DAoC was a huge positive surprise for me. That game was punching way above it's weight. For me, early DAoC (vanilla and SI) was the best MMORPG of all times. You just can't recreate that feeling anymore.
For me this would have to be ESO it just keeps improving ,what with the questing housing crafting dlcs and just exploring has become my favorite since EQ2 .
Easy. Wurm Online. 2012. Opened my mind. Opened a lot of doors.
It honestly blew my mind. Everything I had played before it dwindled to almost nothing. Up to that point, I was old school minded. I'd played Everquest 2 and DDO and some other new MMORPGs, but I didn't like the hand holding. I was very mean-spirited. My first MMO was Everquest. After that UO:T2A. I played many small scale MMO's. I noticed a pattern how newer MMO's had increasing hand holding and disliked it. Wurm Online proved to me I really did like that old way of playing. It wasn't just nostalgia, as many claimed and I feared. Project 1999 didn't prove it for me the same way. It also took that formula and went further. It was what I hoped Everquest and UO would become when I played them so many years ago. Granted, it's not a perfect thing, but I'm not lying when I say my jaw dropped repeatedly at how much it continued to deliver.
Also I think it helped to clarify things for me. Previously I thought it was over. I thought the past way of gaming was dead. But after Wurm Online I changed. I started to believe it's not that things are dead, but that they look deceptively different. For example, I believe the crushing difficulty of old games emerged in modern survival games. Survival games are taking the reigns and continuing the legacy. Many fail to see this so they believe all is lost. I believe it's not just this either. it's a lot of other things. What's tricky is figuring out what the past looks like now, since it's not the same.
For me this would have to be ESO it just keeps improving ,what with the questing housing crafting dlcs and just exploring has become my favorite since EQ2 .
Easy. Wurm Online. 2012. Opened my mind. Opened a lot of doors.
Wurm, despite is graphical lackings, was so immersive for me. Wurm is the mold that more AAA MMOs should have followed IMHO.
For me this would have to be ESO it just keeps improving ,what with the questing housing crafting dlcs and just exploring has become my favorite since EQ2 .
Easy. Wurm Online. 2012. Opened my mind. Opened a lot of doors.
Wurm, despite is graphical lackings, was so immersive for me. Wurm is the mold that more AAA MMOs should have followed IMHO.
I don't think ti's for everyone. The lack of hand holding and the extreme grinding and the danger on the PvP servers pushes most people away. But -I'm- grateful it exists. For a few oddball mixups, it's the perfect place to be.
For me, it really HIT HARD after I fled from some players who were starting to be suspicious of me for stupid reasons. It was dangerous. My life was in the cart I was dragging. I was new. Monsters everywhere. I was lost. It was night and I was in a clearcut. I could see the stars and hear the wind. BAM. I was more immersed than I've ever been b4. I experienced this many times over the years, but this was the defining moment. For some players this would be hell. Worse, I'm on a PvP server and stuff can be stolen. Hell, I tell you! For me it was like being in another world truly felt alive.
IMHO, Wurm Online isn't terribly different from MMO's like 7 Days To Die or Rust or H1Z1. In all you can lose things and have to build for survival. Wurm Online has more inertia in its system and is slower pace--more grindy. And this inertia in Wurm Online can also work against it by muting the survival element. For example, if what you've built is too good then there's nothing to survive it's a cakewalk.
WOW - My only experience in MMOs was watching friends play EQ and UO and knowing those games weren't at all what I wanted to play. WOW was more enjoyable than expected.
BDO actually surpassed my expectations in one core area, the parkour aspect of it, there's so many animations and transitions and the ability to climb around buildings and such in the way it was embedded on the game-world giving that "Assassin's Creed" vibe is something that I didn't really expect from it until I played it.
When I first entered the MMO scene, I had no expectations to surpass. SWG came first, then FFXI for a bit, then LotRO. SWG and LotRO in particular ended up setting my expectations for the future: SWG showed me what was possible when creating a virtual world, whilst LotRO showed me what great combat and group / class design looked like.
Since then, everything has been a let down. Even when I massively lower my expectations, most MMOs still fail to meet them (here's looking at you, Wildstar!).
Guild Wars 2 did.. it doesn't seem so amazing anymore but when I started playing the beta I was just awed by it. The dynamic event system, done that way it is, was just groundbreaking at the time. Too be honest no other MMO seems to have matched that system, or even attempted to since then.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
SWG(in the beginning). It felt like a pioneering sort of game, which makes sense from a meta perspective, as there were relatively few graphic MMO before it. Despite its many issues, and in many ways because of them, there was an air of adventure about it that we might not ever see again in the genre. Reason being is that much of it was accidental.
Or maybe incidental is the better word? It was released half baked and unpolished, leaving you with very little means to know whether you were about to get in over your head. But with that, you also had the perfect Star Wars music and sound FX, great art design, day/night/weather cycles, and even little nuances, like Luke's Theme swelling up just as the sun(s) sets...
Once you figured it out, though, things got routine, grindy, and even silly. Doc buffs would turn you from a guy who could barely hold their own against a few storm troopers, to The Injectable Hulk™?, who could Teras Kasi Curbstomp™ a half dozen Rancor to death in 20 seconds flat. You know, that spammed skill that makes you skip around like friggin' Tom Bombadil on a genocide binge...
Anyhoo, my point is, it was great for many reasons, including many reasons that it didn't intend.
For me, it was City of Heroes, Tabula Rasa, and World of Warcraft.. (Wish I could say Star Wars Galaxies, but sadly I did not get to play it.. Would have made this list though with all the things I have since heard or researched)
CoH/CoV was a completely different experience at the time, and really captured my attention.. I don't think I've ever felt as compelled to create a backstory for my characters as when I played.. To this day, I still say the Mastermind blew me away as the best and most fun pet-class ever designed..
Tabula Rasa was awesome.. (Damn you to torment on every layer of the Nine Hells, NCSoft).. The Logos made collecting in MMOs seem relevant.. Also, the constantly generated battlefields made for some very memorable moments for me..
World of Warcraft exceeded most of the fantasy genre elements at the time.. From the beginning up until the end of Wrath, I can't say I ever stopped enjoying myself.. Let's not bring up Cataclysm though..
..because we're gamers, damn it!! - William Massachusetts (Log Horizon)
SWG(in the beginning). It felt like a pioneering sort of game, which makes sense from a meta perspective, as there were relatively few graphic MMO before it. Despite its many issues, and in many ways because of them, there was an air of adventure about it that we might not ever see again in the genre. Reason being is that much of it was accidental.
Or maybe incidental is the better word? It was released half baked and unpolished, leaving you with very little means to know whether you were about to get in over your head. But with that, you also had the perfect Star Wars music and sound FX, great art design, day/night/weather cycles, and even little nuances, like Luke's Theme swelling up just as the sun(s) sets...
Once you figured it out, though, things got routine, grindy, and even silly. Doc buffs would turn you from a guy who could barely hold their own against a few storm troopers, to The Injectable Hulk™?, who could Teras Kasi Curbstomp™ a half dozen Rancor to death in 20 seconds flat. You know, that spammed skill that makes you skip around like friggin' Tom Bombadil on a genocide binge...
Anyhoo, my point is, it was great for many reasons, including many reasons that it didn't intend.
That was SWG all right, it was broken and buggy and to some boring, but we made our own fun. The music made it Star Warsy. Remember when you incapacitated someone and they slid fifty meters away and you had to chase their body down for the deathblow? We put up with a lot, can't see that happening now though. lol
Anarchy Online back in 2001. The game world blew me away. I couldn't wait to get home from work and play that game. The genre was so different back then and so were the people that played mmo's. I haven't had that same feeling in a long time. Mostly because the communities in mmo's are filled with ass holes today.
I can't say SWG, because I'd followed it pre-launch, and was involved with some of the community from UOStratics, and that intro had me optimistic that about both what the game was offering, and about the community.
In reality? For me I think it was WoW.
I'd bought into EQ2, and thought it would be the "next big thing", I thought WoW looked cartoony, and had a hard time believing that it would be fun. When I finally gave it a try, I realized it took so many features I thought were good in other games, and polished them, and put them all together. I'm not saying it was an "end all be all", but I've went back and played it so many times over the years, and enjoyed it every single time. From a low set of expectations, it gave me by far the best return.
There have a been a few others that have mildly exceeded expectations, but over the years, definitely have stopped following games years before launch, so I could just games based on their actual merits, rather than based on what dev's may have promised and failed to deliver years ahead of time. Way less frustration.
Vanilla WoW set the expectation. TBC Exceeded it. Pretty much everything else, no, not really. Today, some come close to meeting expectation, and in 2017, meeting expectation is not complimentary.
SWG. I've never played a game with such an involved community.
Yeh SWG was definitely one of those MMOs that just blew me away with the amount of attention to detail that catered to Star Wars fans like me. Planetside is also one of those MMOs that just exceeded my ideas on what can be achieved with such badd ass combined arms combat on such a massive scale that just puts any other MMO's combat to shame in my opinion.
For me, it was City of Heroes, Tabula Rasa, and World of Warcraft..
All good choices, IMO. If TR had spent its entire development cycle toward what it would become rather than being scrapped and completely rewritten halfway through, it might still be around, I think.
CoH's travel powers, difficulty settings, and enhancement slot system made it special. Also, even to date, it was one of the best games to PUG in. The short mission times made it to where you could stay in a group for hours, or leave after a couple missions. You weren't stuck in a 2 hour raid, nor sent off in a 10 minute skirmish to be disbanded afterward and have to queue up again.
In WoW, the big thing for me was the sculpted world. SWG had big zones, but much of it seemed a bit randomly formed, probably not helped by the random frill generation. With WoW, every bit of it seemed placed deliberately, and that every player saw the same thing you saw. Seeing it all from the perspective of air travel made it all the more amazing, especially for the time. It seemed unreal that you were watching people running around on the ground, doing the stuff they were doing rather than just a cutscene or fade to black.
World of Warcraft : World, animations, combat, musics etc. Literally everything blowed my mind back then. Still today I can't find any other mmo with better world design...
Dofus : Graphic style, lore, quests, crafting, dungeons, especially the combat system. I still play it today. Such a great game.
Guild Wars 2 : This game surpassed my expectations twice. First when it released with it's combat system, animations, aesthetics and grindless end game it just blowed my mind. It has the best combat system I've ever seen in any mmorpg (except Dofus which is a turn based game). And then Hot came. I didn't expect too much from that expansion. But holy shit was I wrong... The new maps, raids, story, musics, gliding. etc. everything was perfect for me.
City of Heroes for me. I had only tried Neocron as far as MMORPGs go before that, and not being a masochist the crawling through the sewer with a flimsy plastic knife thing was a deal breaker for me. CoH has awesome character creation, the initial opponents were not some type of small prey animal that only psychopaths enjoy killing, and the gameplay was fun and simple, and it was worthwhile to group. Being a hero game it did attract a lot of helpful and friendly people, so over all good fun. I was worried I'd also like WoW being a fan of the RTS, but that turned out to not be a non-issue.
Anarchy Online back in 2001. The game world blew me away. I couldn't wait to get home from work and play that game. The genre was so different back then and so were the people that played mmo's. I haven't had that same feeling in a long time. Mostly because the communities in mmo's are filled with ass holes today.
You had a good amount of assholes back then too. I remember in Anarchy Online, the jackasses camping the PvP area borders waiting for newbies to zone in...
Yeah i never once in the years i played that game got ganked in pvp zones as a newbie. In fact i never got killed once in that game when out doing missions or exploring. Crossing in to those pvp zones was never an issue for me.
Dungeons and Dragons Online - was amazing, had that real table top feel, then, for reasons I cannot fathom, they felt the need to be more "generic style MMO" and really killed the whole feel of the game.
DDO was a huge gamble. If they'd had a more "super-server" type architecture, it might have paid off. But even at launch, I had trouble finding a full party for a 15 minute dungeon at all, let alone a party that didn't have at least one idiot running around setting off all the traps. The move to more solo alternatives was necessary for survival.
I absolutely appreciate that they tried, though. And that they keep supporting it to this day. Gotta give Turbine/SS props for not dumping their games at first sign of trouble ala NCSoft.
Comments
For me, early DAoC (vanilla and SI) was the best MMORPG of all times. You just can't recreate that feeling anymore.
It honestly blew my mind. Everything I had played before it dwindled to almost nothing. Up to that point, I was old school minded. I'd played Everquest 2 and DDO and some other new MMORPGs, but I didn't like the hand holding. I was very mean-spirited. My first MMO was Everquest. After that UO:T2A. I played many small scale MMO's. I noticed a pattern how newer MMO's had increasing hand holding and disliked it. Wurm Online proved to me I really did like that old way of playing. It wasn't just nostalgia, as many claimed and I feared. Project 1999 didn't prove it for me the same way. It also took that formula and went further. It was what I hoped Everquest and UO would become when I played them so many years ago. Granted, it's not a perfect thing, but I'm not lying when I say my jaw dropped repeatedly at how much it continued to deliver.
Also I think it helped to clarify things for me. Previously I thought it was over. I thought the past way of gaming was dead. But after Wurm Online I changed. I started to believe it's not that things are dead, but that they look deceptively different. For example, I believe the crushing difficulty of old games emerged in modern survival games. Survival games are taking the reigns and continuing the legacy. Many fail to see this so they believe all is lost. I believe it's not just this either. it's a lot of other things. What's tricky is figuring out what the past looks like now, since it's not the same.
Joined - July 2004
For me, it really HIT HARD after I fled from some players who were starting to be suspicious of me for stupid reasons. It was dangerous. My life was in the cart I was dragging. I was new. Monsters everywhere. I was lost. It was night and I was in a clearcut. I could see the stars and hear the wind. BAM. I was more immersed than I've ever been b4. I experienced this many times over the years, but this was the defining moment. For some players this would be hell. Worse, I'm on a PvP server and stuff can be stolen. Hell, I tell you! For me it was like being in another world truly felt alive.
IMHO, Wurm Online isn't terribly different from MMO's like 7 Days To Die or Rust or H1Z1. In all you can lose things and have to build for survival. Wurm Online has more inertia in its system and is slower pace--more grindy. And this inertia in Wurm Online can also work against it by muting the survival element. For example, if what you've built is too good then there's nothing to survive it's a cakewalk.
When I first entered the MMO scene, I had no expectations to surpass. SWG came first, then FFXI for a bit, then LotRO. SWG and LotRO in particular ended up setting my expectations for the future: SWG showed me what was possible when creating a virtual world, whilst LotRO showed me what great combat and group / class design looked like.
Since then, everything has been a let down. Even when I massively lower my expectations, most MMOs still fail to meet them (here's looking at you, Wildstar!).
Follow my Blog at: http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/123bentilador
Or maybe incidental is the better word? It was released half baked and unpolished, leaving you with very little means to know whether you were about to get in over your head. But with that, you also had the perfect Star Wars music and sound FX, great art design, day/night/weather cycles, and even little nuances, like Luke's Theme swelling up just as the sun(s) sets...
Once you figured it out, though, things got routine, grindy, and even silly. Doc buffs would turn you from a guy who could barely hold their own against a few storm troopers, to The Injectable Hulk™?, who could Teras Kasi Curbstomp™ a half dozen Rancor to death in 20 seconds flat. You know, that spammed skill that makes you skip around like friggin' Tom Bombadil on a genocide binge...
Anyhoo, my point is, it was great for many reasons, including many reasons that it didn't intend.
CoH/CoV was a completely different experience at the time, and really captured my attention.. I don't think I've ever felt as compelled to create a backstory for my characters as when I played.. To this day, I still say the Mastermind blew me away as the best and most fun pet-class ever designed..
Tabula Rasa was awesome.. (Damn you to torment on every layer of the Nine Hells, NCSoft).. The Logos made collecting in MMOs seem relevant.. Also, the constantly generated battlefields made for some very memorable moments for me..
World of Warcraft exceeded most of the fantasy genre elements at the time.. From the beginning up until the end of Wrath, I can't say I ever stopped enjoying myself.. Let's not bring up Cataclysm though..
..because we're gamers, damn it!! - William Massachusetts (Log Horizon)
I can't say SWG, because I'd followed it pre-launch, and was involved with some of the community from UOStratics, and that intro had me optimistic that about both what the game was offering, and about the community.
In reality? For me I think it was WoW.
I'd bought into EQ2, and thought it would be the "next big thing", I thought WoW looked cartoony, and had a hard time believing that it would be fun. When I finally gave it a try, I realized it took so many features I thought were good in other games, and polished them, and put them all together. I'm not saying it was an "end all be all", but I've went back and played it so many times over the years, and enjoyed it every single time. From a low set of expectations, it gave me by far the best return.
There have a been a few others that have mildly exceeded expectations, but over the years, definitely have stopped following games years before launch, so I could just games based on their actual merits, rather than based on what dev's may have promised and failed to deliver years ahead of time. Way less frustration.
Today, some come close to meeting expectation, and in 2017, meeting expectation is not complimentary.
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
CoH's travel powers, difficulty settings, and enhancement slot system made it special. Also, even to date, it was one of the best games to PUG in. The short mission times made it to where you could stay in a group for hours, or leave after a couple missions. You weren't stuck in a 2 hour raid, nor sent off in a 10 minute skirmish to be disbanded afterward and have to queue up again.
In WoW, the big thing for me was the sculpted world. SWG had big zones, but much of it seemed a bit randomly formed, probably not helped by the random frill generation. With WoW, every bit of it seemed placed deliberately, and that every player saw the same thing you saw. Seeing it all from the perspective of air travel made it all the more amazing, especially for the time. It seemed unreal that you were watching people running around on the ground, doing the stuff they were doing rather than just a cutscene or fade to black.
Dofus : Graphic style, lore, quests, crafting, dungeons, especially the combat system. I still play it today. Such a great game.
Guild Wars 2 : This game surpassed my expectations twice. First when it released with it's combat system, animations, aesthetics and grindless end game it just blowed my mind. It has the best combat system I've ever seen in any mmorpg (except Dofus which is a turn based game). And then Hot came. I didn't expect too much from that expansion. But holy shit was I wrong... The new maps, raids, story, musics, gliding. etc. everything was perfect for me.
I absolutely appreciate that they tried, though. And that they keep supporting it to this day. Gotta give Turbine/SS props for not dumping their games at first sign of trouble ala NCSoft.