I did not start playing MMOs until 2004 with City of Heroes. I've tried a couple of the prior generation, but my best memories are from the 2004 to 2012 era. Of course, some of my worst memories too, but I'll hang onto the good ones (and just never forget the lessons of the old ones).
Right now I am only playing 2 MMOs, both from the WoW era; STO and DCUO.
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
The 2 in the middle is not generally considered MMOs but with the serverprojects running they would have been called MMOs if they released today. Max 64 players in the same zone and linked zones is not really less of an MMO then DDO or Guildwars.
Judging by amount of time spent in mmo's during those time frames, wow era for sure. Pretty much given up on MMO's for the time being. Anything remotely interesting is ages away and is probably unlikely to even be close to what's promised and linger in a 'early access' state seemingly forever.
There are games i miss playing, SWG, Earth and Beyond spring to mind, they were games of their time, and lately i feel spoiled for choice in the games that i can play, so while i do miss games that are no longer around, i also feel that i have never had it so good as i do right now and as much as i miss those games, i wouldn't give up the games i have access to now to go back to them.
From pre-WoW era i really can't say because they are all too outdated for my taste, back in that time i didn't play PC mmos so it wouldn't be fair to say anything about them. Could i say Ultima Online? probably not as i never played it, but if it's as good as the Ultima series on Super Nintendo then it was probably an amazing online experience.
From WoW era i like WoW, GW1 and Age of Conan the most. I also liked PvE in WAR because of the setting and characters/classes.
From post-WoW era i like GW2, BDO, ESO, XIV. I also like AA but it's a shame the two companies running it can't seem do it right.
These are just the most noticeable games of each era for me personally. I guess i would just give it to WoW era for obvious reasons.
Pre-Wow Era hands down. No one can argue that, and if they do, it's because they weren't present to see how exciting that era was for the Industry.
Bullshit. Anyone who would say that wasn't born when those MMOs came out. Thanks for letting us know how young you are.
Constant crashes, lag, expensive online access all made for a bad experience, not to mention horrible UIs, remedial storylines with little substance, and super grindy game mechanics. People tend to think fondly on those old games because there was nothing to compare them to. Now people try to compare present in-game experience with the memory of those past game experiences, usually with their nostalgia meter turned up to eleven. Anyone with a brain in their head knows how imperfect memory is and filters out the negative in favor of the positive.
Also, the ridiculous trend among MMO players that old school somehow makes you cooler/edgier/hipster plays a huge part in it as well. Typical sheep mentality.
You'd be better off growing an "ironically" styled beard and pretending you're above the culturally-ignorant attitudes of mainstream consumers. Blah blah blah...posers.
I think I'll just start calling old-school blind fan boys "hipster gamers". Fits pretty well.
Definitely 2000-2005. Since then the genre has seen thousands of wannabe get rich studios popping up every month. We saw the beginning of MANY changes during the early 2000 era,every single aspect of game design was being improved...technically speaking. However since the early stages,NOBODY is putting it all together,every single studio is giving us bits and pieces and often times putting more effort into advertising/marketing than the game design.
You would THINK dev leads are putting in some serious thought and time into their game design decisions but NOPE.Instead instantly asking gamer's for money to fund some make believe dream.You get a guy like Smedley,fired from his job,then a month later he is suppose to be pan handling a game ..lmao.
Not only do these newer studios have a lot of gumption, balls,they really think gamer's are dumb as nails.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I think defining the eras around WoW adds way to much baggage for some people. I think it should have been around monthly sub vs micro transaction FTP or based on stages of populatiry. You could have used the same dates. Just framed it as a niche genera, mass market, and mass market with over saturation of games.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
The pre-WoW era was my favorite, because my favorite MMOs, Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes, released during that timeframe. I did enjoy plenty of games released during the WoW era, particularly Warhammer Online, The Matrix Online, and even Age of Conan (as messy as it was), but ultimately I had my best experiences with games early in the genre's history.
The pre-WoW era was my favorite, because my favorite MMOs, Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes, released during that timeframe. I did enjoy plenty of games released during the WoW era, particularly Warhammer Online, The Matrix Online, and even Age of Conan (as messy as it was), but ultimately I had my best experiences with games early in the genre's history.
I'm torn on the present, or the era that you mentioned... because of CoH... x.x
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
My favorite era was the original wow era as it was the era that I first found out about mmos.
I wasnt around for the pre-wow era, but have tried some games and the graphical updates and features kept me in the wow to post wow era. Have mostly tried only the wow era and beyond.
Wow era Aoc Coh EQ2 Guild Wars Planetside
Like many others I feel like many features have been added or improved the communities have gotten steadily worse. In the pre-wow era and wow era you would actually have more communication via chat vs comms although this sounds like a bad thing the voice comms although made battles initially easier eventually made things worse. Although reactions and updates in real time were faster they were not always necessary. Eventually there was the era of solo play and pvp good in theory bad in reality as it divided the community even more than before into the us vs them or pve vs pvp instead of having both being fine. I personally tried many failed mmos including quite a few pvp focused mmos with pve being quite limited. Pvp was fine back then but eventually pvp in lead to flaming and raging quite often so I focus more time in global pvp 20 vs 20 or 50 vs 50 instead of 1 vs 1 or 3 vs 3. Large scale battles are sometimes quite interesting.
Now the modern day with all its improvements often feel like a step back with cashshops and limited edition goods that show up monthly or weekly for no purpose other than to sell virtual goods. Modern mmos do feel like they are quite casual and cater to the widest market with easy auto attacking mmos. The community although quite large feels less like a community and more like a random group of strangers here just to get the loot. I personally like games with more precieved value where doing a quest feels more important to the overall story instead of fetch x items until you skip all of them. I do like some modern F2P like Hearthstone, Path of Exile, and even GW2 even though I did get Hot. Games like Rift, Terra, Aion, and Archeage did not draw me enough into the games even though they have sorta improved upon the past they have also made some features less interesting. Also grinding is fun for some, but not all.
The era that is best is simply the one that you with games played and loved the most there is no best for everyone, but only the games that are best for each person.
WoW was truly an amazing mmorpg. It still is, but the game is old. I just canceled my subscription. The graphics are tough to look at when I play newer games that have robust character creators and the graphics look amazing. I think we have yet to see the next gen mmo. A new type of mmo that is a hybrid between theme park and sandbox . It will be a combination of rpg and survival (seamless open world). The game can be played as multiplayer with PvE and PvP servers, Co-op by invite only (difficulty will scale based on number of people on server; like WoW does now with flex raiding.) , and single player.
For me its pre wow, but I'd count wow as the last good mmorpg, so I don't agree calling it pre wow and wow eras...
I'd call them the Gen 1 with WoW included and then Gen 2 which was the WoW clone era and then Gen 3 the post MMO era where it's games like Destiny which are being called MMOs but aren't.
I've also not played an MMO (or sudo-MMO) since 2005 for more than the first trial month.
Pre-WoW, i started playing games like Ultima Online, Tibia and even Runescape (always prefered Tibia of the two). WoW-era had some good games like Everquest 2 (i only started with EQ1 after i had played EQ2, due to spending most of my MMO time with Ultima Online back then). Vanguard was my fav by far RIP.
Games i play today is BDO, FF14 and SWTOR to some extent, but they aren't even close to as good as MMO's used to be.
Pre WoW era was my favorite, SWG, Dark Age of Camelot, Ragnarok Online alpha/beta (never did join it live though), City of Heroes. I miss the newness of MMO's, nowadays I keep hopping from game to game because of boredom.
While I have favorite games of each generation of mmo, but I had to vote post-WoW era. There's some interesting games that should be coming out in the soonish future, and many devs have seemingly re-aligned themselves into thinking more along the lines of pre-WoW games. Newer mmos aren't attempting to be everything to everyone and have a better focus on what they want to be.
There seems to be something of a reset that's coming. Taking what has been learned over the last 20 years and applying the lessons to move forward.
My favorite era was the original wow era as it was the era that I first found out about mmos.
I wasnt around for the pre-wow era, but have tried some games and the graphical updates and features kept me in the wow to post wow era. Have mostly tried only the wow era and beyond.
Wow era Aoc Coh EQ2 Guild Wars Planetside
Like many others I feel like many features have been added or improved the communities have gotten steadily worse. In the pre-wow era and wow era you would actually have more communication via chat vs comms although this sounds like a bad thing the voice comms although made battles initially easier eventually made things worse. Although reactions and updates in real time were faster they were not always necessary. Eventually there was the era of solo play and pvp good in theory bad in reality as it divided the community even more than before into the us vs them or pve vs pvp instead of having both being fine. I personally tried many failed mmos including quite a few pvp focused mmos with pve being quite limited. Pvp was fine back then but eventually pvp in lead to flaming and raging quite often so I focus more time in global pvp 20 vs 20 or 50 vs 50 instead of 1 vs 1 or 3 vs 3. Large scale battles are sometimes quite interesting.
Now the modern day with all its improvements often feel like a step back with cashshops and limited edition goods that show up monthly or weekly for no purpose other than to sell virtual goods. Modern mmos do feel like they are quite casual and cater to the widest market with easy auto attacking mmos. The community although quite large feels less like a community and more like a random group of strangers here just to get the loot. I personally like games with more precieved value where doing a quest feels more important to the overall story instead of fetch x items until you skip all of them. I do like some modern F2P like Hearthstone, Path of Exile, and even GW2 even though I did get Hot. Games like Rift, Terra, Aion, and Archeage did not draw me enough into the games even though they have sorta improved upon the past they have also made some features less interesting. Also grinding is fun for some, but not all.
The era that is best is simply the one that you with games played and loved the most there is no best for everyone, but only the games that are best for each person.
My favorite era was the original wow era as it was the era that I first found out about mmos.
I wasnt around for the pre-wow era, but have tried some games and the graphical updates and features kept me in the wow to post wow era. Have mostly tried only the wow era and beyond.
Wow era Aoc Coh EQ2 Guild Wars Planetside
Like many others I feel like many features have been added or improved the communities have gotten steadily worse. In the pre-wow era and wow era you would actually have more communication via chat vs comms although this sounds like a bad thing the voice comms although made battles initially easier eventually made things worse. Although reactions and updates in real time were faster they were not always necessary. Eventually there was the era of solo play and pvp good in theory bad in reality as it divided the community even more than before into the us vs them or pve vs pvp instead of having both being fine. I personally tried many failed mmos including quite a few pvp focused mmos with pve being quite limited. Pvp was fine back then but eventually pvp in lead to flaming and raging quite often so I focus more time in global pvp 20 vs 20 or 50 vs 50 instead of 1 vs 1 or 3 vs 3. Large scale battles are sometimes quite interesting.
Now the modern day with all its improvements often feel like a step back with cashshops and limited edition goods that show up monthly or weekly for no purpose other than to sell virtual goods. Modern mmos do feel like they are quite casual and cater to the widest market with easy auto attacking mmos. The community although quite large feels less like a community and more like a random group of strangers here just to get the loot. I personally like games with more precieved value where doing a quest feels more important to the overall story instead of fetch x items until you skip all of them. I do like some modern F2P like Hearthstone, Path of Exile, and even GW2 even though I did get Hot. Games like Rift, Terra, Aion, and Archeage did not draw me enough into the games even though they have sorta improved upon the past they have also made some features less interesting. Also grinding is fun for some, but not all.
The era that is best is simply the one that you with games played and loved the most there is no best for everyone, but only the games that are best for each person.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
Comments
Generally agree with jinxxed0.
Games, beginning with WOW, are worse mmorpg's--they are just Smorgp's now.
Not only are the social aspects gone, but the tactics are gone as well.
And, no: emotes and paid costume pieces don't make for "social" any more than heavily scripted fights and ability rotations make for tactics.
Don't get me started about F2P models!
There should be a fourth voting option: City of Heroes, b4 it went F2P!
Right now I am only playing 2 MMOs, both from the WoW era; STO and DCUO.
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
The 2 in the middle is not generally considered MMOs but with the serverprojects running they would have been called MMOs if they released today. Max 64 players in the same zone and linked zones is not really less of an MMO then DDO or Guildwars.
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
From pre-WoW era i really can't say because they are all too outdated for my taste, back in that time i didn't play PC mmos so it wouldn't be fair to say anything about them. Could i say Ultima Online? probably not as i never played it, but if it's as good as the Ultima series on Super Nintendo then it was probably an amazing online experience.
From WoW era i like WoW, GW1 and Age of Conan the most. I also liked PvE in WAR because of the setting and characters/classes.
From post-WoW era i like GW2, BDO, ESO, XIV. I also like AA but it's a shame the two companies running it can't seem do it right.
These are just the most noticeable games of each era for me personally. I guess i would just give it to WoW era for obvious reasons.
Bullshit. Anyone who would say that wasn't born when those MMOs came out. Thanks for letting us know how young you are.
Constant crashes, lag, expensive online access all made for a bad experience, not to mention horrible UIs, remedial storylines with little substance, and super grindy game mechanics. People tend to think fondly on those old games because there was nothing to compare them to. Now people try to compare present in-game experience with the memory of those past game experiences, usually with their nostalgia meter turned up to eleven. Anyone with a brain in their head knows how imperfect memory is and filters out the negative in favor of the positive.
Also, the ridiculous trend among MMO players that old school somehow makes you cooler/edgier/hipster plays a huge part in it as well. Typical sheep mentality.
You'd be better off growing an "ironically" styled beard and pretending you're above the culturally-ignorant attitudes of mainstream consumers. Blah blah blah...posers.
I think I'll just start calling old-school blind fan boys "hipster gamers". Fits pretty well.
~~ postlarval ~~
EQ, DAoC, EVE, SWG, AC, AC2 - A far more diverce group of MMO's than your list and each one a classic.
Since then the genre has seen thousands of wannabe get rich studios popping up every month.
We saw the beginning of MANY changes during the early 2000 era,every single aspect of game design was being improved...technically speaking.
However since the early stages,NOBODY is putting it all together,every single studio is giving us bits and pieces and often times putting more effort into advertising/marketing than the game design.
You would THINK dev leads are putting in some serious thought and time into their game design decisions but NOPE.Instead instantly asking gamer's for money to fund some make believe dream.You get a guy like Smedley,fired from his job,then a month later he is suppose to be pan handling a game ..lmao.
Not only do these newer studios have a lot of gumption, balls,they really think gamer's are dumb as nails.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
--John Ruskin
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
The BEST era was pre f2p,pre cash shop era , pre CF'ing and pre KS.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I wasnt around for the pre-wow era, but have tried some games and the graphical updates and features
kept me in the wow to post wow era. Have mostly tried only the wow era and beyond.
Wow era
Aoc
Coh
EQ2
Guild Wars
Planetside
Like many others I feel like many features have been added or improved the communities have gotten
steadily worse. In the pre-wow era and wow era you would actually have more communication via chat vs comms
although this sounds like a bad thing the voice comms although made battles initially easier eventually made
things worse. Although reactions and updates in real time were faster they were not always necessary.
Eventually there was the era of solo play and pvp good in theory bad in reality as it divided the community
even more than before into the us vs them or pve vs pvp instead of having both being fine. I personally tried
many failed mmos including quite a few pvp focused mmos with pve being quite limited. Pvp was fine back then but
eventually pvp in lead to flaming and raging quite often so I focus more time in global pvp
20 vs 20 or 50 vs 50 instead of 1 vs 1 or 3 vs 3. Large scale battles are sometimes quite interesting.
Now the modern day with all its improvements often feel like a step back with cashshops and limited edition goods that show up monthly or weekly for no purpose other than to sell virtual goods. Modern mmos do feel like they are quite casual and cater to the widest market with easy auto attacking mmos. The community although quite large feels less like a community and more like a random group of strangers here just to get the loot. I personally like games with more precieved value where doing a quest feels more important to the overall story instead of fetch x items until you skip all of them. I do like some modern F2P like Hearthstone, Path of Exile, and even GW2 even though I did get Hot. Games like Rift, Terra, Aion, and Archeage did not draw me enough into the games even though they have sorta improved upon the past they have also made some features less interesting. Also grinding is fun for some, but not all.
The era that is best is simply the one that you with games played and loved the most there is no best for everyone, but only the games that are best for each person.
I'd call them the Gen 1 with WoW included and then Gen 2 which was the WoW clone era and then Gen 3 the post MMO era where it's games like Destiny which are being called MMOs but aren't.
I've also not played an MMO (or sudo-MMO) since 2005 for more than the first trial month.
Games i play today is BDO, FF14 and SWTOR to some extent, but they aren't even close to as good as MMO's used to be.
There seems to be something of a reset that's coming. Taking what has been learned over the last 20 years and applying the lessons to move forward.
Coh is pre-wow.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"