ITT: Retro MMOs

[Anonymous No.10920616]

[Anonymous No.10920623]

AKSHUALLY

[Anonymous No.10920907]

Friendly reminder that John Carmack invented the idea for MMORPGs back in 1998.

[Anonymous No.10920916]

>>10920907
Except Ultima Online came out a full year earlier, in '97.

[Anonymous No.10920917]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opPAGt-rVPI

[Anonymous No.10920920]

>>10920907
>>10920916
that's him speaking in the context of Quake III, and yes the tech and infrastructure wasn't ready for fast-paced shooter MMOs.

[Anonymous No.10920921]

>>10920907
how does he keep doing it, he's the elon musk of video games

[Anonymous No.10920925]

>>10920917
All my weeb friends were obsessed with RO back in the day so I botted a character for like a week, realized that even botting 24/7 you hit a brick wall after a certain point, then said fuck this shit.

[Anonymous No.10920926]

>>10920925
Was it one of the first MMOs to display the Korean style of super-heavy grinding?

[Anonymous No.10920928]

>>10920926
Lineage?

[Anonymous No.10920932]

>>10920925
>all the "I'm stuck in a MMO" manga/anime made to this day is still massively influenced by RO

[Anonymous No.10920934]

>>10920928
Ah, youre right, the first Lineage came out before RO. Though the universe wasn't very popular (worldwide, at least) until L2 came out.

[Anonymous No.10920952]

>>10920934
EQ, AO, DAoC, FFXI, all were grindfests. I think RO was more notable for not being a simple timesink but a heavily RNG-dependent one where items required for your character progression where literal 1 in a million drops.

[Anonymous No.10921129]

>>10920952
All of those games share the fact that players were never expected to have the best gear or even know what the best gear was available. Something randomly dropped that you could use and in your eyes that was the strongest thing you've ever seen. Once guides and wiki's became a thing the community slowly expected you to have the best gear and exclusively level on the stuff that gives you the best exp/hr.

[Anonymous No.10921134]

>>10921129
??? all those games had extremely drawn out level grinds and gear sets that you were absolutely expected to farm and two of them were practically built on currency-style systems

[Anonymous No.10921204]

>>10921134
>absolutely expected to farm
if you were a very casual player you could not look them up. you're the strongest as long as you don't look things up

[Anonymous No.10921585]

>Dransik Rebirth
It stood out to me because it had a hunger system and some kind of open world PvP system.

[Anonymous No.10921668]

>>10920925
>>10920928
I remember watching a friend play some Asian MMO where his quest was to kill 300 of a creature, wonder if it was one of those.

[Anonymous No.10921681]

>>10921134
You definitely did not need to join a competitive raiding guild in original Everquest back in 1999-2002. Among the second-tier guilds, not all were obnoxious try-hards about it.

[Anonymous No.10922085]

I don't play MMOs but am curious, what was it that made WoW dominate the market so thoroughly?
>>10921668
that sounds like bullshit makework lol.

[Anonymous No.10922202]

>>10922085
Did everything right from the get go. For example:
>INTUITIVE (this is important)
>attractive graphics and ran well on weak computers
>based on a familiar property and made by a well-known top tier pc developer which made it easy for people to try a genre known to be intimidating
>right balance between convenience and depth, and familiar fantasy tropes and innovation
>came at a time when broadband connections were becoming commonplace
>simple class/race system where it's impossible to ruin your character during creation or gameplay
>every class has cool abilities and no useless bullshit only there to confuse newcomers; that warriors and rogues have abilities to use in combat was still controversial in MMOs at the time
>quests divide the game into smaller units so you never have to do one thing repeatedly too long; at its best you never feel like you're grinding even though you're killing monsters over and over
>the game paces itself with forced breaks like flight paths and crafting/trading/training business in the city which makes it very addictive to play compared to games where you do the same thing for a long period of time
>the way quests gradually expand your playing area and make you visit more and more of the world is sublime
>players can get started and play most of the game solo, easy to dip into group content since it is sprinkled throughout the game and desirable to complete (for example, a solo quest chain ending in a boss or dungeon fight, with good quality rewards previewable)
>anti-munchkin features like dungeons using the instance system, instead of guilds spawncamping bosses (admittedly the exact same thing happened with the few world bosses wow had)
Shame for the other MMO styles that leaned much more heavily towards satisfaction and community than fun, but it is what it is. WoW was simply a lot more intuitive and easier to dip into and very effectively expanded itself to the player which made it easy to get sucked in.

[Anonymous No.10922358]

>>10921681
That's what I did. It was fun.
We had better gear than non-raiders and casual guilds, but didn't have to answer the bat phone or maintain a certain percent attendance. Those that raided more got more loot of course, but that's only fair.
Since the first-tier guilds on my server all failed because they were filled with literally insane fuckers, somehow the guild I was in became the top guild on the server by default at one point. That was pretty fun too.

[Anonymous No.10923539]

>>10922085
>what was it that made WoW dominate the market so thoroughly?
Well, first of all, it was Warcraft, a massively popular IP that already had a huge online presence that drew in tons of players who had no interest in RPGs. Second, it was new and competent whereas other options were either old or very poorly executed. And probably more than anything, even at launch the gameplay was much more action oriented than other games on the market and required you to constantly push buttons rather than EQ style autoattack and occasionally hit a spell as mana regen permitted.

[Anonymous No.10923549]

>>10923539
>Second, it was new
everquest was in what, omens of war when wow launched? can't even imagine how terrible it would've been to start fresh at that point, no low levels around to group with, no mercs, probably couldn't even multibox on the typical pc of the era, 70 levels and 6 expansions worth of AAs to catch up with...

[Anonymous No.10923690]

>>10923549
It was in gates of discord when wow launched. The worst possible time.

[Anonymous No.10924076]

>>10920623
need to play this one

[Anonymous No.10924332]

>>10920925
Man, I really miss the early days of RO. I was a huge EverQuest addict, but Ragnarok was comfy as fuck and looked great compared to the PS1 graphics of AC/EQ/UO/DaoC.

>>10921129
For a lot of these games, wiki's were years down the road. You had player sites like Everlore, EQItems, Allakhazam, Lucy, etc.. but knowledge was guarded for the most part. Like, some mechanics for EQ have only been learned about in the last few years.

>>10921681
Gear itemization was awful in EQ until like 2002, same FF11, took years.

>>10922085
It was designed by EQ addicts who knew how to build onto EQ's skinnerbox.

[Anonymous No.10924427]

>>10924332
You did not need top gear to progress and enjoy the content. If you felt that way that's your fault not the game.

[Anonymous No.10925207]

>>10920623
Fun game, but just like every other retro MMORPG, you will never be able to re-experience the heyday they had. People know these games inside and out. The mentality of gamers have changed from having fun from playing a game to having fun from completing a game. It doesn't help that social media sites like twitch and youtube made every game a hyper competition and it's a speedrun to drain the fun out of games.

Take WoW classic. I reenactment of vanilla, but people worried about clearing MC as fast as possible and then focus on parsing, draining the fun out of raiding with the boys. Now you're judged by website metrics and if you have gear better than necessary for the dungeon/raid.

[Anonymous No.10925346]

>>10925207
anon maybe you were a casual back in 2004 but wow was a gear treadmill from the start, with the exception of a handful of items that had wonky interactions with class mechanics every item was just a clear upgrade or downgrade and there was a massive emphasis on parsing

eq was a little different because, contrary to the emphasis that casual players placed on gear, whether you had the best gear or worst gear was practically irrelevant to your performance in the first few expansions, all you needed was a passable weapon and worn haste for melee and a few broken op clickies and you were set

[Anonymous No.10925395]

>>10925346
>anon maybe you were a casual back in 2004
Pretty sure his point is that there's no real place for casual enjoyment anymore. Whether he's wrong about that I don't know but your comment about wow being a "gear treadmill" is not a valid answer.

I do know that in 2004, the term "casual" cast a very wide net as WoW was one of the most popular mainstream games.
Any normalfag might play WoW. For every fanatic parsing raid performance there were a dozen casuals fucking around The Barrens. These days, classic MMOs have a massive selection bias. Only addicts, fanatics and nostalgia-chasers play them now, for the most part. Only the occasional curious zoomer wanders in. The population is much smaller and less dynamic.

[Anonymous No.10925442]

>>10925207
this. ive never liked guilds or raiding, i hate people. i play every mmo like a thug vagabond. in AC i would hunt what i could and scour vendors for the hand me downs of stupid raider fags. i pugged my way as high as i could go and played hours upon hours upon hours and had great fun. when the game shut down and the emulators made servers based during its golden age i went to play, but the servers are so empty it isnt fun.

[Anonymous No.10925450]

>>10925442
AC was tragic because it had a huge game world and good world building but they kept fucking with the game mechanics over and over so it wasn't that fun to play.

[Anonymous No.10925457]

>>10925450
yes. they unfortunately did what alot of mmo's did in WoW's wake and began copying its mechanics. But i would say Dark Majesty was the beginning of the end... adding houses to the landscape was retarded. for like a year they kept adding more and more to placate the whiney playerbase ruining more and more of the environment. still, i fucking miss it.

[Anonymous No.10925468]

>>10922202
Yeah pretty much nailed it.
Everquest and the first round of MMOs made a variety of mistakes and just less-appealing (if worthy) design decisions. WoW went through fixing the mistakes and making numerous casual-friendly design choices.
>warriors and rogues have abilities to use in combat was still controversial in MMOs at the time
Blizzard correctly identified that "Crowd Control" and "Support" classes were a design mistake. Crowd Control is the most dynamic and exciting aspect to combat, giving that role to one player in a party leads to boring gameplay for everyone else. Meanwhile support(buffing) roles tended to be the most boring and monotonous. So WoW reduced the total number of classes and divided up crowd control and buffing abilities most of the classes.
>>10923549
>>10923690
Everquest paced its growth very poorly. By Luclin it was clear they had no long-term plan and Planes of Power was the point of no return. That's when SoE cashed out every last bit of soul that had been invested into the original game. People just had too much fun in PoP to realize it was over. Gates of Discord merely shattered the illusion once and for all. People jumped ship and most never came back.

[Anonymous No.10925681]

>>10925468
>Blizzard correctly identified that "Crowd Control" and "Support" classes were a design mistake. Crowd Control is the most dynamic and exciting aspect to combat, giving that role to one player in a party leads to boring gameplay for everyone else. Meanwhile support(buffing) roles tended to be the most boring and monotonous. So WoW reduced the total number of classes and divided up crowd control and buffing abilities most of the classes.

thats what gave mmo's depth you casualtard, fuck off

[Anonymous No.10925684]

>>10920907
That's not even remotely what that article says or suggests.
Also, MMOs predate that shit by like a decade anyway. See Club Caribe / Habitat for the C64.
Then there's NWN on AOL.
There was also INN's YSerbius/Twinion/Cawdor - which you can actually play on the INN server project that utilizes dosbox and a dialer tunnel app over the internet.
Then there was Meridian59
And Dark Sun Online
Subspace (now continuum), also has a twitch stream for certain arenas or whatever, and you can play online in private numbered arenas with friends and stuff.
There was also a spinoff of Subspace using the same engine and general setup, that uses soldiers on the ground called Infantry.

[Anonymous No.10925687]

>>10925681
Every group requiring a Warrior, Cleric, Enchanter with no other classes able to fill those roles was awful design.

[Anonymous No.10925691]

[Anonymous No.10925779]

Knight Online. Grindy as shit, corrupt GMs, pay to win, tons of cheaters. But it had a really good combat system and I had a lot of fun with the people I met.

[Anonymous No.10925823]

>>10925684
>That's not even remotely what that article says or suggests.
i suggest you read the giant quote in the big black box

[Anonymous No.10926146]

>>10920907
>>10925823
You're a retard. He's talking about making an MMO for an "action" game. MMORPG's had been around for years.

[Anonymous No.10926572]

>>10925681
No. You are stupid. The depth is in the combat mechanics. Lumping all of the abilities into one class/role is the mistake. WoW did lower the bar, but this was separate from the class and ability changes. WoW actually made crowd control MORE difficult. There was a higher skill ceiling. But the stakes were lowered, consequences for sub-optimal play were less severe.

Besides, you probably didn't play WoW at release and are commenting on what the game became 5+ years after it had dominated the market.

[Anonymous No.10926735]

>EQ clone
>EQ clone (Korea)
>EQ clone (Japan)
>EQ clone (Blizzard)

this thread sucks. MMOs had so much potential as a genre and it all amounted to cloning EQ until one of the EQ clones got so popular that everyone started trying to clone that instead

I miss SWG

[Anonymous No.10926748]

1996

[Anonymous No.10927031]

>>10925346
Only a small amount of spergs played it like that in the early days of wow, and it didnt ruin the game for everyone else just due to the state of the internet at the time like the previous poster suggested.

Parsers always feel the need to justify their existence by pretending it was always that way for some reason.

[Anonymous No.10927063]

>>10925346
When vanilla released, it took a month for the first rag kill. When classic released, it took 6 days. You will never experience what vanilla was truly like unless you were there to witness and play it. No matter what blizzard did, classic wasn't going to be the same as vanilla.

[Anonymous No.10929421]

>>10926735
>I miss SWG
It was never going to work

[Anonymous No.10929459]

>>10920907
Man, he really likes showing off that 1080p monitor.

[Anonymous No.10930295]

>>10920616
Ultima Online changed my life. I graduated in 1996 and had read about it.in magazines but didn't own a PC. I failed college after my first two semesters and was back home with a crappy job and no outlet.

My Dad let me buy a PC on his Sears card and make the payments and I began playing UO to escape my loser life that I had created for myself. I became immersed into it for about a year until one day I just realized I was ready to move on.

Much more importantly, I acquired computer skills that allowed me to return to college, land real jobs, bang the girl of my dreams, and even become a creative person later in life.

Most people can say they played a game at a down point in life or that they enjoyed this as a kid, I legitimately have no idea how bad my life would have become had it not been for getting that PC to play that game.

[Anonymous No.10930302]

>>10926735
Everything that's not an EQ clone is a UO clone

[Anonymous No.10930319]

Retro MMOs appeal to me mechanically and the spirit of the game is far more in line with what I want out of an RPG but fuck me I cannot handle the shitty UIs and control schemes they often have.
Any suggestions for games that might make not want to claw my eyes out?

[Anonymous No.10930323]

>>10925823
We all know what he's talking about because Quake 3 had specifically that. Some Q3 mods today still make use of it. If anything he was ahead of the curve for the shitty instanced 'notmmos' that hit in the late 2000s early 2010s

[Anonymous No.10930805]

>>10926572
not only did i play the release, i played the beta. and played everquest and asherons call and daoc. fuck off zoomer, go watch another video essay.

[Anonymous No.10930842]

>>10926748
I wonder what made coreans the MMO powerhouse that they were, even surpassing glorious nippon in some way. I'd assume it was the infrastructure and the internet accessibility which was what they had compared to the others around them.

[Anonymous No.10930861]

>>10930323
>Quake 3 had a persistent world
wat

[Anonymous No.10930863]

Why does every MMO ever have to have the same awful atrocious combat system?

[Anonymous No.10930885]

>>10930863
Because potentially having to handle hundreds if not thousands of connections at the same time with little/tolerable delay for the players is easier with an inherently slower paced combat system like action bar combat.

Which at least was true for everquest, which wow ripped off, and as you know every other mmo just rips off wow.

[Anonymous No.10930913]

>>10930885
The only similarity between WoW and EQ combat is that both have an autoattack feature, and even that's functionally different between the two games as it's not the main focus of WoW melee combat like it is in EQ. Even to this day EQ doesn't have a strict rotation system, just a priority spell cast order.

[Anonymous No.10930931]

>>10930913
WoW was obviously based on EQ what are you smoking? Have you literally never played any other game except those two?

[Anonymous No.10930939]

>>10930885
really irked me that people didn't know about this (and still don't, but we have way better internet now so it's not as much a problem) and wanted action combat with twitch reflexes and dodging and stuff. there's also server latency to consider, and people not knowing that it's physically impossible to get under 100ms when the server's round the globe and just went "get better internet lol".

[Anonymous No.10930941]

>>10930931
>guys it has abilities you activate that is so totally the same game!
>please ignore the actual combat!

[Anonymous No.10930946]

>>10930939
you realize that online FPS games had already existed for a decade by the time WoW released, right?

[Anonymous No.10930951]

>>10930885
Right. It's also an RPG, meaning RPG combat so not FPS action combat.
Even without technical concerns, it's hard to improve. There's potential with environmental modification and better tactical fundamentals (eg being able to physically block and push and such). But ultimately the problem is that very few PvE games remain fun for the amount of time people spend playing MMORPGs.

[Anonymous No.10930957]

>>10930941
No, you are the one ignoring the massive number of mechanical similarities to fixate on some specific meta. Hence, it appears as if you are far too immersed in MMOs to recognize similarities, they are invisible to you. You take them for granted.

[Anonymous No.10930961]

>>10930946
you missed the MMO part of the discussion

[Anonymous No.10930968]

>>10925395
>Pretty sure his point is that there's no real place for casual enjoyment anymore
I know we are on /vr/ but both Blizzard and Square Enix want to focus on casual experience over the "hardcore" MMO audience with WoW and FFXIV. That being said, the idea of what a "casual experience" is very much changed from what it was in the past.

[Anonymous No.10931029]

>>10930842
Koreans were ahead of their time with Freemium skinnerboxes. Back when everyone was trying to make a monthly fee game that you commit to for years, Korea was mastering the art of getting you hooked fast and then putting a long grind ahead of you (that you can expedite with some payments).

Now every country makes games like this but Korea was doing it first

[Anonymous No.10931096]

>>10931029
Ah sweet, man-made horrors from Worst Korea.

[Anonymous No.10931098]

>>10930961
>it was impossible to do online action combat in the 90s!
>>what about fps games?
>those don't count!
I accept your concession

[Anonymous No.10931147]

>>10931098
I mean, the article in >>10920907
even shows Carmack himself stating the same

[Anonymous No.10931160]

>>10930939
lol case in point

[Anonymous No.10931171]

>>10926748
I'm looking for more games like this because I played a few in the early 2000s, but looking up "anime inspired 2.5d MMO (which is how some of them described themselves) brings up nothing. In short, what's the name of this and other games like it.

[Anonymous No.10931172]

>>10931147
I don't see "ping" anywhere on that page.

[Anonymous No.10931179]

>>10931172
fine, you got me, I just hate how the MMO industry turned skill-based after WoW, I got filtered out of online gaming
they stole MMOs from me

[Anonymous No.10931215]

>>10931171
That one's Nexus TK, the game that the (in)famous Nexon made their name of. Also a bit later there were a lot of small private RPGMaker-esque MMORPGs, using pre-made engines like BYOND.

[Anonymous No.10931509]

>>10931098
They don't.
There were also online card games and gambling and battle.net and such but MMOs were different and nobody cares about your gay semantic nitpicking.

[Anonymous No.10931517]

>>10931098
>>10931160
>>10931172
>>10931179
The context is RPGs . See >>10930951
Also there were no massively multiplayer FPS anyway. MMOs had thousands of players per world server simultaneously, FPS didn't. FPS had heavy bias towards Local Area Networks as they performed best. Playing Quake over WAN was less popular. Your argument is embarrassing on both sides. But mostly the faggot even bringing them up in the first place.

[Anonymous No.10931523]

>>10931517
no fuck you, stop assuming things and making it fact. the original poster never mentioned RPG, he just said MMO >>10930863

[Anonymous No.10931536]

so, what are some MMOFPS games? I remember some World War II simulator and a few "modern" sci-fi ones

[Anonymous No.10931595]

>>10931536

[Anonymous No.10931607]

>>10931523
It's a safe assumption.

[Anonymous No.10932067]

>>10930861
Quake 3 had that capability yes, some mods and other vidya make use of it

[Anonymous No.10932071]

>>10930863
It's just a holdover from really shitty internet
doesn't help your average mmo player is terrible at action combat but not patient enough for anything other than batched/tick based real time.

[Anonymous No.10932073]

>>10932071
>>10930863
>>10931523
None of you have ideas for what good MMORPG combat would look like.

[Anonymous No.10932085]

>>10932073
this is /vr/

[Anonymous No.10932525]

Hear me out:

Turn based MMORPG

[Anonymous No.10932538]

>>10932067
I don't think you know what persistent world means, anon.

[Anonymous No.10932542]

>>10932538
Has there been any real persistent state world other than Ultima Online though.

[Anonymous No.10932607]

>>10932085
Yeah and?
Try specific criticism of retro games instead of generic bitching and retarded shit like comparing quake to evequest.

[Anonymous No.10932637]

>>10920616
>missed the best years of MMOs because I was a poorfag who didn't have a computer at home until 2010 and couldn't have afforded a sub regardless
All I was able to experience were a few hours of Maple Story at a friend's house every other weekend or so. I wish I could have played XI in those early years. I remember watching some docu-video on a PS2 demo disc about it and the canned expression system they had for English and Japanese players to communicate with each other. I hungered for that game. My cousin had a sub, but when she showed me the game, all I saw was her login to the middle of a desert, show me the menus, and then logout.

[Anonymous No.10932834]

>>10920616
I remember seeing the cover art of Everquest in Walmart when I was like 11 and autistically staring at it inappropriately, probably instinctually trying to get a boner to fuck this cartoon mating sow

[Anonymous No.10932931]

>>10920907
Quake MMO brehs

[Anonymous No.10932961]

>>10925691
I like playing online but games like Diablo or PSO are really more my speed than the big open world massive ones like WoW or.. I dunno do people still play Lord of the Rings? I just want to get in, do a dungeon and then get out.

[Anonymous No.10933023]

>>10922085
The other posters responding to you explained it very well but I'd add that the main reasons it was so successful is that it appealed to normies as well as hardcore gamers, it had low system requirements so everyone could play, and it had game mechanics and characters that appealed to everyone so even your girlfriend wanted to play it. Add some aspects of gambling and no (pay to win) and you've got a captive audience made up of damn near everyone who likes video games. The newbie zones were also particularly well done.

[Anonymous No.10933045]

>>10932961
>games like Diablo or PSO are really more my speed
I love lobby-based games like PSO, and Monster Hunter and its clones. I wish they were more popular.

[Anonymous No.10933379]

>>10933045
nta but here as well. which is why I liked Warframe, at least the earlier days before they caved in and cater to the spastics and turbo autists.

[Anonymous No.10933595]

>>10932525
Fallout Online had some kind of turn based system

[Anonymous No.10933679]

>>10931536
>"modern" sci-fi ones
PlanetSide was 2003 so I guess it's /vr/

[Anonymous No.10934681]

>>10932542
There was SWG and of course there is still Eve Online

[Anonymous No.10934710]

>>10932525
That's Wakfu. Fun game.

[Anonymous No.10934752]

>>10926735
>>10930302
There's Runescape

[Anonymous No.10934762]

>>10932067
I think this is arguable in what you mean by "the capability". First, by any default Quake 3 - there was nothing really "persistent" to be had beyond an unlimited time deathmatch or CTF, but everything in that mode resets except score.
No mods really used any form of persistence.
But Q3 allowed for moddability and configurability - so you might "technically" be correct, but it's a stupid technicality, because no one ever saw any persistent mods come from it - and you're really just saying "you can program things if you program them." Which... fuckin sure.

[Anonymous No.10934875]

>>10932538
I know what I said

[Anonymous No.10934969]

>>10920932
It's interesting seeing someone new going back to hack//sign and complaining that most of the show is just people talking or grinding random places with the game itself seemingly having little story.
Because back then before WoW changed everything, that's exactly what mmos were, glorified chat rooms with shit to kill to pass time.

[Anonymous No.10935261]

this is like right on the border of what is retro, but: anyone play this? game was fucking beautiful, it brought my 3870 to its knees. i loved the chaining combat combos in it. shame that the game had 0 content outside of the starting area.

[Anonymous No.10935270]

>>10934969
what's ironic is the last big MMO that tried to capture the feel of retro MMOs was fallout 76 and nobody liked it until wastelanders.

[Anonymous No.10935278]

>>10935270
I actually liked it
of course there's some jank mechanics and balance issues but it's bethesda

[Anonymous No.10936143]

>>10935261
I played a few years ago, the f2p version and liked it, it has vistas, soloable bosses, achievements, fashion... And the setting couldn't be better but yeah, tutorial island is peak apparently

[Anonymous No.10936148]

>>10935270
>big MMO
>Fallout 76
>retro
dafuc?

[Anonymous No.10936167]

>>10935261
It's really good if you like Conan particularly. The zones and environments really hit the spot of evoking Howard's writing, even Cimmeria which he never actually depicted apart from one poem.

>It was gloomy land that seemed to hold
>All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,
>With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,
>And the dark woodlands brooding over all,
>Not even lightened by the rare dim sun
>Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it
>Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.

[Anonymous No.10936606]

>>10936167
yeah conan is still the OG champ at low fantasy (i think only the dark souls universe comes anywhere close to its quality), it's just a shame that funcom is such a horrible developer.

[Anonymous No.10936814]

>>10930295
wholesome UO story. Loved that game as an 8 year old on my parents PC getting tricked by people in town and swimming to raise my skills.

[Anonymous No.10936914]

>>10921134
What are you even talking about lmfao. That’s not how it is even today on P99 or Quarm, let alone back in 1999 when no info was available. Something tells me you only played WoW and are trying to apply that logic to EQ.

[Anonymous No.10937541]

>>10936167
Games like Conan and LoRO really make me wish I could get into MMOs more. Because I would really love nothing more than to just EXIST inside the Hyborian age or Middle-Earth because I used to dream about those worlds for ages when I was getting into fantasy literature.

[Anonymous No.10937656]

>>10936148
reading comprehension is your friend pedro.

[Anonymous No.10937681]

I feel like starting an MMO, especially one that's been going on a long time is that they tend to overwhelm you out the gate with 50 thousand event, catch up and everything else markers. It's not like a game you just start and have fun. There's hundreds of things pulling you every which way. Different events, different currencies, different expansions, different additions, patches and buffs and suddenly you have a log book fuller than the Silmarillion before you even left the starter village.

[Anonymous No.10937714]

>>10937681
That’s why old school MMO private servers are the best way to enjoy MMOs. They never change; at least not dramatically. You log in and play the same game everyone else played, and simply hit end game whenever it happens. There’s no need to “catch up” because it’s not a rat race/endless treadmill. You can take a break for as long as you like and not be any further behind when you eventually come back.

[Anonymous No.10938063]

>>10937714
Yeah, I want to go in and take my time. Get lost in the world and explore. I don't want to rush through the game to get to the current content or deal with every player under the sun rushing the content because they all got guides open and are rushing the meta.

[Anonymous No.10938239]

>2004
Conquer Online was the first and only MMO I seriously played. It was really pretty decent until they implemented some massively detrimental changes for the sake of profit.

[Anonymous No.10938323]

>>10937541
>Conan and LoRO
For both of those games you don't really have to get 'into' them to get the best out of them. If you are into the fantasy wordls already just try them and explore around.
Seriously, LOTRO is incredible for that. The Shire alone is almost the size of skyrim and its a very early game zone. Just have a wander through there. Maybe even take the long journey to Thorins Hall and see the sights.
And if you don't mind playing the game a little, you have places like Rivendell to look forward too. Well worth the install imo.

[Anonymous No.10938935]

>>10938323
I've been meaning to look into it. I understand even as a free player you can actually earn quite a bit. Which is neat. But yeah that's really kind of what I want. I want to just sort of explore and exist in the fantasy world. Certainly do quests and adventure but I very much don't care for the more "theme park" coaster approach to MMOs where everything is just rush to the end game so you can raid.

[Anonymous No.10939035]

>>10920616
I'm still mad that Project 99 doesn't have the first-person spell effects or access to the old UI
But in general, Everquest is one of those games that is really hard to go back to

[Anonymous No.10939036]

>>10939035
It's hard to go back to because it will never have those numbers of players ever again and a lot of the design choices were dogshit, like the amount of exp grind and exp loss on death.

[Anonymous No.10939041]

>>10939036
Yeah, that's part of it. And it's not just the numbers of players, I think everyone has collectively lost their MMO innocence in a time when everything is about wikis and metas
But the game itself is rough too. It's always sad when a genuinely awesome cool game reveals itself to be heavily flawed like that
I'll give it some more time, but I think maybe I'd rather have the memories

[Anonymous No.10939058]

Deadmaze by pepe cuntry. IF Flash/Adobe AIR counts as a retro platform.

[Anonymous No.10939061]

No one played MMOs games in the 90s and early 2000s only few Boomers did WoW was the real first MMO most of them were trash compared to WoW

[Anonymous No.10939067]

>>10936167
Sounds like Finland , land of drunks and depression. or Siberia.

[Anonymous No.10939069]

>>10939061
>WoW was the real first MMO
WoW just copied from everything before it, it casualized things a lot and had built-in popularity from Warcraft
MMOs were already thriving at this point, although obviously WoW blew up

[Anonymous No.10939073]

>>10939036
>lot of the design choices were dogshit, like the amount of exp grind and exp loss on death
A lot of the design decisions were dogshit, but those examples aren't it. Making the game hard and long is what kept people playing, and people playing is what kept the game alive.
Especially before information was easy to find, you couldn't just no-life it for a week or two and hit max level.
Examples of things that WERE dogshit design include complete heal as a level 39 spell, high percentage slows, every itemization decision before PoP, raid content created before the game understood raids (i.e. we were still just 6 man groups and any broader structure was enforced by players, not the game), etc.

[Anonymous No.10939079]

>>10939073
>include complete heal as a level 39 spell
Balance wise, maybe, but boy did it feel good to get that spell

[Anonymous No.10939516]

>>10939073
>Making the game hard
Not that guy, but neither grinding or xp loss on death are elements of difficulty.
I'm not saying these things were bad for the game but it's a common mistake to call these things "hard" when they're not. They just punishing or tedious. They're elements of time and stakes, not difficulty. It's important because Everquest still is hard in many respects. If anything, the harsh death penalty and extreme grind requirements heavily discouraged players from even attempting the challenging content. They would just sit on the edge of an outdoor zone in an overpowered group and just effortlessly slaughter pull after pull. Hence the massive popularity of zones like Oasis, South Karana, Dreadlands, Overthere and so on. If it wasn't for the loot incentives pulling people into dungeons, those zones would have been even more over-crowded.
>Examples of things that WERE dogshit design include complete heal as a level 39 spell
Complete heal was busted regardless of its level. The fact that it came at level 39 wasn't especially important.
> high percentage slows
These weren't a problem. Maybe durations were tweaked poorly, maybe it would have been better to have multiple, stackable slows, but these are mostly nitpicks.
>every itemization decision before PoP,
Elaborate
>raid content created before the game understood raids (i.e. we were still just 6 man groups and any broader structure was enforced by players, not the game)
Those were the best raid mobs ever. That's when a raid was something exciting. Vox and Nagafen weren't elaborately scripted 30-60+ minute encounters with a sequence mini-challenges tailored especially to test a 40-person raid meta. They were Dragons. They had Giants as allies. That's it. Everything else flowed organically from there.

[Anonymous No.10939521]

>>10939061
yeah, absolutely no one was playing Everquest or FF11. No one. Blizzard just decided to make an MMO for no reason and invent the genre.

[Anonymous No.10939528]

>>10939521
Yeah and FFXI specifically exists because Square saw how much money Sony was making with a grindy RPG and said hory shit what are we waiting for?

[Anonymous No.10939631]

>>10939073
If people liked those things and it kept them playing so much, then why did they bail immediately when alternative games in the genre that didn't have them were available?

[Anonymous No.10940342]

I can't believe True Fantasy Live Online just celebrated it's 30th expansion pack and is still currently the most successful online game ever created.

[Anonymous No.10941108]

>>10930805
>asherons call
came here to see if any actual OGs in this thread or just zoomers. and theres literally only one. sad. even /vg/ is now all underage.

[Anonymous No.10941119]

>>10931517
>Also there were no massively multiplayer FPS anyway.
not that guy but - Planetside came out in 2003

=^)

[Anonymous No.10941124]

>>10935261
i played it at launch and wnet back to it a few times. they released it too early. the level 60-80 zones were not finished. the seige warfare pvp never ever worked and was suppose to be the main end game draw. the distaste people had for the unfinishedness led to the game losing funding and never getting properly finished and turned into a zombie mmo. sad

but yes. the first 20-40 levels were amazing. the combat was great and the cross classing was cool.

[Anonymous No.10941141]

>>10940342
Is that the one that was going to have open world voice chatting?

[Anonymous No.10941151]

>want to play FFXI classic again
>don't want to play some shitty private server ran by retards wanting to live out their powertrip fantasies
>SE says they will never make an official one

[Anonymous No.10941163]

[Anonymous No.10941171]

>>10941141
So they claimed

[Anonymous No.10941335]

>>10941151
>FFXI classic
>private server
Yikes, no way I'm investing thousands of hours on a server that could be shut down at any moment just to fill the role of NPC for the admins and their friends to show off their summoned gear to.

[Anonymous No.10941603]

>>10931098
8 players on one quake server is not "massive" by any means

[Anonymous No.10941751]

>>10941603
8 players in a FPS is way more data than 40 players with WoW's bitch basic target-based "action" combat