We talk shit about the genre but almost everyone has dipped into one of these worlds at some point. I think it should be a common agreement that sandbox is better than theme park style. Vanguard had one massive expansive world with no zones to speak of unless you count the giant ocean blocks you might need to sail in-between certain places. Vanguard is the first game that ever made me upgrade my graphics card. It made me feel like a big boy. While fags were playing WoW I was grinding in the opposing factions quest zone to obtain a special panther transformation with my old army buddy with the weird shit on his lip. On the entire light side continent I wager we were the only ones that had that thing. Since it ran really fast you really did not need a mount so it felt cool and made you feel special which I think MMO's are good at if they do the job right. Vanguard died almost immediately due to being rushed out of the gate by Sony iirc. It really was ahead of it's time.
Imagine 30 noobs fighting a lvl 60 evil player that is camping the starting zone. This stuff just happened out of nowhere then groups would be formed to hunt down and chase off the assaulting player. These days that would be considered griefing but to me that was the point. By the time I got around to joining a guild they all jumped back to their favorite fag game of choice (Dark Ages of Camelot) instead of dealing with the occasional bug and performance issues. I should have known that guild was suspect since some obese chick named Queenie was one of the officers.
Not long after I tried Age of Conan which was also really great partly due to having tits but also the world felt lived in and less fake than other zone style mmo's. It still ended up falling to pieces. I recall people crying they could not run it at max quality as well. I think WoW is responsible for that mindset. Age of Conan had great combat but since I had nobody to play with I quit after borrowing a bunch of money from some random person. I moved on to City of Heroes to walk around like a faggot and enter costume contests. That was pretty neat but there was not much meat to the game then it died.
Then I found Secret World. Me and a friend are working on beating that one together (he beat it already) but I feel like the desert zone has taken us way too long to get through. The mission variety is nice but the combat is so mindless it takes away from that. It's one of those games where you could probably get some entertainment by just watching the cutscenes online and the occasional boss fight. I like Funcom but I think they will go out of business.
Oh I played LOTR Online this past year with some people from the Handoverse. Fluent instantly got tired of playing with people and killed the guild due to being antisocial so everyone quit. LOTR Online is ok but there is way too much content locked behind paywalls and way too much content that is mindless bullshit that MMO's are known for.
So if FF14 is shit what is worth playing in this genre now?
We have a Steam curator now. You should be following it. https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44994899-RPGHQ/
Your MMO memories
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General Reign
- Posts: 1030
- Joined: Feb 6, '23
- Location: Scorched Earth
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Fedora Master
- Turtle
- Posts: 268
- Joined: Feb 7, '23
Playing DAoC and killing Legion. Doing the old "/follow and pointing your camera down to keep fps stable" in RvR. Being utterly useless because I picked Shaman and all the tryhards had dedicated buffbots.
Taking part in the Highsec Jihad in EvE and fighting in big ass wars, being part of a huge armada.
Taking part in the Highsec Jihad in EvE and fighting in big ass wars, being part of a huge armada.
I played those free superhero mmos for a few hours with a friend and they were boring. City of heroes? And the one that came out before that. And a few hours of some weird empty sci fi/postapoc game with Deus Ex 1-tier graphics. Also a couple hours of Runequest. And a few hours of that ascii one where you had to spend hours killing orphans in a crackhouse or something to grind up your stats before you could explore anywhere else and survive.
I don't see the appeal.
I don't see the appeal.
I have at least a couple of stories to tell.
Back when I was new in EQ, I made friends with this guy who was a total piece of shit scammer. He would scam people in trades and even stole people's accounts by winning ebay bids and never paying.
One time he decided that he wanted to move to a new server and that he wanted me to come with him. The way he made this happen was by tricking me into jumping into this giant hole inside the starting city for evil Erudites. This was an extremely high level zone call "the hole" and I thought it might be fun to check it out with him. What I didn't know is that when you zone in, levitate drops so I fell to my death and lost all of my gear. I didn't have much choice than start over on a different server with him since he promised to give me gear.
Years later karma finally got him when he flipped someone off at a stoplight and they broke his car window and then his face.
Most of my other good memories involve small scale PvP. Stalking farmers invis as a rogue then waiting for them to sit down and backstabbing them for quad damage, getting an insta-kill, and taking all the gold they spent hours farming. Or hanging around a public bank invis and pickpocketing people right before they can deposit their goods. Those were some of my favorite activities in Shadowbane.
There are no good MMOs right now. Monsters & Memories is our only hope and even that has no hope for pkers. Only the EQ crowd will enjoy it.
Back when I was new in EQ, I made friends with this guy who was a total piece of shit scammer. He would scam people in trades and even stole people's accounts by winning ebay bids and never paying.
One time he decided that he wanted to move to a new server and that he wanted me to come with him. The way he made this happen was by tricking me into jumping into this giant hole inside the starting city for evil Erudites. This was an extremely high level zone call "the hole" and I thought it might be fun to check it out with him. What I didn't know is that when you zone in, levitate drops so I fell to my death and lost all of my gear. I didn't have much choice than start over on a different server with him since he promised to give me gear.
Years later karma finally got him when he flipped someone off at a stoplight and they broke his car window and then his face.
Most of my other good memories involve small scale PvP. Stalking farmers invis as a rogue then waiting for them to sit down and backstabbing them for quad damage, getting an insta-kill, and taking all the gold they spent hours farming. Or hanging around a public bank invis and pickpocketing people right before they can deposit their goods. Those were some of my favorite activities in Shadowbane.
There are no good MMOs right now. Monsters & Memories is our only hope and even that has no hope for pkers. Only the EQ crowd will enjoy it.
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Val the Moofia Boss
- Turtle
- Posts: 314
- Joined: Jun 3, '23
My first MMO was Air Rivals. It was a faction war MMO where you played as a pilot for one of two warring countries. You could fly an I-Gear (fast interceptor, specialized for dogfighting), B-Gear (specialized for bombing, can also dogfight but not as well as the I-Gear), the M-Gear (a support unit that can heal or buff or scan for stealthed units, can hover in midair or fly backwards, weakest dogfighter), or the A-Gear (flying tank that can land and enter a siege mode and deal heavy damage. Can technically fight while flying but is very slow so it should only be out of siege mode when travelling long distance. Is weak to being bombed by B-Gears so it needs air support).
From left to right: I-Gear, B-Gear, M-Gear, A-Gear, wearing standard vendor armors
Every month, each faction could elect a player as nation leader, who would then set taxes on player shops. Taxes would be collected into a national war chest which the nation leader could then distribute to fund war campaigns (ie fuel and repair costs, buying new players better equipment). The nation leaders scheduled the mothership wars to happen during the weekends, during which each nation's mothership would spawn right outside their capital city. The objective was to push through enemy territory and destroy the enemy's mothership. Hundreds, sometimes even thousands of players turned out for these weekly mothership wars. There was nothing like seeing several hundred players engaging in a dogfight around a faction's mothership, or seeing hordes of planes rushing through a gate only for most of them be insta-killed by legions of tanks in siege mode with their guns pounding on it, with a handful of M-Gears surviving and then trying to find some corner of the map to start summoning more of their faction while being hunted by the defenders.
There were also three bases (an airship carrier, a space station, and a huge underground fortress) that would be fought over by the two factions during the week, and could be claimed by a Brigade (guild) to be used as their base as long as they held it.
The game was fun, but it eventually got repetitive after a while, pushing down the same lane of maps towards the enemy's mothership. Eventually an expansion added a second lane of maps towards the enemy's mothership. Those maps were aesthetically interesting, but were filled with high level mobs, and level grinding in AR was a chore. Level grinding from 81 to 82 in the asteroid map would take 60 hours. So most players never bothered travelling through that second lane of maps, and if you were powerful enough to be travelling through it you rarely found any big PvP battles to be waged. Those maps also had some PvE world bosses that could be killed for materials to create cool looking armors for your aircraft, but again few people bothered level grinding up high enough.
A B-Gear wearing the Vellocatus Veil, obtained by farming bosses from the Pandea expansion. Video of it flying around.
Eventually, a literally P2W slot machine was added to the cities. You could walk up to it, put in money, and roll for cool and powerful armors that would otherwise take an incredible amount of grinding to acquire. That killed the playerbase. There are private servers but you never really see huge battles like in the old AR anymore.
Some of my best memories are from UO and EQ. When I was a noob I fell for the "magic trap my box" scam and lost my meager belongings, in fact the first month or so of that game was a school of hard knocks and I played on Pacific, which was the absolute worst of the worst. Eventually I moved over to Test Center because it ran so much better without all the people clogging the entire place up. The shard got wiped on a regular basis made everything transitory, it didn't matter if you got owned and lost it all, a few months later we'd all be back to square one and of course, we got to test and break all the newest updates. OSI's first attempt at necromancy was...a disaster and then they called it off until long after the game switched hands and got several expansions. Speaking of expansions, my brother and I discovered two of the entrances to the underground when T2A was in testing, but we only reported on one, dart.
I stopped being a newb and started being a selective vigilante. I didn't care if people were red, I only cared if people were attacking me or trying to steal my shit, but there's always morons out there who think they can take you on because you're alone and look innocent. It always felt so good lecturing the ghosts of would-be murderers on the errors of their ways as they spammed "OoOo OOo" at me.
My best times in EQ came on The Combine, the first progressive server. I'd long since stopped playing and didn't feel like running the treadmill again until they announced a new server that would start with base content and then unlock things expansion by expansion as people completed certain objectives. Playing with all the old content, but with a more stable system and a server that didn't crash every five seconds (remember UUnet?) made it a load of fun. It was also great watching noobs who'd never dealt with oldschool zones get wasted and lose their corpses.
I was also a guide for awhile in EQ and that brought its own twisted entertainment. In the world of voluntary customer service the customer is almost always wrong. No, I can't teleport your corpse, no, I can't make them give up the spawn, no, I can't make the npc give back the quest item you handed to him, no no and no. I heard every kind of threat from people trying to track me down, to people saying they'd have my job at Sony for not giving into their demands. On the other hand, there was the rare occasion where we could do something, like revive an entire wiped guild because the server crashed, or clean up a bunch of mobs that had fallen under the world and not depopped.
In the end they took the CS out of our hands and made guides into glorified hosts, like those annoying bubbly people you find at theme parks that try to interact with you. I didn't last long after that.
I stopped being a newb and started being a selective vigilante. I didn't care if people were red, I only cared if people were attacking me or trying to steal my shit, but there's always morons out there who think they can take you on because you're alone and look innocent. It always felt so good lecturing the ghosts of would-be murderers on the errors of their ways as they spammed "OoOo OOo" at me.
My best times in EQ came on The Combine, the first progressive server. I'd long since stopped playing and didn't feel like running the treadmill again until they announced a new server that would start with base content and then unlock things expansion by expansion as people completed certain objectives. Playing with all the old content, but with a more stable system and a server that didn't crash every five seconds (remember UUnet?) made it a load of fun. It was also great watching noobs who'd never dealt with oldschool zones get wasted and lose their corpses.
I was also a guide for awhile in EQ and that brought its own twisted entertainment. In the world of voluntary customer service the customer is almost always wrong. No, I can't teleport your corpse, no, I can't make them give up the spawn, no, I can't make the npc give back the quest item you handed to him, no no and no. I heard every kind of threat from people trying to track me down, to people saying they'd have my job at Sony for not giving into their demands. On the other hand, there was the rare occasion where we could do something, like revive an entire wiped guild because the server crashed, or clean up a bunch of mobs that had fallen under the world and not depopped.
In the end they took the CS out of our hands and made guides into glorified hosts, like those annoying bubbly people you find at theme parks that try to interact with you. I didn't last long after that.
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Goth-Girl-Supremacy
- Posts: 421
- Joined: Jul 4, '23
Griefing people until they broke down and became my followers to help me gank more people.
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WhiteShark
- Turtle
- Posts: 2097
- Joined: Feb 2, '23
I played Champions Online for a while. It was neat for the fact that there were dozens of powers to choose from and no classes, so the freedom to make the superhero you envisioned was very high. The character creator was excellent, too.
I had a number of characters but my main ended up being a healing-focused superheroine named Wonder. Again, the game was classless, and it was not designed such that a healer was mandatory, but there were a number of healing powers and some of them were really strong. Of course, taking a bevy of support and healing powers didn't leave much for offense, so her main attack was a melee chainsaw power that could be used continuously and did decent damage. She also inadvertently became a tank par excellence thanks to aggro from healing and a power that would create a circle on the ground which, if the caster stood inside of it, would massively reduce CC and give an enormous defense boost. Between that and self-heals, it was basically impossible to dislodge Wonder from her chosen spot.
Due to the above, Wonder was a terror in PvP. In duels, the best the opponent could hope for was a draw; she could crush, through attrition, any build that didn't bring some serious sustain of its own. There was a PvP mode about defending your own NPC raid boss while attacking the enemy's with some capturable stuff in between the two that offered boons. Wonder could make herself an immovable object on those capturables and it would take a concerted effort from multiple people to do anything about it. When the allied NPC boss would get low on health, she could pop an emergency heal that would instantly restore 50% or more of his enormous HP pool. I didn't lose in that game mode very often.
I somehow ended up becoming friends with a guy who specialized in breaking the game—I don't remember if it was because he was interested in my build or I in his. He would spend hours on the test server experimenting with different powers. He was a genius on the in-game market too, becoming rich by carefully reading patch notes and predicting price fluctuations. His character was famous for being unkillable in PvP, but unlike Wonder, he could also dish out serious damage and would routinely solo group content. We ended up doing some of the tougher group content together because, between the two of us, we could handle anything the game could dish out.
Good times. That was perhaps the only time in gaming where I truly felt like a pioneer. I honestly don't remember why I stopped playing. I hear it's F2P now.
I had a number of characters but my main ended up being a healing-focused superheroine named Wonder. Again, the game was classless, and it was not designed such that a healer was mandatory, but there were a number of healing powers and some of them were really strong. Of course, taking a bevy of support and healing powers didn't leave much for offense, so her main attack was a melee chainsaw power that could be used continuously and did decent damage. She also inadvertently became a tank par excellence thanks to aggro from healing and a power that would create a circle on the ground which, if the caster stood inside of it, would massively reduce CC and give an enormous defense boost. Between that and self-heals, it was basically impossible to dislodge Wonder from her chosen spot.
Due to the above, Wonder was a terror in PvP. In duels, the best the opponent could hope for was a draw; she could crush, through attrition, any build that didn't bring some serious sustain of its own. There was a PvP mode about defending your own NPC raid boss while attacking the enemy's with some capturable stuff in between the two that offered boons. Wonder could make herself an immovable object on those capturables and it would take a concerted effort from multiple people to do anything about it. When the allied NPC boss would get low on health, she could pop an emergency heal that would instantly restore 50% or more of his enormous HP pool. I didn't lose in that game mode very often.
I somehow ended up becoming friends with a guy who specialized in breaking the game—I don't remember if it was because he was interested in my build or I in his. He would spend hours on the test server experimenting with different powers. He was a genius on the in-game market too, becoming rich by carefully reading patch notes and predicting price fluctuations. His character was famous for being unkillable in PvP, but unlike Wonder, he could also dish out serious damage and would routinely solo group content. We ended up doing some of the tougher group content together because, between the two of us, we could handle anything the game could dish out.
Good times. That was perhaps the only time in gaming where I truly felt like a pioneer. I honestly don't remember why I stopped playing. I hear it's F2P now.
The best memories I have are from Darkfall Online, many care bears were shat on in those days, many gimps ganked. Good times.
I played Darkfall. It was good but had the same problem as every sandbox pvp MMO. Completely dead world with nothing to do but pvp.
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rusty_shackleford
- Site Admin
- Posts: 10280
- Joined: Feb 2, '23
- Contact:
project gorgon is the only MMO I've played that isn't ancient and actually decent in years
this genre is deader than RTS
SWG private servers like SWG Legends are good, https://swglegends.com/
EQ time locked progression servers are also good, mix of old good EQ + modern UI/UX. Surprisingly enough, EQ has one of the better interfaces of any MMO on the market right now, resolution independent and rather customizable. Just to be clear, these are official EQ servers hosted by daybreak.
I've been meaning to try Anarchy Online, never got into it when it was released.
It's fun. Dated graphics but deep systems.rusty_shackleford wrote: ↑ July 20th, 2023, 17:40I've been meaning to try Anarchy Online, never got into it when it was released.
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MadPreacher
AO was okay until the Nano Techs got their ability to pull entire zones and kite them in the mid-150s. After that it was good luck leveling in a group because there weren't any mobs to fight. I don't know if Funcom ever fixed that problem since I last played in 2004.rusty_shackleford wrote: ↑ July 20th, 2023, 17:40I've been meaning to try Anarchy Online, never got into it when it was released.
Oh if you had a sub from when you bought the game it's locked behind a paywall. You're unable to access it unless you decide to subscribe again. Otherwise, you're forced to create a new f2p account.
Last edited by MadPreacher on July 20th, 2023, 23:55, edited 1 time in total.
Nah, at least MMOs are being made. RTS do not even exist anymore.
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Fedora Master
- Turtle
- Posts: 268
- Joined: Feb 7, '23
Remember ImANewbie?
Yeah, that clown came over to Pacific at one point to promote some crappy guild. Every PK on the shard declared war on them and after a number of months he moved on. Lost in UO was the funnier webcomic.
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General Reign
- Posts: 1030
- Joined: Feb 6, '23
- Location: Scorched Earth
No you weren't.
In 2001 - 2002 or so, I used to play RPG World Online a lot. It was a client based MMO. The main thing I remember at the time is that you could claim a plot of land as your own, but if you didn't set it up correctly, or if you were offline for too long, anyone could come along and take your things. I got some high-level weapons that way.
Also, I spent most of my time crafting cheese in barrels.
Also, I spent most of my time crafting cheese in barrels.
I've never heard of BYOND, but it does look similar. I just checked and it looks like RPGWO still has servers running. I'm very surprised!
http://www.rpgwo.com/
http://www.rpgwo.com/
Didn't you have to pay for the ability to do that in CO? Or was that changed?WhiteShark wrote: ↑ July 20th, 2023, 15:08I played Champions Online for a while. It was neat for the fact that there were dozens of powers to choose from and no classes, so the freedom to make the superhero you envisioned was very high. The character creator was excellent, too.
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WhiteShark
- Turtle
- Posts: 2097
- Joined: Feb 2, '23
Yeah, it was pay2play only originally. Now it's free to play but you have to pay if you don't want to be locked into fixed sets of themed powers.Norfleet wrote: ↑ July 22nd, 2023, 19:03Didn't you have to pay for the ability to do that in CO? Or was that changed?WhiteShark wrote: ↑ July 20th, 2023, 15:08I played Champions Online for a while. It was neat for the fact that there were dozens of powers to choose from and no classes, so the freedom to make the superhero you envisioned was very high. The character creator was excellent, too.
RTS was already perfected with Forged Alliance.Decline wrote: ↑ July 20th, 2023, 18:37Nah, at least MMOs are being made. RTS do not even exist anymore.
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Val the Moofia Boss
- Turtle
- Posts: 314
- Joined: Jun 3, '23
Cryptic's games, Champions Online and Star Trek Online, had a nice character customization feature where you could pick your character's idle pose. Those games came out... almost a decade and a half ago, and I haven't seen other games emulate that since.
Allowed you to zoom out really far and behold massive battles between armies of cool looking spider mechs and enormous robo dinosaurs. I don't understand why so many other RTS games kept the camera zoomed in so close, the unit cap so low, and the units so small and uncool. Impossible Creatures' mix-and-match different animals system was neat, though.
Another great EQ memory I have is getting into fights with wizards and druids who ported people for "donations". I cheerfully reminded them that if they're charging for the service then it's a fee.
I did this a few times as a noob. I had totally forgotten until you brought it up. Good times.
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Slavic Sorcerer
- Posts: 852
- Joined: Sep 9, '23
- Location: Poland
On November last year, my fav MMO, Forsaken World, closed its servers
An MMO by a chinese developer, yes, but it had a fun system and wasn't always this pay to win
This MMO shaped my tastes I still have today, and with it I created characters I try my best to replicate in other games
Each race was different. Each class had a talent point system, and 3 paths to mix and match
My personal fav was the Bard class. Beautiful designs, and actual songs being played
Their gimmick was based on Chords. Most spells created a Chord - water spells created D, wind C, light E - and depending on the combination different auras were activated
It actually required skill to play, to time aura apply and uptime. Like Bards in DnD, they were jacks of all trade; CC, buff, heal secondary only to Priests
Water Bard was my main. I had good damage, amazing heals, threw water spells, and played music - everything at once.
Not my vid. Some skills are recolored due to the Virtue/Vice system
It took you on either the path of good or evil, and it modified your skills effects. I'm posting it rather for the sound effects
Sadly the devs decided to close it. The game had massive playerbase but the numbers were dwindling, and they had to cut the budget to keep their main game alive - Perfect World International
The game I'm also playing from time to time. I had more fond memories in that game from social view
I played it with my brother, his GF, and her friend. The 4 of us had hours of fun as teenagers in the game. I've met people I talked to every day, had an amazing small guild
Those were the good times
But the guild is no more.
Brother no longer talks to me.
His GF broke up with him years ago.
Her friend is a toxic woke feminist I blocked 3 years ago after she reached out to me after years of silence
An MMO by a chinese developer, yes, but it had a fun system and wasn't always this pay to win
This MMO shaped my tastes I still have today, and with it I created characters I try my best to replicate in other games
Each race was different. Each class had a talent point system, and 3 paths to mix and match
My personal fav was the Bard class. Beautiful designs, and actual songs being played
Their gimmick was based on Chords. Most spells created a Chord - water spells created D, wind C, light E - and depending on the combination different auras were activated
It actually required skill to play, to time aura apply and uptime. Like Bards in DnD, they were jacks of all trade; CC, buff, heal secondary only to Priests
Water Bard was my main. I had good damage, amazing heals, threw water spells, and played music - everything at once.
Not my vid. Some skills are recolored due to the Virtue/Vice system
It took you on either the path of good or evil, and it modified your skills effects. I'm posting it rather for the sound effects
Sadly the devs decided to close it. The game had massive playerbase but the numbers were dwindling, and they had to cut the budget to keep their main game alive - Perfect World International
The game I'm also playing from time to time. I had more fond memories in that game from social view
I played it with my brother, his GF, and her friend. The 4 of us had hours of fun as teenagers in the game. I've met people I talked to every day, had an amazing small guild
Those were the good times
But the guild is no more.
Brother no longer talks to me.
His GF broke up with him years ago.
Her friend is a toxic woke feminist I blocked 3 years ago after she reached out to me after years of silence
Last edited by Slavic Sorcerer on November 5th, 2023, 00:23, edited 2 times in total.
There was this time where @rusty_shackleford and I grouped up and then he ditched me for some losers, that was great.
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H-H-Holmes
- Posts: 236
- Joined: Jul 10, '23
- Location: The Welkin Wonderland
Rather vague and faded now, but I have a sackful of great memories of DAoC from 2002-2003. The older I get, and the more time that passes without anything close to it being produced, the more my belief is cemented that it was a masterpiece and one of the greatest games ever created. Nothing has been able to replicate the perfect balance between PvE and PvP in a persistent, perpetually warring 3-faction system with diverse, enjoyable, and decently balanced races and classes across the three realms. Sadly it seems to have been a case of lightning in a bottle and it's looking unlikely that we will see anything like it again.
I try to avoid mentioning WoW in the same context as DAoC because as far as I'm concerned the two games weren't even playing the same sport, never mind competing in the same league. Unfortunately it was WoW, with its more accessible (dumbed down) mechanics and gameplay, which ultimately prospered and the rest is history.
I try to avoid mentioning WoW in the same context as DAoC because as far as I'm concerned the two games weren't even playing the same sport, never mind competing in the same league. Unfortunately it was WoW, with its more accessible (dumbed down) mechanics and gameplay, which ultimately prospered and the rest is history.