 nowit'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 againAh 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
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.
it was so nice
anchorhead cantina used to be so full most days on ahazi, it used to lag my god-awful machine lmaoSame, 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
