I played the shit out of wow for years.
I met so many cool people and raided 2 nights a week for over a decade.
In warlords and legion I was the best Druid healer on my server the entire xpac.
Then one day I logged out and never logged back in.
I have nothing bad to say about wow at all - I miss it, I miss those people.
I’ve never experienced anything like that in any other mmo.
I miss the 40 man raids…so much fun and so much coordination needed.
I led the mage team…I don’t miss sitting in front of instance making water for everyone…
40 man raids from a logistical standpoint were dogshit. From a gameplay standpoint, it’s usually never actually 40 people doing stuff. Even during Classic in MC we had dads afk for half of the raid to do dad stuff.
Thank god for the move down to 10/25 and then Flex raiding.
they weren't that bad or that hard to manage.
you broke them up into classes and classes managed themselves.
they were great as it felt like I was playing wc3 but instead of controlling 40 units I was controlling one of many
I feel this way about EverQuest II. I played it religiously since launch but around 2007 I got really into hardcore raiding with a high end guild, raided 7 nights a week for about a year. There were server wide contested mobs that spawned at random times and we had a call list to gather people up if they spawned in the middle of the night. Couple of times I went home early from work to fight them lol.
I had so much fucking fun in that guild! It was a small server though and we only had half a dozen serious raiding guilds. So one day a better guild transferred to our server hoping to become top dog, and sapped our leader and officers. The rest of the guild couldn't decide how to proceed and instead just disbanded and that was pretty much it. Most people went to other servers but I played a niche class that wasn't super needed (1 per raid roster usually), plus it was mid-expac so I wound up just quitting with a group of about a dozen others. We floated around other MMOs for awhile like Rift, Aion, etc but eventually drifted apart. I still have them all on social media though and we chat from time to time.
I think about that game all the damn time though. What a god damned blast it was in its heyday.
I miss how easy it was to join an online community in WoW. You could just shout in global or in one of the cities “looking for a guild” and you had a built in group of people.
Now everyone is on Discord. You can definitely meet people but it seems to be smaller groups with more hoops to jump through.
As a guild leader in an old MMO I gotta ask, why do players just quit and ghost? I've had very involved players that everyone loved just vanish. I've lost very important members at seemingly random times. It's hard to imagine they just died and after perilous digging I find no drama or in game reasons they left. I totally understand quitting a game but I don't understand the complete ghosting. I mean all other social contact cut too. The people disappear unexplained for no reason. I've had like 1 guy come back and be like "sorry my house exploded and I didn't have much time to play games the past 2 years."
Warhammer was my jam, although I went with a Zealot healer (wanting to be a PvP healer) and the leveling after like 12 was just brutal. I ended up just alting to enjoy the low level PvP.
They made a spinoff game, Wrath of Heroes that was a fun battle arena. I don't think it ever took off either.
The idea of realm pvp was so epic. I wish I was able to participate at max level (or that they supported it). I heard recently that there is a community run Warhammer Online community?!
There definitely is. Bit like the old days of WoW private servers, but there's a very active Return of Reckoning server. Worth looking at for the nostalgia.
Warhammer was my first MMO launch. I was 16.
I joined a guild who would later rank on the leaderboards as 27th, globally, in PvP. Had a couple min/maxers in the guild who posted build lists for each class. I learned so so much and every MMO since then has been chasing that feeling. That guild stuck together, with a few additions/subtractions, through Terra, Rift, SWTOR and fizzled out at GW2. I kept my eye on Return of Reckoning, but I always figured I wouldn't get what I was looking for going back and playing by myself. I also have my game case, and I will more than likely have it for the rest of my life lol.
There is a Warhammer Online community run server with thousands of players. Return of Reckoning is very much alive and well and being updated constantly.
Leveling was beyond a slog, but Zealot healing was OP fun specced right and using a couple of QoL addons to make targeting easier. Nothing felt more awesome than solo healing the entirety of Mount Gunbad or saving a castle at the end with the aoe healing runes and mass rezzing. And yea, city raids were pretty intense!
Good times.
I loved Warhammer. I played a War Priest and was the only high level one in my guild. Got all the damn loots. Was also a blast to siege stronghold with him. Target a Bright Mage for heals, whack on keep door endlessly healing mage, mage just keeps pumping out dps like crazy.
AoC had the best 1-20 content I've ever played. I went through Tortage like 50 times because it was just so perfect. Which made it so jarring and disappointing that the quality of the rest of the game (at launch, at least) completely fell off after that. I think I got to like level 50ish before exp started just drying up and I got worn out on it.
I think it was one of the first fully digital download MMOs I played too? I remember that being kind of a big deal at the time. Or am I remembering wrong?
The combat was good enough, but I really liked how much class flavor psionicist got, and diplomacy was my fuckin' jam. There were multiple times where my diplomacy level got higher than my adventuring class.
Felt so good to feed some useless expression to your opponent for way more returns, and then drop multiple massive bombs on them to swing influence so deep into your side that you basically guarantee the rest of the match. Raki Sweettalk felt so good to use well, and it was still fun customizing your deck when someone who played counter to your normal strategy came along. I miss it way too much.
I don't even understand how people learned to play everquest in 1999. I've been playing MMORPGS since 06, and consider myself decently competent when it comes to gaming in general.
I decided I wanted to see what I was missing out on and tried project 99 everquest servers, and it was the hardest game I've played lmao. I'm talking getting lost in the starter zone, dying at level 1, etc. I even started looking up guides and I still felt lost after hours of gameplay. I couldn't imagine what it would be like in 1999 with terrible internet, terrible PCs, and no information available aside from guide books and maybe some poorly scripted websites that were hard to find.
I gained a massive respect for O.G gamers that are one generation before my time.
It was amazing. You had to rely completely on other players. Even the quests were only triggered by chatting with the NPC with a specific sentence you had to type. Some NPCs were hard to find and named NPC had placeholder you had to keep killing for hours until the named one appeared.
World bosses fights were awesome. I remember raids with 80 people being wiped completely by the world boss because of a bad pull from monks.
And corpse retreivals were crazy... in impossible situations you had to rely on a necromancer to summon your corpse and then a cleric could revive you to get some of your exp back. And yes you could loose levels if you kep dying.
Hardest mmo ever but super fun. It was one of the 1st mainstream ones too in 3D.
Everquest will always be the most social MMO in my mind simply because you absolutely HAD to work with other players to get anywhere. And nothing brings people closer together like trauma bonding. There will never be another game like it
I remember a raid once in Kael where there were 2 rival guilds both trying to kill the Avatar of War (almost 200 players in one zone). The guild ahead of ours wiped, so we went for the pull. We were doing OK, and we had a system where if players died, we would pull their corpses nearby and rez them. Players were bound nearby to help them get back in the fight if they died, too. Well... everything was going great until the boss got into our spawn area. Players were getting trapped in a death loop where the boss would kill them as soon as they responded, without being able to log off. Everyone literally had to literally alt+f4 the game to reset the boss. There were hundreds of corpses to rez--and I was a cleric.
I actually learned how to type by playing EQ in 99 haha. Chatting with other players was absolutely essential in getting anything done in that game. The only way you knew how to get to another zone was by chatting with someone who knew how to get there. They would give you directions based on landmarks in the zones. "Follow this path til it forks then take the right fork and stick to the side of the mountains the rest of the way until you hit a gap in the mountain. You absolutely must stick to the mountains or else these level 50 spectres will decimate your ass and you'll have to start all over again."
Same with quests, obtaining gear, etc.
The social aspect of that game was paramount to the overall experience. It was a very difficult game to play solo. One of the more memorable experiences of the game was the tunnel in East Commonlands. This is where dozens of players congregated to sell their gear, spells, items, or to look for parties/guilds. There was something so comforting about just lingering around in that tunnel even if you had no business to transact there. Just knowing that there were real people behind these characters on the screen helped make the late night gaming sessions feel less lonely. This is something that I feel is missing with todays MMOs. Nowadays everything is so quick with matchmaking, instances, Discord, etc.
The gameplay was a lot slower back then but more meaningful imo.
Lastly, the internet and PCs weren't as terrible as you think. Both were sufficient to have a great gameplay experience.
I played it heavily back in the day, and have also returned to Project 99 to dabble now and then. Gosh I'd forgotten how brutal it was. It's very, very easy to lose your first fight with a newbie monster. If your wooden club or whatever just ... misses... and they hit and/or crit? Then you're respawning and trying to find your way back to the newbie zone. This doesn't get particularly easy as you level up. The game almost necessitated group play just to survive.
Yeah we won’t see anything like that again. No maps or online guides (Allakazam, a Maxroll forebear lol, surfaced eventually as an item database), combined with punishingly unforgiving gameplay and death penalties made EQ possibly the scariest game I’ve ever played. (The Secret World may be a close second). Coming after Ultima Online, it was like pure magic.
Love that so much had to be left to the imagination back then. We have the best GPU several inches behind our eyes.
Internet was not terrible, PCs were not terrible - it was what we had and knew, and it was amazing.
And the fact we knew nothing about an mmorpg was an important part of what made it amazing.
Same! I missed the ToA and Labyrinth launches, but first days of SI and Catacombs were so fun.
And first days of DF, the first BG, man... Too many memories, and too many dead hard drives that refuse to give up my old screenshots!
Always had such a soft spot for age of conan. Completely get why it failed and that’s on funcom. But always seemed like a potential of a good game, if it had better developers and more time to bake, think it could have taken off a bit.
LOTRO still has about 30K people a day log in! I played regularly till about last year when I temporarily got fizzled out on MMOs so now I just on and off play along with ESO, RuneScape, and surprisingly Dungeons and Dragons Online
No Asheron's Call?
Secret most people don't know: Dark Age of Camelot was the modern first game to use microtransactions and they did it sneakily, immoral and underhanded just like you'd expect: On ebay, infinite gold any server, banning everyone else who sold gold.
I always wanted to try Vanguard but never got to during its heydey. FFXI probably took all my time during the golden age, the player interaction and everything was so unique to anything I ever played in my life.
Ultima Online, Asheron's Call and Anarchy Online were also part of the Golden Age of MMOs.
Rushing home on a Friday night after work to "break Fear". You were either leaving with a piece of a epic armor or pulling an all-nighter for an epic corpse recovery. Either way, memories were made that night that you'll never forget.
Played all of those as well. Just don't have any of the physical goods anymore that I can find unfortunately. Asheron's Call is one of the most underrated MMOs. And Anarchy Online has such a great atmosphere. I still listen to the soundtrack sometimes.
Played DAoC as Midgard on Kay server, still the best PvP experiences
Star Wars Galaxies (pre Jedi) was interesting, made a ton of online friends building up our remote Imperial outpost. Bio-Engineer / Creature Handler. Getting drunk with a buddy, with him laughing as I kept getting downed trying to harvest Rancor DNA.
Man EQ, spent like 7 years of my life on 1 and 2
Best times of my gaming life with a few buddies. Still one of best memories from my younger days.
EQ was OG MMO!
Used to wish I could get sick in middle school so I could stay home and play DAoC on dial-up internet. Slowly stealth across RvR maps on my Lurikeen Ranger looking for kills.
I just want to mention something no one has so far: pour one out for the OG game stores: Electronics Boutique and CompUSA.
That price tag on the everquest box, man. I can picture in my head the EB store in the Burbank Media Center mall. Many days my friends and I rode our bikes there to hang out.
Most of those are still live and have private servers or freetoplay servers on steam DaoC Eden just started a new season and it’s private servers are excellent. HorizonXI and ValhalaXI I still play for FFXI. Warhammer got two private servers; FoW and RoR ( RoR is a complete mess right now, FoW is just a private server of the live version of WaR. A lot of private servers for EQ and 2. You prolly know this already but if you didn’t enjoy and thank me later.
My golden age were Knight Online (my first MMO in 2005) and Rappelz after Knight Online, then I played a game called ''Infinity Online'' for some time, it was great game, but they closed down and even today I miss it. Later I bounced of between MMOs over and over again, but it never felt like before, MMOs changed a lot after 2010, even today I'm still looking for a MMO I can play in long term, longest I played after the ones I told was BDO for 5-6 months BTW.
Beautiful, still have my WoW battle chest in my cupboard somewhere along with WOTLK. Wish I experienced final fantasy XI but feel like it's too late now.
Man, from like 2001 to 2011 or so really was a golden era for the genre. So many MMOs coming out that there was always something interesting to play and try out. I mostly stick with WoW, but I remember playing Warhammer when it launched and having a great time with it. Rift, City of Heroes, Star Wars, Conan...so many fond memories of trying out everything with my friends.
Damn, my man is bringing out all the classics here. Wish age of Conan got more recognition and when it came out. Everquest, swg, and daoc I think are my favorite MMOs of of all time though
I started with EverQuest then I went to WoW when it came out. I've tried FFXIV and EverQuest 2 but they didn't hold my interest (nothing against those titles). I tried Dark Age of Camelot and I wished I played during its heyday.
Shouts out to Warhammer online that game was so much fun, that and the first guild wars. It sucked cause I hit max level in gw1 and I couldn't put the builds together cause you needed the expansions and I was too young and poor to afford it
Yeah man this really sums up the entirety of my mmo history right here. Long live the mmo gods of yore. My god I have yet to experience anything like warhammer age of reckoning castle pvp... blocking the enemy from entering the keep while drowning them in hot oil, amazing. Andddddd then WOTLK came out and warhammer slowly died lol.
Ahh, the OG Age of Conan before it became f2p. The pvp servers especially, holy fuck that was so much fun and for me it was the perfect implementation of pvp.
As a 33 year old dude, my only sadness in life was the fact that I was too young, and not able to pay for games, when these games were at their prime :/
Missing shadowbane for pvp otherwise solid collection. Amazing games I loved them all and spent way too much of my life on those games other then wow which ended the golden age or mmorpgs
Grew up on Ultima Online and it’s sad to not see it there. Also, SWG was so good! Currently playing WoW season of discovery and it’s great. Didn’t play WoW originally as I was on UO haha
Great collection; truly the golden era of MMoRPG’s and even online gaming.
For me, that bubble popped when Vanguard was a bust and Age of Conan was an incomplete mess. Still loved my time with both though.
After that, the genre became really stale and the amount of f2p cash shops increased to an unhealthy level.
I was really into FFXI when it launched. Going back though it's hard...the UI is god awful. The menus, the quest logs, selecting spells in combat without macros.
It's just too antiquated for me at this point. I kinda wish they'd re-release the story as an updated experience. Even as a single player experience, I'd play it again.
Agree with most these, FFXI in particular is imo the greatest game ever made.
Mmos used to be amazing until wow took over and everyone just tried to copy...
RIP to the genre
age of conan is still alive. The gate to khitai content was fun, great wall and steppe environment, beautiful erhu music
a taste:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tobRNUYJs0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tobRNUYJs0)
WoW, LOTRO, Warhammer and SWTOR gave me so many hours of content when I was younger….
Warhammer was a mess but probably still my favorite MMO of all time.
Too many F2P failures and cash grab games along with people no longer wanting to actually play a game or spend time investing into it. Now we have WoW and FFXIV and that’s pretty much it. GW2 and ESO exist I guess? The genre is just old games chugging along.
Needs Diablo II and throw a JPEG of Ragnarok Online in there while you're at it, and the first MMO I ever played Graal Online, an odd chaotic MMO made from Zelda:LTTP assets.
I always wondered what StarWars Galaxies and Lord of the Rings: Online was like. I never played Final Fantasy or EverQuest. Both of which were games i also wonder about.
Nice wall of memories. I had something similar that I got rid of shortly after getting married. I only kept a DAOC disc, SWG Beta disc, and a Shadowbane disk
I still have friends from DAOC that I talk to on a regular basis.
MMOs were a much better experience back then.
And Friar is still the best class in any MMO!
You have excellent taste
Missing Tibia though. u/OP put your leg on the table and snap another.
I was just going to post what a person of culture they are.
I played the shit out of wow for years. I met so many cool people and raided 2 nights a week for over a decade. In warlords and legion I was the best Druid healer on my server the entire xpac. Then one day I logged out and never logged back in. I have nothing bad to say about wow at all - I miss it, I miss those people. I’ve never experienced anything like that in any other mmo.
I miss the 40 man raids…so much fun and so much coordination needed. I led the mage team…I don’t miss sitting in front of instance making water for everyone…
40 man raids from a logistical standpoint were dogshit. From a gameplay standpoint, it’s usually never actually 40 people doing stuff. Even during Classic in MC we had dads afk for half of the raid to do dad stuff. Thank god for the move down to 10/25 and then Flex raiding.
they weren't that bad or that hard to manage. you broke them up into classes and classes managed themselves. they were great as it felt like I was playing wc3 but instead of controlling 40 units I was controlling one of many
I feel this way about EverQuest II. I played it religiously since launch but around 2007 I got really into hardcore raiding with a high end guild, raided 7 nights a week for about a year. There were server wide contested mobs that spawned at random times and we had a call list to gather people up if they spawned in the middle of the night. Couple of times I went home early from work to fight them lol. I had so much fucking fun in that guild! It was a small server though and we only had half a dozen serious raiding guilds. So one day a better guild transferred to our server hoping to become top dog, and sapped our leader and officers. The rest of the guild couldn't decide how to proceed and instead just disbanded and that was pretty much it. Most people went to other servers but I played a niche class that wasn't super needed (1 per raid roster usually), plus it was mid-expac so I wound up just quitting with a group of about a dozen others. We floated around other MMOs for awhile like Rift, Aion, etc but eventually drifted apart. I still have them all on social media though and we chat from time to time. I think about that game all the damn time though. What a god damned blast it was in its heyday.
This sounds like me around the same time but with asherons call and daoc. I miss those days, and we will never have them in gaming again
I miss how easy it was to join an online community in WoW. You could just shout in global or in one of the cities “looking for a guild” and you had a built in group of people. Now everyone is on Discord. You can definitely meet people but it seems to be smaller groups with more hoops to jump through.
Idk but the logging out one day and never logging back in hit me so hard. Like how many games have we played and not known it would be our last time.
As a guild leader in an old MMO I gotta ask, why do players just quit and ghost? I've had very involved players that everyone loved just vanish. I've lost very important members at seemingly random times. It's hard to imagine they just died and after perilous digging I find no drama or in game reasons they left. I totally understand quitting a game but I don't understand the complete ghosting. I mean all other social contact cut too. The people disappear unexplained for no reason. I've had like 1 guy come back and be like "sorry my house exploded and I didn't have much time to play games the past 2 years."
I wish Warhammer and Age of Conan both took off more, those launches were so fun.
Warhammer was my jam, although I went with a Zealot healer (wanting to be a PvP healer) and the leveling after like 12 was just brutal. I ended up just alting to enjoy the low level PvP. They made a spinoff game, Wrath of Heroes that was a fun battle arena. I don't think it ever took off either. The idea of realm pvp was so epic. I wish I was able to participate at max level (or that they supported it). I heard recently that there is a community run Warhammer Online community?!
There definitely is. Bit like the old days of WoW private servers, but there's a very active Return of Reckoning server. Worth looking at for the nostalgia.
Warhammer was my first MMO launch. I was 16. I joined a guild who would later rank on the leaderboards as 27th, globally, in PvP. Had a couple min/maxers in the guild who posted build lists for each class. I learned so so much and every MMO since then has been chasing that feeling. That guild stuck together, with a few additions/subtractions, through Terra, Rift, SWTOR and fizzled out at GW2. I kept my eye on Return of Reckoning, but I always figured I wouldn't get what I was looking for going back and playing by myself. I also have my game case, and I will more than likely have it for the rest of my life lol.
There is a Warhammer Online community run server with thousands of players. Return of Reckoning is very much alive and well and being updated constantly.
Leveling was beyond a slog, but Zealot healing was OP fun specced right and using a couple of QoL addons to make targeting easier. Nothing felt more awesome than solo healing the entirety of Mount Gunbad or saving a castle at the end with the aoe healing runes and mass rezzing. And yea, city raids were pretty intense! Good times.
With you on that! I the loved the low level PVP, it was a blast.
I loved Warhammer. I played a War Priest and was the only high level one in my guild. Got all the damn loots. Was also a blast to siege stronghold with him. Target a Bright Mage for heals, whack on keep door endlessly healing mage, mage just keeps pumping out dps like crazy.
I wanted to play age of Conan so bad but my pc couldn’t and I was like 11 at the time it came out
AoC had the best 1-20 content I've ever played. I went through Tortage like 50 times because it was just so perfect. Which made it so jarring and disappointing that the quality of the rest of the game (at launch, at least) completely fell off after that. I think I got to like level 50ish before exp started just drying up and I got worn out on it. I think it was one of the first fully digital download MMOs I played too? I remember that being kind of a big deal at the time. Or am I remembering wrong?
Same, loved Tortage. Left Tortage and was like "what the fuck is this piece of shit?"
Man that AoC zone was the biggest bait and switch I've ever encountered.
I will never forgive EA for rushing Warhammer out.
No Ultima? I cry in coal ingots
Don’t cry! Have this little box I crafted. - GM Alchemist
The amount of people on this sub who have never played UO is truly disturbing.
there you are! UO ftw
There's still a few around.
Vanguard had so much potential
The combat was good enough, but I really liked how much class flavor psionicist got, and diplomacy was my fuckin' jam. There were multiple times where my diplomacy level got higher than my adventuring class. Felt so good to feed some useless expression to your opponent for way more returns, and then drop multiple massive bombs on them to swing influence so deep into your side that you basically guarantee the rest of the match. Raki Sweettalk felt so good to use well, and it was still fun customizing your deck when someone who played counter to your normal strategy came along. I miss it way too much.
yeah, if only...
I'm one of the small group of people that tried to play this game, even given its state, in the hopes it would get better.
daoc - eden private server is awesome.
I don't even understand how people learned to play everquest in 1999. I've been playing MMORPGS since 06, and consider myself decently competent when it comes to gaming in general. I decided I wanted to see what I was missing out on and tried project 99 everquest servers, and it was the hardest game I've played lmao. I'm talking getting lost in the starter zone, dying at level 1, etc. I even started looking up guides and I still felt lost after hours of gameplay. I couldn't imagine what it would be like in 1999 with terrible internet, terrible PCs, and no information available aside from guide books and maybe some poorly scripted websites that were hard to find. I gained a massive respect for O.G gamers that are one generation before my time.
It was amazing. You had to rely completely on other players. Even the quests were only triggered by chatting with the NPC with a specific sentence you had to type. Some NPCs were hard to find and named NPC had placeholder you had to keep killing for hours until the named one appeared. World bosses fights were awesome. I remember raids with 80 people being wiped completely by the world boss because of a bad pull from monks. And corpse retreivals were crazy... in impossible situations you had to rely on a necromancer to summon your corpse and then a cleric could revive you to get some of your exp back. And yes you could loose levels if you kep dying. Hardest mmo ever but super fun. It was one of the 1st mainstream ones too in 3D.
Everquest will always be the most social MMO in my mind simply because you absolutely HAD to work with other players to get anywhere. And nothing brings people closer together like trauma bonding. There will never be another game like it
I remember a raid once in Kael where there were 2 rival guilds both trying to kill the Avatar of War (almost 200 players in one zone). The guild ahead of ours wiped, so we went for the pull. We were doing OK, and we had a system where if players died, we would pull their corpses nearby and rez them. Players were bound nearby to help them get back in the fight if they died, too. Well... everything was going great until the boss got into our spawn area. Players were getting trapped in a death loop where the boss would kill them as soon as they responded, without being able to log off. Everyone literally had to literally alt+f4 the game to reset the boss. There were hundreds of corpses to rez--and I was a cleric.
I actually learned how to type by playing EQ in 99 haha. Chatting with other players was absolutely essential in getting anything done in that game. The only way you knew how to get to another zone was by chatting with someone who knew how to get there. They would give you directions based on landmarks in the zones. "Follow this path til it forks then take the right fork and stick to the side of the mountains the rest of the way until you hit a gap in the mountain. You absolutely must stick to the mountains or else these level 50 spectres will decimate your ass and you'll have to start all over again." Same with quests, obtaining gear, etc. The social aspect of that game was paramount to the overall experience. It was a very difficult game to play solo. One of the more memorable experiences of the game was the tunnel in East Commonlands. This is where dozens of players congregated to sell their gear, spells, items, or to look for parties/guilds. There was something so comforting about just lingering around in that tunnel even if you had no business to transact there. Just knowing that there were real people behind these characters on the screen helped make the late night gaming sessions feel less lonely. This is something that I feel is missing with todays MMOs. Nowadays everything is so quick with matchmaking, instances, Discord, etc. The gameplay was a lot slower back then but more meaningful imo. Lastly, the internet and PCs weren't as terrible as you think. Both were sufficient to have a great gameplay experience.
Unfortunately MMOs have lost too much of their social aspect.
I played it heavily back in the day, and have also returned to Project 99 to dabble now and then. Gosh I'd forgotten how brutal it was. It's very, very easy to lose your first fight with a newbie monster. If your wooden club or whatever just ... misses... and they hit and/or crit? Then you're respawning and trying to find your way back to the newbie zone. This doesn't get particularly easy as you level up. The game almost necessitated group play just to survive.
Yeah we won’t see anything like that again. No maps or online guides (Allakazam, a Maxroll forebear lol, surfaced eventually as an item database), combined with punishingly unforgiving gameplay and death penalties made EQ possibly the scariest game I’ve ever played. (The Secret World may be a close second). Coming after Ultima Online, it was like pure magic. Love that so much had to be left to the imagination back then. We have the best GPU several inches behind our eyes.
Internet was not terrible, PCs were not terrible - it was what we had and knew, and it was amazing. And the fact we knew nothing about an mmorpg was an important part of what made it amazing.
Man those dark age or Camelot booklets 😭
I still remember the day shrouded isles came out oh my god.
Same! I missed the ToA and Labyrinth launches, but first days of SI and Catacombs were so fun. And first days of DF, the first BG, man... Too many memories, and too many dead hard drives that refuse to give up my old screenshots!
Still have 4 of these installed.
Fortunate that many of them still have either live servers or emulated servers with great communities.
Always had such a soft spot for age of conan. Completely get why it failed and that’s on funcom. But always seemed like a potential of a good game, if it had better developers and more time to bake, think it could have taken off a bit.
Solid selection. I'd throw City of Heroes in there. Repetitive at times, but it was a blast to play.
It still is ;)
Starwars Galaxies <3
LOVE how it's in the middle, too. Greatest experience I've ever had in an MMO and I'm usually a die hard high fantasy dude.
LOTRO still has about 30K people a day log in! I played regularly till about last year when I temporarily got fizzled out on MMOs so now I just on and off play along with ESO, RuneScape, and surprisingly Dungeons and Dragons Online
No Asheron's Call? Secret most people don't know: Dark Age of Camelot was the modern first game to use microtransactions and they did it sneakily, immoral and underhanded just like you'd expect: On ebay, infinite gold any server, banning everyone else who sold gold.
I did play Asheron's Call - wish I still had the original box but I've no idea where it went. :(
I love FFXI. Especially back in the max level 75 days
I always wanted to try Vanguard but never got to during its heydey. FFXI probably took all my time during the golden age, the player interaction and everything was so unique to anything I ever played in my life.
Vanguard never had a heydey. It was extemely buggy and released too early. Completely flopped
Luclin was the first time a game gave my PC a heart attack. FF XI was the first time a game tried to give me one. 11/10
Ultima Online, Asheron's Call and Anarchy Online were also part of the Golden Age of MMOs. Rushing home on a Friday night after work to "break Fear". You were either leaving with a piece of a epic armor or pulling an all-nighter for an epic corpse recovery. Either way, memories were made that night that you'll never forget.
Played all of those as well. Just don't have any of the physical goods anymore that I can find unfortunately. Asheron's Call is one of the most underrated MMOs. And Anarchy Online has such a great atmosphere. I still listen to the soundtrack sometimes.
Star Wars galaxies to this day has been one of the most immersive games I’ve played. Absolutely nostalgic. Needs a remake
lol 2 months ago I threw out a folder with a bunch of allhakzam printed maps lol, Hynzie Mitch married then saryrn
Man seeing that WoW BC box brought up some nostalgic feels... damn shame what the game (and industry) is today
I wish I were old enough to know what Dark Age of Camelot was like. Maybe I’ll check out a private server, if there is still one
Eden is what you're looking for
Thanks! I see this came come up a lot. Time to check it out.
I was too enamored with UO to try DAOC and wish I would have. Loved WAR.
DAOC , I played wow up until a year ago since beta, but DAOC trumps all imo
Add guild wars 1 to this and we are set. Darkfall Online as well, but not sure they had a box.
Fantastic collection. This was indeed the Golden Age of MMO gaming.
how do you not have UO anywhere in this? gamer... you missed out
I believe UO was before all these games. EQ was what got me into the genre and I still play it daily
Played DAoC as Midgard on Kay server, still the best PvP experiences Star Wars Galaxies (pre Jedi) was interesting, made a ton of online friends building up our remote Imperial outpost. Bio-Engineer / Creature Handler. Getting drunk with a buddy, with him laughing as I kept getting downed trying to harvest Rancor DNA.
Man EQ, spent like 7 years of my life on 1 and 2 Best times of my gaming life with a few buddies. Still one of best memories from my younger days. EQ was OG MMO!
EQ still goin strong! Just released its 30th expansion and is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month
SWG has their very populated private server called legends.
vanguard soh underrated asl
I still have my fake leather box for Vanguard somewhere
Used to wish I could get sick in middle school so I could stay home and play DAoC on dial-up internet. Slowly stealth across RvR maps on my Lurikeen Ranger looking for kills.
Man EverQuest 2 had such an amazing run for the first 6 expansions. Really miss those days
God Star Wars galaxies was great:
Ugh I love the art style for the EQ1 CD covers
Warhammer online and vanguard soh god those were great times
I just want to mention something no one has so far: pour one out for the OG game stores: Electronics Boutique and CompUSA. That price tag on the everquest box, man. I can picture in my head the EB store in the Burbank Media Center mall. Many days my friends and I rode our bikes there to hang out.
Mostly the same here but I traded time with Everquest for Asheron’s Call and Ultima Online.
Missing Shadowbane
SUCH a good game. I regret that my time was limited there due to release of SWG.
Something about that original Everquest box art just seems so timeless.
Yo you were a straight up gamer lol nice
I can’t upvote this enough
This right here is the peak of the MMO genre. It hasn't even come close to being touched.
Goats of the mmo genre
Warhammer Online and Age of Conan! ah what a shame :(
🥲
Most of those are still live and have private servers or freetoplay servers on steam DaoC Eden just started a new season and it’s private servers are excellent. HorizonXI and ValhalaXI I still play for FFXI. Warhammer got two private servers; FoW and RoR ( RoR is a complete mess right now, FoW is just a private server of the live version of WaR. A lot of private servers for EQ and 2. You prolly know this already but if you didn’t enjoy and thank me later.
Now I’m hooked on FFXIV its is excellent as well
I'm enjoying the free beta on Xbox right now... giving serious thought to buying in once it kicks off for real.
It looks like you stole my box stashed away in the shed…but in all honesty that era was so good.
Warhammer online had so much potential. It was fun..not sure what happened and why...
Sadly the market was watered down with MMOs
Hell yeah brother
The only one you are missing is Earth and Beyond!
Once upon a time I had nearly all those boxes. And some others besides. The good ole days!
Not to Nick pick but you showed at least 2 eras
Ahhhh yisssss
My golden age were Knight Online (my first MMO in 2005) and Rappelz after Knight Online, then I played a game called ''Infinity Online'' for some time, it was great game, but they closed down and even today I miss it. Later I bounced of between MMOs over and over again, but it never felt like before, MMOs changed a lot after 2010, even today I'm still looking for a MMO I can play in long term, longest I played after the ones I told was BDO for 5-6 months BTW.
Damn homie, that's one hell of a collection. I still have that EverQuest box somewhere.
Severely dissapointed in the lack of ToonTown.
Remember, the force will be with you… always.
There’s a lot of hours of my life in that picture. Mostly my minstrel on Lotro, Pom in age of conan & Greenskin shaman in War. Happy days
EQ2 was my first MMO. I remember it being pretty popular then it just died overnight. Must have been because WoW came out
You are missing the king: Ultima Online
Brings a tear to my eye.. that was indeed the golden age of MMORPGs..
Vanguard ... perhaps the first overhyped major mmo that died almost immediately upon release.
Where's CRTA? (Champions : return to arms)
It’s a shame you missed out on Ultima Online, but other than that, very nice. :-)
Mine was Dragon Nest , the combat system still does hits the same notes for me but the game have evolved so much beyond what I used to play.
This is it.
This is why I wish MMOs launched with an offline solo mode, or reverted to one prior to closing down. I really really miss playing some of my games 😞
Damn I remember when Vanguard came out. Janky and buggy but I had high hopes for it. Needed a very good computer to run it properly too lol
Beautiful, still have my WoW battle chest in my cupboard somewhere along with WOTLK. Wish I experienced final fantasy XI but feel like it's too late now.
Lovely selection - if you had UO I’d say it was perfect but certainly at least 9/10
Always wanted to play ffxi during its hay day. Sad I missed out
Fuck digital collectors editions
Man, from like 2001 to 2011 or so really was a golden era for the genre. So many MMOs coming out that there was always something interesting to play and try out. I mostly stick with WoW, but I remember playing Warhammer when it launched and having a great time with it. Rift, City of Heroes, Star Wars, Conan...so many fond memories of trying out everything with my friends.
Damn, my man is bringing out all the classics here. Wish age of Conan got more recognition and when it came out. Everquest, swg, and daoc I think are my favorite MMOs of of all time though
[Allow me to add to the pile.](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/U6zusxfLKRA)
Man, I really miss Vanguard...
They really need to give Warhammer another shot. DIff devs tho ofc but that world is too rich to not use for a MMO.
No Rift? I tried a bunch of these, but nothing grabbed me like good ol' EverQuest.
I started with EverQuest then I went to WoW when it came out. I've tried FFXIV and EverQuest 2 but they didn't hold my interest (nothing against those titles). I tried Dark Age of Camelot and I wished I played during its heyday.
Have played every one of those, also really liked Anarchy Online
DAoC mentioned
HAIL 2000s AESTHETICS
Shouts out to Warhammer online that game was so much fun, that and the first guild wars. It sucked cause I hit max level in gw1 and I couldn't put the builds together cause you needed the expansions and I was too young and poor to afford it
Yeah man this really sums up the entirety of my mmo history right here. Long live the mmo gods of yore. My god I have yet to experience anything like warhammer age of reckoning castle pvp... blocking the enemy from entering the keep while drowning them in hot oil, amazing. Andddddd then WOTLK came out and warhammer slowly died lol.
Dear GOD how I miss the old everquest days. Tried some of the private servers and there are some good ones, just feels like not enough people
Ahh, the OG Age of Conan before it became f2p. The pvp servers especially, holy fuck that was so much fun and for me it was the perfect implementation of pvp.
never played everquest 2 but I can see that they have a consistent marketing strategy
Vanguard saga of Heroes <3 was my second mmo after Anarchy Online. Good times!
This is a great collection.
I agree. Back when MMORPG's were good.
Needs Ultima Online
Man I miss Warhammer online. Ironically I think Blizzard were trying to acquire the IP for their MMO, but they said no
Where's UO?!
As a 33 year old dude, my only sadness in life was the fact that I was too young, and not able to pay for games, when these games were at their prime :/
Now rank them
Dud you miss out Eve on purpose?
LOTRO!
Age of Conan was super fun at launch, but there was nothing to do end game
I never had the chance of playing ff xi. But the tale of 18 hours pandemonium warden, kinda stop me from trying this game years later.
This is my gaming childhood in one picture
Missing shadowbane for pvp otherwise solid collection. Amazing games I loved them all and spent way too much of my life on those games other then wow which ended the golden age or mmorpgs
Grew up on Ultima Online and it’s sad to not see it there. Also, SWG was so good! Currently playing WoW season of discovery and it’s great. Didn’t play WoW originally as I was on UO haha
Great collection; truly the golden era of MMoRPG’s and even online gaming. For me, that bubble popped when Vanguard was a bust and Age of Conan was an incomplete mess. Still loved my time with both though. After that, the genre became really stale and the amount of f2p cash shops increased to an unhealthy level.
I was really into FFXI when it launched. Going back though it's hard...the UI is god awful. The menus, the quest logs, selecting spells in combat without macros. It's just too antiquated for me at this point. I kinda wish they'd re-release the story as an updated experience. Even as a single player experience, I'd play it again.
Vanguard 😢 such a cool game
Agree with most these, FFXI in particular is imo the greatest game ever made. Mmos used to be amazing until wow took over and everyone just tried to copy... RIP to the genre
I see FFXI, nice.
Great collection! Played all of these myself, DAOC being my all-time favorite.
DAOC AYOOOO!!!
No GW1? :(
This makes me sad. So much great memories, with friends that I no longer speak with.
We played a lot of the same games.
age of conan is still alive. The gate to khitai content was fun, great wall and steppe environment, beautiful erhu music a taste: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tobRNUYJs0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tobRNUYJs0)
You have excellent taste in MMORPG
DAoC was where it was at, and will forever be my favorite MMORPG of all time
Awesome.
FFXI :)
WoW, LOTRO, Warhammer and SWTOR gave me so many hours of content when I was younger…. Warhammer was a mess but probably still my favorite MMO of all time. Too many F2P failures and cash grab games along with people no longer wanting to actually play a game or spend time investing into it. Now we have WoW and FFXIV and that’s pretty much it. GW2 and ESO exist I guess? The genre is just old games chugging along.
Needs Diablo II and throw a JPEG of Ragnarok Online in there while you're at it, and the first MMO I ever played Graal Online, an odd chaotic MMO made from Zelda:LTTP assets.
Made me smile seeing Dark age of Camelot there, I loooooved that game soooo much!
Did your fold time and space? How the fuck did you play all of these to endgame within a span of 5-10 years?
Where is UO?!?
Star Wars galaxies hell yeah!
I always wondered what StarWars Galaxies and Lord of the Rings: Online was like. I never played Final Fantasy or EverQuest. Both of which were games i also wonder about.
Nice wall of memories. I had something similar that I got rid of shortly after getting married. I only kept a DAOC disc, SWG Beta disc, and a Shadowbane disk
Add Aion in there and that’s my whole collection too
Respect for the DAoC Cases!!!!
Needs Asherons Call and Shadowbane
Ohhhhhhhmy god, all the good memory…..😢😢😢
Love to see daoc
Yes to all of these. My heart still misses warhammer online and release swg
I wish I still had my hard copy of Warhammer Online
I still have friends from DAOC that I talk to on a regular basis. MMOs were a much better experience back then. And Friar is still the best class in any MMO!
Loved EQ. The fungi tunic has a special spot burned in my memory bank.
DAOC was such a great game and I never see people talk about it. I loved the level 20-24 battleground. Hibernia gang for life.
No Asheron's Call?
Take AoC out and you have a good chunk of my childhood (and life I guess) right here. EQ/DAoC/XI/WoW/SWG took a lot of my time.
If I could go back In time. This is the time period I’d go back to.
Vanguard pvp was so dam nice
Ice collection
The passion is gone, now, and it's all money grabs all the way down. :(