The Love of MMOs

Plasmicredx

There are a lot of people who play MMO games. Though, most of us will agree when I say that the majority of the first MMO players were people who loved sitting in front of their computers or game consoles playing text or graphic adventures, RPGs, MUDs, and the like. The Casual Nintendo Wii players sort of came later on. I personally grew up on The Legend of Zelda and Sierra Adventure games such as King's Quest & Quest for Glory 1 VGA remake primarily. I say primarily because those are the ones I can remember right now. I hope we can all relate in that not all of us can remember every game we ever played in our lifetime on the spot without going and using google to find more. Some of them we even liked but have long forgotten. Alot of these types of games were medieval fantasy and not a whole lot of them had eastern philosophies and ideas. American history originates in majority on the western civilization side of things, so for the average american, medieval fantasy with western ideas was more familiar. This brings me to my next point.

 

In my attempts to uncover the reasoning for playing MMOs, or to uncover why the first of these people love MMOs, I describe it as a sequential process. It began with single player games. The single player games we grew up on had the biggest impact on our lives. Some of us played the legend of zelda and beat it countless times and grew to wish it were multiplayer. We then started buying and playing multiplayer games because of our experience with the single-players. Multiplayer games started out as offline at first. Then internet and local networking brought online/local-networked multiplayer games into the spectrum. Online multi became our next (third) step in the sequence. Even online multiplayer games felt quite small in some cases. Especially when servers would go down when the hosts would leave. The next step is obviously an MMO where the number of players can be in the hundreds or thousands so by that point we lose count and now we finally get the game experience we all wanted: people to play with everywhere, online, nearly every hour 24/7 all over the game world.

 

Obviously simply having lots of players doesn't make a game worth playing, though. We simply just wanted to make the games that were fun as single player fun as a huge massively multiplayer game. Ultimately people will review the game for themself to determine if the game will be fun for themself.

 

Now my first MMO was Dark Age of Camelot. It gave the players features like a huge war and a great PvE experience to go along with it. I never liked EverQuest because it wasn't fun for me and there wasn't an awesome war in it that I wanted to belong to. I loved 90% of everything about DAoC. If you wanted to raid, then your whole server would come and kill the dragon. If you wanted to PvP, then the whole server would go to war with the other team. It was true Massively Multiplayer. Then along came games like WoW who sought to "control" the massively multiplayer experience with instance dungeons. People ate up the idea because it was coupled with a theme park experience. That's great and all - but it has killed the true MMO spirit for me. It died, and I wasn't the one that killed it. For me, it was like I had the best toy in the world, then some stranger came up and took it from me while I was enjoying it, and I never got it back. I'm not going to blame anyone. I might say I blame money or something typical like that. All I know is that I have memories of how I was playing my favorite game in the world and suddenly my perfect game was completely destroyed.

 

So tell me: Is there a game out there that carries the MMO spirit (in the sense that I described it) ? Or will it only live on as a memory in the hearts of people like me?