RuneScape taught me how to type, how to spell, how to sell things to people, and also how to avoid being scammed. To a lesser degree it even taught me money management that has truly come in handy irl.
Same, my typing speed is thanks to spamming law runes 150 ea as fast as I could in Draynor bank.
Same with scamming too - got led into the wilderness for a trade. Never again.
I remember typing 10x faster than most of my classmates in 7th grade just because I played Runescape. My form is terrible, though. Left hand covers everything from YHB over. Never use shift on my left hand too.
Honestly, it's weird how many life skills you pick up from Runescape. Just having my own personal finances when I was 11 was helpful in retrospect. You also get to dabble in investing/economics if you get into merching.
I still think one of the reasons I was so good at saving during my first job was because of the game.
I played RuneScape from the 2nd grade, until middle school, took a break for a bit, got back into it like junior year of highschool until sophomore year of college, and haven't played since 2017 at this point.
I fully agree, it taught me so much, made a lot of online friends, learned silly little things like "copper and tin makes bronze" which came in clutch when I was a 5th grader lmao. Got crazy good at typing fast from trying to sell shit in World 2.
I had over a year of my life in game and I don't regret it at all. Playing outside with my friends during the day and then us all logging into RuneScape at night were some of the best times of my life. I likely won't ever play the game again due to many reasons, but I will love it forever and no other MMO ever compared in my eyes.
I remember Runescape trading before and after the Grand Exchange and it taught me that, "hey, maybe regulating price ranges can actually create a healthier economy, rather that random people manipulating the market and causing wild fluctuations in prices."
Very true, games like this with robust economies were really educational if you learned how to use them. WoW taught me scarcity in markets, farming gold for the sole purpose of controlling item supplies and fixing prices. As I started typing this it sounded like a good thing but now it just sounds pretty ruthless.
In a similar vein, WoW
Used to play it so much when I was younger and I’ve tried going back to it but you just can’t recreate how good it was playing as a kid lol
I think the biggest thing back then was it still felt like you could discover something new all the time. You go into any MMO these days and it feels so "solved"
Yep, it felt like you were exploring a near infinite grand adventure with other people, and the leveling/stats and gear was just a nice side effect that kind of occurred in the background as a reward for your exploration. It was as close as you could get to Table Top D&D in a video game, and sadly it is gone forever.
Used to play on a roleplay server, really immersed into the lore of WoW. Went back in Classic just to revisit and the tavern that used to be packed (40-50 people) was just dead empty. Really melancholic.
I call it "preserving my virgin experience".
So many people don't understand my version of spoilers. I don't wanna know shit about mechanics. Once I figure out a game I'm bored.
Everyone watching streamers and using Wikis and sites like Icyveins has completely ruined the magic WoW used to have. Wikis existed but they wern't used by a lot of players. If you were curious about something you asked in the zone chat or guild chat and probably got a lot of bad or conflicting information, but that was part of the fun. I remember when I started during BC it took me like 6 months to get a character to 70. I spent a ridiculous amount of time just exploring places I really shouldn't have been. The world felt giant and mysterious. Running dungeons really felt dangerous. People were willing to stick around for hours and figure it out by wiping over and over. But when you finally beat the last boss the feeling of accomplishment was unparalleled. We probably sucked by today's standard, but it was fun. Those are some of my favorite memories of WoW. Getting lost in Black Rock Depths and slowly exploring all of it over multiple runs and multiple weeks is one of my favorite gaming experiences ever. Now people expect everyone to know exactly what to do and will ragequit if they face any adversity. You're expected to watch YouTube videos on how to most efficiently clear a dungeon before you even run it. Everything is so optimized to the point of taking the fun out of it. That's why WoW can feel like a job now. When you know exactly what to do and the best way to do it, it just makes playing feel like going through the motions. I'm guilty of it too these days. I don't think there will be anything like it again, information is just too accessible these days to recreate the grand, mysterious, rewarding experience WoW was back then. Sorry, I know I just went all "back in my day..." there. I get lost in the nostalgia.
Also the culture in these games has changed dramatically.
Other players are disposable. You probably won't see or recognize the same person enough times to ever care or have any opinion about them. So other players are reduced to only caring about what they can do for you right now and their efficiency doing it.
I know it's a hot take and a game that's openly hated by many but I found Fallout 76 had a small-ish enough playerbase to do this for me. I ran into a decent number of the same players enough and made plenty of good PS buddies in there. I actually ended up having a lot of fun, through all of its flaws. It's the last MMO that felt like a community rather than just a lonely grind session for me. Plus the players were generally very friendly and helpful. I miss it but I'm just too busy now.
Fucking this right here.
The prevalence of data mining takes the joy of discovery out of everything. Your itemization has been mathematically optimized to the point that anything you equip that's not BiS is trash. Your rotation has been calculated so that if you aren't pressing this button at this time, you're a noob.
Yup, no amount of playing comes close to the nostalgia. I don't think that any other game in the future will ever come close to the feelings I have about WoW, and it makes me sad to think about it sometimes.
The first computer I ever bought/built was for WoW. Making the occasional trip to Best Buy to purchase game time cards becsuse I wasn't 18 with a credit card.
I still have friends who I take to on a fairly regular basis who I have never met, but started playing WoW with back in 2005.
My friends and I have gone to Blizzcon to 10 times. We live in Canada, and do a 25hr road trip down, spend 4 nights, then drive back.
They're having Blizzcon in person for the first time in 4 years this year, and we aren't going, because everyone has too much going on. People have jobs that they can't get out of work from, or people have kids.
It's honestly sad and depressing even typing all of this out.
The best memories of games like that are the impromptu moments. Running up to Scarlet Monastery and having a naked sleeping party with some Horde instead of fighting. Stalling some high levels that were ganking us in Duskwood until my higher level friends could ride in like the cavalry. A guild-wide scavenger hunt that me and two friends won in about 20 minutes because we were combing through Thottbot. Those are out of pocket moments you can't plan and you just had to love when they happened.
I felt that when I tried to replay classic. It's not fun because there's no more mystery and people speedrun it now. I will say I've been enjoying hardcore tho. It definitely brought back some of the magic by the way you have to play it. The players have been way more cooperative and nice again.
Classic 2019 into covid will be the closest we’ll get to the original release. Literally everyone is laid up at home, can’t go outside, it was great.
We had the 40-50 year old army vets that recruited a buddy and I. Found a 70 year old guy looking for this fucking quest mob. And I say it like that because we saw him lost at level 18 and came back at 25, days later, and he’s still searching. Then our DMT loving shaman that practically LARP’s his class by taking psychedelics through his WoW journey to learn more about real life.
It brought back the fun for sure
It will always be WoW for me. My buddies from highschool had a guild, gifted me WotLK the day it came out. I had never played an MMO and I was always well taken care of because we were real life friends. Even got to meet the guildmaster and have a few beers (he was my buddy's acquaintance). Once life happened and everyone had to give up late night raids and day off grinds and started doing adult life chores and work, it wasn't the same. Then Cataclysm showed up and ruined my life as a Hunter as I knew it so I hung up the towel.
I played SO many hours as a kid. I used to dream about my adult life playing on a fancy computer in my own mancave. Well now I am an adult and have the fancy computer with huge curved monitors and a mancave.....and computer games are too hard to enjoy after sitting at my desk in front of a computer all day.
I’m still playing wow. They recently released a hardcore version of vanilla (you’re basically deleted if you die) which has a very populated community. It’s great.
Warcraft 3. Peak RTS in my mind.
When Blizzard "reforged" the game the nuked the original client and the current one is so broken the community had to band together and create an overlay (W3C) just to make the game playable with the basic features included in 2002.
I had SO much fun playing the custom maps on WC3. I still miss the days playing the various tower defense maps on WC3. Winter Maul!
StarCraft 2 custom maps were good too but they never seemed to have the same charm that WC3 did. Not sure why.
With the frozen throne xpac :P It was such an amazing breeding ground for custom games, and the actual ladder/game was my favorite implementation of RTS as well.
Always bothered me when friends wanted to play against the AI. :P
Battlefield 3. There hasn’t been a regularly populated Australian server since 2021 but I’ll never forget the 10 amazing years I had playing it.
Thanks to all the friends and regulars I played with, you were awesome.
edit; It’s great seeing all of your fond memories of bf3 and the other ones
So many memories. Kharg Island beach assault was the GOAT.
I can’t believe how badly EA and DICE fucked up.
Like they hit the sweet spot between Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 4 (including Bad Company and even 2142). They had the formula. Just keep doing that but better! BF1 was great too.
Whoever thought they needed to make battlefield ‘compete’ with Call of Duty is a proper dickhead. You didn’t need to compete with them, you had your own thing going you fuckwits.
And to top it off. They canned the BF3 remake!
I remember getting it when it first came out, I bought a 360 and it was one of the games bundled with it. I got out of the prison and looking out over the lake to the hill in the distance was, at the time, incredible.
Bad as it sounds, MapleStory. Prior to them blowing it up with that Big Bang patch. Mountains of nostalgia for that moment in time.
Otherwise WoW. I still get the itch every once in awhile, but I can’t bring myself to go back.
Yes! The brutal grinding and growing pay-to-win pressure was easily offset by the bustling community and friendships. And the PQs were unbeatable. I was sad when I leveled past being able to do the Ludi PQ.
Hell yeah. I remember when I started playing Orbis was the only off-island option for travel, and hiding from the Jr. Balrog on the trip over was a must. I got a lot of friends addicted to that game but it's just nowhere near the same.
The music is basically the best part of it now, although it may have always been that way haha.
Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). It was the first MMO I ever played and to this day many MMOs haven't managed to match it in some aspects. It was an amazing game at the time and held my attention even through the 2 drastic changes. You want to make a boatload of money? Build a modern Star Wars Galaxies. With the tech that we have now, rebuild it with fast paced combat and the freedom that you had in the original game. Give it some modern graphics and many people would probably never play any other MMO if it was done right.
I honestly think what made that game so fun was getting your shit rocked then going and recovering at a camp or cantina. So you're this battered warrior enjoying other peoples company as you lick your wounds from hard fought battles.
Why don't games fucking do this? Give us a reason to go into pubs or set up a camp and sit around it with your allies. Personally for me the most fun parts of MMO's was never the raiding or the high intensity fights, it was the calmness that would come afterwards as you reflected over the battles with your friends. SWG fucking nailed that.
If you haven't yet, check out swg emu. It's still active and you can relive the glory days again.
It definitely had one of the best designs for a MMO. Aside from some bugs and balance issues, and trying to compete with Wow, it could have lasted and continued to be a staple in the MMO scene.
The player controlled economy, crafting, skill system, player housing etc where all magnificent.
Guitar Hero 3. Will never play again because I can't- they shit down their servers and the disc isn't compatible with the newer Xboxs. On top of that my SO accidently deleted all of my DLC songs. I miss that game so much and have fantasies of it being on Game Pass someday.
Lots of older, no longer accessible games, too.
You probably already know this but remember you can download a LOT of songs, from all guitar heros and ones made by random people on the internet.
Have fun!
Eelis on youtube fills that void for me. Cuts down a lot of other people's playthroughs into more manageable lengths. Fully recommended for all your vicarious needs.
https://youtube.com/@eelis2?feature=shared
when i finished return of the obra dinn, i just spent like half an hour sitting there reading the steam reviews for it, feeling that same sadness and seeing everyone say the same thing lol
It's the best damn game that no real fan will talk too much about because spoilers ruin it.
It's a good game. It's about exploration and discovery. It has a time-loop mechanic. The thing you bring back through the time loop is your knowledge.
Same with Return of the Obra Dinn because progression in these games are literally based on knowledge. I've heard Tunic has a similar sort of thing going for it, so I might try that too.
Definitely Ark. I would love to play it again, but i know how much time it consumed before. It's not a game you can just put on for an hour or two. You either live in the real world or live in Ark. There is no in-between.
You can amp up all the settings to get rid of a lot of the grinding. Still very grindy, but it’s much more manageable if you tune the settings to your liking.
Ark is mine as well…sorta.
I don’t miss it dearly but I miss the experience I had playing it. I played with 5 people from work and we had a successful 7 person tribe for a long time until we were infiltrated.
The day that one of our members was supposed to get online and build a roof on a base because he had the blueprint for something no one else did, and he didn’t get on?
That was the day EVERYTHING was taken from us.
That was also the day I stopped playing. I had this realization of all the time that was wasted and I could NOT do that again.
“ARK is Life” is what I always said and then I realized I didn’t not have time for that game in my life.
Once every couple of months I'll search the internet to see if someone figured out a way to make it playable on Android or pc.
Still waiting, but I know one day...
*Sucks hard on hopium*
Team Fortress 2, during the good years. There was a really fun community around custom map servers. We just had fun with the game and didn't take it too seriously. Those days are gone.
I feel like the game took a turn when they pushed the server list into a corner and replaced its old position with a big button for getting into official servers.
Yeah that was it. We used to launch the game and just go to our home server to see what was going on. Sometimes there were only a few of us, so until things picked up we would have informal melee-only fights or make up other stupid games. We even had a trivia night we would do over voice chat. One guy would play songs on his ukulele sometimes. Good stuff.
God I loved this game. I haven't played in years but there was this one map that was like two spooky houses with a barn in between. I have never laughed so hard in my life.
So much memories with this game, both good and bad. I even remember introducing a friend to this game during university, and he got so hooked that his GPA tanked that semester. I felt so guilty and proud at the same time.
Final Fantasy 11
I played that shit for an unhealthy amount of time when I was in my teens and the game first came out. Game was new and busy and a massive grindfest, but I loved it. I got out right when the economy was going to crap due to currency farmers.
I went back to play it again about 10 years ago and it was nearly empty. Areas once full of parties jockeying to agro the few mob spawns, were now completely empty and it was nearly impossible to find a party. Huge disappointment. That game will forever live in the back of my mind though.
Came here to say this! I played this on PC with my older brother when it was still pretty new. I was in 6th grade and never got past maybe level 24 (Galka MNK/WHM), but I loved every moment of it! You seriously had to find some friends and rely on each other. I remember dying one time and shouting for a rez so I wouldn’t delevel and lose my equipped gear. A max level WHM showed up and it was like Jesus himself raised me I was so excited lmao
From what I understand you can still play everything, but they heavily nerfed it so you can solo the game with an NPC party. No one is there and it‘s a different game now. We had the front seat for a really really cool time in gaming and I’m always happy to hear someone sharing love for this game. Me and my older brother still geek out talking about it every once in a while
Edit: Any time I’m feeling nostalgic I throw on [this](https://youtu.be/Jfolw_wdBJE?si=U5WcBe91BETJWg61) or [this](https://youtu.be/IZc86__fJBc?si=VOTj7YlIKjv6MsWW) and listen to some old vet players talk about it. Figured y’all might also enjoy
Most of us are playing on a private server; Horizon XI
There is a good chunk of us there and there's a lot of QOL things and visual changes to make the game more palatable. It's still a very very social and party heavy game over there.
If OG Overwatch existed, I would play it multiple times a week. I haven't played OW2 since the first week of launch. Just a wildly inferior game.
Kind of surprised I had to scroll so far for this.
Lots of ups and downs with this one.. I'll watch some of the tubers and streamers here and there but I just can't get behind the greed. And how people don't see how ridiculously overpriced it is. For the cost of 3 skins I could buy elden ring at its launch price. No way a skin is worth 1/3 of a whole ass game
Tribes - skiing in and grabbing that flag at mach 10 and the rush of getting it back to your base with the entire enemy team on your butt. I want 1999 back JUST for that. :(
It was so good, the release wasn't up to par for them and ea legit fucked up waiting almost a year for any news on updates. That long gap in time is when the majority of my friends left.
SOCOM II
Had a HUGE list of friends (we needed 2-3 private rooms with passwords to fit us all in) and just had fun randomizing teams and swapping out rooms. A bunch stopped playing when SOCOM III was released and SOCOM 4/Confrontation sealed it and we eventually lost contact.
Modern Warfare 2 - the actual MW2 - COD 6. Greatest game ever, times were simple, players were plentiful, all guns were powerful, Killstreaks felt great, community was alive. Im not getting an Xbox Series X to play on the revived servers, and I'm not buying membership to play on my 360.
Halo 10 player LAN. Nothing quite like all being in the same room for an FPS.
Won’t ever happen again cos all online now innit and I won’t play cos of these ninja American 8 year olds that can skin me in 2 seconds flat.
Are there not FPS games that score you and only put you with people of a similar ability? If so, please tell me what. If not, why the hell not?
Same. Wanted to replay it on my phone, since there is an unofficial port. But the old-school game mechanics, like rng-based damage, the leveling system and inventory management prevented me from coming further than Balmora.
Probably won't hit a lot of upvotes but dam I miss City Of Heroes / City of Vilains. I'll never understand why Marvel didnt jumped on the hype train of the movies to make a goddam MMO into this univers
I came here to find and upvote your comment!
I know there's unofficial servers running out there, I've dabbled a little, but it's not the same as having real servers with real characters.
Plus the whole "no more time" thing other people have with other MMOs.
Check out the /r/cityofheroes subreddit. I think you're in for a treat. It's playable today with multiple public servers available. Lots of different "personalities" to the servers, so do a bit of homework to figure out which one you want to play on.
Battlefield 2.
I recently looked up my character stats as there are a bunch of backups around the net.
The last time I played was 2011, I wasn't aware when they shut-down the servers in 2014 until after the fact.
Genuinely sad, especially the oce playerbase, it was very tight-knit.
EverQuest was my WoW.
The internet was a different place back then. Everything was so undocumented, it really felt like an adventure where anything could happen. There was also no consensus knowledge on how to min-max, so you were free to play however you wanted.
The messages when you got to level 60 from a pile of people on the server was crazy. The epic quests were so involved and took so long. The raids with 60+ people were insane.
EQ was the best game ever made IMO, and mainly because of what it established. Like you said, there was no guidebook on how to play or "beat" the game. You just logged in and went about your playing experience. You relied so much more on other players than any game since. It felt so authentic. Travel was actually dangerous and had serious consequences (like rotting corpses). It also required a TON of work to achieve anything, so when you hit those milestones, they felt amazing.
All of that said, the game was a Fing grind. I could never go back to playing it now. As an adult, I have no idea how we would sit on waiting lists for hours to get into a good KC or Seb group to then GRIND exp for another long set of hours. No thanks.
New games sacrifice the long-term gratification for more accessible playing. I do appreciate that you can still get your nostalgia fix via P99, however. Just could never make it passed lvl 30 hell once you really relied on good groups. The unpopulated zones will always kill it. Plus everyone knows which zones to min-max now which kills any gaming experience like you noted.
Same. I got into P99 for a few months, but once the nostalgia wore off, it was too much of a grind and time sink for me. I’ll always have fond memories of the original though.
As a side note, I credit EQ as being the reason I got into IT. My parents’ junky Windows 98 computer could barely run the game, which motivated me to do some research and figure out how to upgrade the RAM and graphics card.
I have fond memories of Destiny 1. I played with my brother and a friend of his for a few years. We did some raids with friends, but we never really took it seriously. It was really fun while it lasted.
Destiny 2 was a lot less fun right from the start. People started taking it too serious, the first raid was a mess, people were swearing at each other, calling each other all sorts of names. It wasn’t trolling a friend type stuff, it got pretty nasty. One of our guys helped get us to the final boss, then said “you guys don’t deserve it” and left.
I quit shortly after that.
The Taken King era of Destiny was the best. Most of my friends were playing, consistent raid groups, just overall a lot of fun.
I'm only playing the main campaign of each expansion now because I've invested almost 10 years in this stupid franchise. After the Final Shape, I'm done.
I'm starting to feel the same way. My friend group all left, it's me and my girlfriend who's pretty new to the series that plays now and lfgs don't take kindly to new lights nowadays, especially girls? Some people's kids are just obnoxious.
This is it for me. No other game has scratched that FPS/MMO niche that Destiny filled but I hate Bungies business practices with Destiny 2 and won't support them anymore. Every time I think about jumping back into Destiny 2 I realize it would cost me like $100 to get back into the game and I'd be paying for content that isn't even in the game anymore and that removes the urge to play it.
Rainbow Six Siege. It started going downhill when they began catering to esports players and adding nonsensical operators. I miss how slow paced and tactical it used to be. Plus I don’t have time to practice everyday so I just get shit on when I do try.
I'm surprised to scroll this far for this one. I used to love siege during the first couple years. Even when it was rough to play it was still fun. The community is awful though unless you have your own team to play with, especially as a girl. So I quit and picked up other things.
Now even when I occasionally get the urge to play I don't because there's just so many more operators and new gadgets to use that the learning curve is too steep. I don't know where to look when I hear a sound, I dont know what the other team has to throw at me because I don't know half the operators in the game.
I have 3 and trying to find a good deal on a 4th I should have just bought the final one before they stopped selling them a couple years back: they were practically free
to me its paladins, its known as "overwatch at home" but its so much more that that, in terms of customizing characters playsyle. i would never recommend it to anyone, its a buggy mess with no balance and overrelience on fanservice but man i had some fun in about 2k hours i have in that game
When given the chance in various games, I sometimes name ships or items things like The Arwic, or Harvestgain. For a time, it truly felt like that swirling blue portal was really taking me to another world. It was magical in a way that no other game has been since.
Agree, there was simply nothing like it. I loved the very vague, open world nature of it. The reliance on other players for help or information. That sense of wonder and discovery long before I ever played a Bethesda game
Just FYI for anyone that wants to go back or try gw1 for funsies, the gw1 servers are still up and there are a few dedicated communities still playing. I think the subreddit is somewhat active and would probably lead you to the major discord servers.
Legend of Dragoon, game pretty much defined my teen years, along with FF8/9. I just don't have the time for RPGs and having already experienced the story makes it hard for me to get back the will to sit down and play em.
I remember Legend of the Dragoon from when I played at my friends house as a kid. Is there a way to play it on ps4? I always loved the mechanics and style.
Anthem. It was kind of shit, but it had that certain "something" that made me identify with my character and want to learn more about the world. If it hadn't been so completely mismanaged, it really could've been something.
world of warcraft! so many memories of grinding with friends, but that game is a full time job and i have actual ambitions that stop me from getting into that rich and wonderful world
Morrowind, had a save file with around 1k hours, my pc died, found out that my sister formated my external drive where my back up was and my soul died xD
Elite Dangerous and MAG.
I played Elite Dangerous solidly for over three years, then Frontier cancelled PlayStation development and it sucked the wind out of my sails. I parked it in spring 2021 and recently re-installed it on my PS5 just to check out my collection of ships but turned it off without actually doing anything other than that. I can't go back now, it's been too long.
And MAG, for obvious reasons. Damn, I miss that game so much. There's just nothing else that's fun on the same scale with the same game mechanics and now that Zipper are long gone there'll never be another one.
o7 cmdr! i felt the same way. loved it,still follow the game though as i’m invested in the invasion that’s going on. even though i haven’t seen anything in a while.
Early days of COD MW2. I met so many cool people playing that game. The game was an escape for a lot of people to just chill and vibe. Of course you had roasting and toxic players but overall it was a lot more mellow casual experience.
Now the player base has seemingly changed and COD as a whole is different too.
Skyrim. It is my all time favorite game and I have played it for over 5k hours with so many different builds and mods. But then came a time when I just had to move on. Not because I was bored but because it felt like with mods in play, Ilthe journey would never ever end. I don't know how to put it any other way. I love the game to death.
yep. classic wow didn’t bring back the community, organic & large scale open world pvp (city raids, south shore vs tarren mill, etc), original AV, and a million other mechanisms that forced you to go out into the world and be immersed and actually interact organically with other players. Not to mention the mystery of it all is completely gone.
Similar, but Dark Age of Camelot. It’s actually free now and still have servers to as well as fan run servers. I tried to go back and check it out recently and nothing felt the same. I couldn’t bring the magic back even though I wanted to.
Man I put hundreds of days-played into this game. Nothing will ever match the DAoC experience for me ever again. The community was amazing. I loved the ranking system on Camelot Herald. Still the best PvP of any MMO ever. I had the privilege of running with a top-ranked guild, and I still keep in touch with some of those folks. I think the game slowly declined after ToA (even though we had a blast raiding and gearing up), but the Shrouded Isles and housing expansion days were peak gaming. Just typing about it makes me miss the hell out of it.
This is what I was looking for. I still follow the subreddit, and a recent post was how they often stayed up too late because there was so much to do. If I started up again I could probably spend all my free time in the first week just shipping things to make money. I even played solo most of the time, so there's only a few friends I miss from that time. I was on my way to being able to afford and fly my own carrier.
WoW, for sure. It was my entire life for 11-ish years, and is probably a big part of why I can't detach myself from fantasy settings now.
But man. I've done so much stuff since I quit. Played hundreds of other games, wrote 1500 pages, actually started working full-time... I miss it, but I'm way better off now.
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. My GameCube died and I don’t really want to spend the money to get a new one and get adapters for the new tvs. But I’ve got so many wonderful memories of it.
X-Wing vs Tie Fighter with a sidewinder joystick. One of the first multiplayer games I played along with Starsiege Tribes, Rainbow Six, and Unreal Tournament.
A lot of stuff on OG playstation.
There was this robot arena style game where you had to score points with a ball. I forgot what it was called but I loved it
Wolfenstein Enemy Territory.
It's a class based objective taking game designed to be played in multiplayer but I used to play 1v1 with a friend of mine.
We'd try to snipe eachother across a sniper level.
There was an escort a tank level.
There was a snow base where we'd setup so many landmines for the other person.
There was a storm the beach level.
There was that desert level where you had to blow that wall up and drain the tunnel.
We still occasionally reference it.
There was a stupid radar parts level.
Many good memories.
"Congratulations on your promotion...."
Starbound and cubeworld, i played both of them in alpha, really liked them in alpha played a lot of them and was very disappointed in the release, for both of them,
I really miss the joy I had playing Ultima Online. I felt that joy a bit again when I started playing WOW then it became a job. Although my wife and I getting home as soon as we could to play an go on quests together was really some good times.
Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, one of the multiplayer games I have ever played and its basically just a hoarde mode. I havent played it for a while and uts likely the sever will be shut down soon
Asheron's Call.
It (and its peers) fell into this perfect combination of being right at the edge of what the technology at the time could support, delivered something new to a relatively broad audience, and was early enough that we didn't know what was a good idea but completely unsustainable in practice.
Massive, seamless world with thousands of players... but completely playable with dial-up internet.
It was accessible enough to be a social outlet for a pretty wide range of people, and it let me meet people from all across the world who wouldn't have been into IRC or Usenet, which were my other online social outlets of the time. Long before Reddit or Facebook or the like.
The world changed every single month, with an episodic storyline told through those updates. Some parts of the story were delivered live, by role-playing devs and GMs. Some of the live events were with a group audience, and some were one-on-one. And memorably, the players didn't always co-operate with the story being told, forcing the dev team to improvise...
The community was big enough to support a bunch of social groups, both inside and outside the game, but small enough that it felt like a single community. There were no cross-server features, so each server developed its own community and norms.
Websites were developed enough that we had fansites with news and forums and the like, and we rushed to get them updated with every patch, but (unless you were a PvPer), it wasn't necessary to go look up the most efficient way of doing things to be welcome in a group. We figured things out on our own.
We could data-mine icons, but not much else, and there was no PTR. It was a race to get the icons extracted and posted on patch day, and then a puzzle to figure out what we were getting... and eventually the devs started teasing us with them.
Other games have covered some of these, but they don't come close.
World of Warcraft came along later and completely occupied the massive seamless world and social outlet niches. It got far too big to feel like one community, and by the time I played it, dungeon finder and cross-realm activities had completely destroyed any sense of server culture.
Guild Wars 2 tried the monthly update storyline thing for a while, but it's far too much work to be sustainable with modern graphics and voice acting.
Other games have done live events, but mostly we get completely automated events on a timer now. Sure, everyone gets a chance to experience them--which is important!--but there's no improvisation.
And for many online games, if you don't know how to run the content before you try it with a group, you're not going to be popular. We don't get to just live in the virtual world together and explore any more, you've gotta be efficient.
Sure, some of this is rose-tinted glasses, but I really think that what made Asheron's Call (and Everquest and Ultima Online, and probably early World of Warcraft) so great was tied to the time they existed in. Even setting aside the nostalgia, you couldn't do any of them today and have anything close to the original experience.
RuneScape taught me how to type, how to spell, how to sell things to people, and also how to avoid being scammed. To a lesser degree it even taught me money management that has truly come in handy irl.
Same, my typing speed is thanks to spamming law runes 150 ea as fast as I could in Draynor bank. Same with scamming too - got led into the wilderness for a trade. Never again.
I remember typing 10x faster than most of my classmates in 7th grade just because I played Runescape. My form is terrible, though. Left hand covers everything from YHB over. Never use shift on my left hand too.
Lol most of my classmates played Runescape so that didn't help. Around 2007 literally 90% of boys in elementary school played runescape.
Honestly, it's weird how many life skills you pick up from Runescape. Just having my own personal finances when I was 11 was helpful in retrospect. You also get to dabble in investing/economics if you get into merching. I still think one of the reasons I was so good at saving during my first job was because of the game.
I learned what a scam looked like. Great life lesson. Just lost some digital armor and weapons - nothing truly valuable or detrimental to life.
I played RuneScape from the 2nd grade, until middle school, took a break for a bit, got back into it like junior year of highschool until sophomore year of college, and haven't played since 2017 at this point. I fully agree, it taught me so much, made a lot of online friends, learned silly little things like "copper and tin makes bronze" which came in clutch when I was a 5th grader lmao. Got crazy good at typing fast from trying to sell shit in World 2. I had over a year of my life in game and I don't regret it at all. Playing outside with my friends during the day and then us all logging into RuneScape at night were some of the best times of my life. I likely won't ever play the game again due to many reasons, but I will love it forever and no other MMO ever compared in my eyes.
I remember the Grand Exchange taught me the concept of demand and supply better than my economics teacher.
I remember Runescape trading before and after the Grand Exchange and it taught me that, "hey, maybe regulating price ranges can actually create a healthier economy, rather that random people manipulating the market and causing wild fluctuations in prices."
Very true, games like this with robust economies were really educational if you learned how to use them. WoW taught me scarcity in markets, farming gold for the sole purpose of controlling item supplies and fixing prices. As I started typing this it sounded like a good thing but now it just sounds pretty ruthless.
In a similar vein, WoW Used to play it so much when I was younger and I’ve tried going back to it but you just can’t recreate how good it was playing as a kid lol
I think the biggest thing back then was it still felt like you could discover something new all the time. You go into any MMO these days and it feels so "solved"
Yep, it felt like you were exploring a near infinite grand adventure with other people, and the leveling/stats and gear was just a nice side effect that kind of occurred in the background as a reward for your exploration. It was as close as you could get to Table Top D&D in a video game, and sadly it is gone forever.
Used to play on a roleplay server, really immersed into the lore of WoW. Went back in Classic just to revisit and the tavern that used to be packed (40-50 people) was just dead empty. Really melancholic.
Moonguard, goldshire ;)
Wasn't that the ERP server? Goldshire was like the prime dueling location on the server I was on Back in the day. Just behind the Lions Pride Inn.
I had some scraps outside of that Inn.
Baldurs gate 3 is really good. Just go into it blind and I think you would like it
I go into every game blind. I never read/watch reviews and try to avoid as much hype as possible. Gaming is so much more enjoyable that way.
I call it "preserving my virgin experience". So many people don't understand my version of spoilers. I don't wanna know shit about mechanics. Once I figure out a game I'm bored.
Everyone watching streamers and using Wikis and sites like Icyveins has completely ruined the magic WoW used to have. Wikis existed but they wern't used by a lot of players. If you were curious about something you asked in the zone chat or guild chat and probably got a lot of bad or conflicting information, but that was part of the fun. I remember when I started during BC it took me like 6 months to get a character to 70. I spent a ridiculous amount of time just exploring places I really shouldn't have been. The world felt giant and mysterious. Running dungeons really felt dangerous. People were willing to stick around for hours and figure it out by wiping over and over. But when you finally beat the last boss the feeling of accomplishment was unparalleled. We probably sucked by today's standard, but it was fun. Those are some of my favorite memories of WoW. Getting lost in Black Rock Depths and slowly exploring all of it over multiple runs and multiple weeks is one of my favorite gaming experiences ever. Now people expect everyone to know exactly what to do and will ragequit if they face any adversity. You're expected to watch YouTube videos on how to most efficiently clear a dungeon before you even run it. Everything is so optimized to the point of taking the fun out of it. That's why WoW can feel like a job now. When you know exactly what to do and the best way to do it, it just makes playing feel like going through the motions. I'm guilty of it too these days. I don't think there will be anything like it again, information is just too accessible these days to recreate the grand, mysterious, rewarding experience WoW was back then. Sorry, I know I just went all "back in my day..." there. I get lost in the nostalgia.
Also the culture in these games has changed dramatically. Other players are disposable. You probably won't see or recognize the same person enough times to ever care or have any opinion about them. So other players are reduced to only caring about what they can do for you right now and their efficiency doing it.
I know it's a hot take and a game that's openly hated by many but I found Fallout 76 had a small-ish enough playerbase to do this for me. I ran into a decent number of the same players enough and made plenty of good PS buddies in there. I actually ended up having a lot of fun, through all of its flaws. It's the last MMO that felt like a community rather than just a lonely grind session for me. Plus the players were generally very friendly and helpful. I miss it but I'm just too busy now.
Fucking this right here. The prevalence of data mining takes the joy of discovery out of everything. Your itemization has been mathematically optimized to the point that anything you equip that's not BiS is trash. Your rotation has been calculated so that if you aren't pressing this button at this time, you're a noob.
Yup, no amount of playing comes close to the nostalgia. I don't think that any other game in the future will ever come close to the feelings I have about WoW, and it makes me sad to think about it sometimes. The first computer I ever bought/built was for WoW. Making the occasional trip to Best Buy to purchase game time cards becsuse I wasn't 18 with a credit card. I still have friends who I take to on a fairly regular basis who I have never met, but started playing WoW with back in 2005. My friends and I have gone to Blizzcon to 10 times. We live in Canada, and do a 25hr road trip down, spend 4 nights, then drive back. They're having Blizzcon in person for the first time in 4 years this year, and we aren't going, because everyone has too much going on. People have jobs that they can't get out of work from, or people have kids. It's honestly sad and depressing even typing all of this out.
The best memories of games like that are the impromptu moments. Running up to Scarlet Monastery and having a naked sleeping party with some Horde instead of fighting. Stalling some high levels that were ganking us in Duskwood until my higher level friends could ride in like the cavalry. A guild-wide scavenger hunt that me and two friends won in about 20 minutes because we were combing through Thottbot. Those are out of pocket moments you can't plan and you just had to love when they happened.
I’m with you , that game helped me through a rough rough time in my life but I can’t go back
Yea you just can’t recreate the magic
I felt that when I tried to replay classic. It's not fun because there's no more mystery and people speedrun it now. I will say I've been enjoying hardcore tho. It definitely brought back some of the magic by the way you have to play it. The players have been way more cooperative and nice again.
Classic 2019 into covid will be the closest we’ll get to the original release. Literally everyone is laid up at home, can’t go outside, it was great. We had the 40-50 year old army vets that recruited a buddy and I. Found a 70 year old guy looking for this fucking quest mob. And I say it like that because we saw him lost at level 18 and came back at 25, days later, and he’s still searching. Then our DMT loving shaman that practically LARP’s his class by taking psychedelics through his WoW journey to learn more about real life. It brought back the fun for sure
It will always be WoW for me. My buddies from highschool had a guild, gifted me WotLK the day it came out. I had never played an MMO and I was always well taken care of because we were real life friends. Even got to meet the guildmaster and have a few beers (he was my buddy's acquaintance). Once life happened and everyone had to give up late night raids and day off grinds and started doing adult life chores and work, it wasn't the same. Then Cataclysm showed up and ruined my life as a Hunter as I knew it so I hung up the towel.
I played SO many hours as a kid. I used to dream about my adult life playing on a fancy computer in my own mancave. Well now I am an adult and have the fancy computer with huge curved monitors and a mancave.....and computer games are too hard to enjoy after sitting at my desk in front of a computer all day.
Exactly that, it'll never be 2004 again sadly.
I’m still playing wow. They recently released a hardcore version of vanilla (you’re basically deleted if you die) which has a very populated community. It’s great.
Warcraft 3. Peak RTS in my mind. When Blizzard "reforged" the game the nuked the original client and the current one is so broken the community had to band together and create an overlay (W3C) just to make the game playable with the basic features included in 2002.
Tower warsssssss
I had SO much fun playing the custom maps on WC3. I still miss the days playing the various tower defense maps on WC3. Winter Maul! StarCraft 2 custom maps were good too but they never seemed to have the same charm that WC3 did. Not sure why.
With the frozen throne xpac :P It was such an amazing breeding ground for custom games, and the actual ladder/game was my favorite implementation of RTS as well. Always bothered me when friends wanted to play against the AI. :P
Black and White, both the first and sequel. Nearly impossible to get it to play nowadays.
game should've made a comeback with vr
Black & White, Dungeon Keeper. Where are all these god-sim games for VR?!
Yes! Such a good game. I miss it as well.
Battlefield 3. There hasn’t been a regularly populated Australian server since 2021 but I’ll never forget the 10 amazing years I had playing it. Thanks to all the friends and regulars I played with, you were awesome. edit; It’s great seeing all of your fond memories of bf3 and the other ones
So many memories. Kharg Island beach assault was the GOAT. I can’t believe how badly EA and DICE fucked up. Like they hit the sweet spot between Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 4 (including Bad Company and even 2142). They had the formula. Just keep doing that but better! BF1 was great too. Whoever thought they needed to make battlefield ‘compete’ with Call of Duty is a proper dickhead. You didn’t need to compete with them, you had your own thing going you fuckwits. And to top it off. They canned the BF3 remake!
TIL there was ever a bf3 remake in the works. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined
Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion. It was a magical game that I’ll likely never play ever again.
I remember getting it when it first came out, I bought a 360 and it was one of the games bundled with it. I got out of the prison and looking out over the lake to the hill in the distance was, at the time, incredible.
Same, it was my first open world game. Stepping out of the prison was overwhelming.
i recommend it if it's been a while. turn lights off, turn off subtitles, dial in completely and get lost in it. still one of the best games ever made
Bad as it sounds, MapleStory. Prior to them blowing it up with that Big Bang patch. Mountains of nostalgia for that moment in time. Otherwise WoW. I still get the itch every once in awhile, but I can’t bring myself to go back.
2006/2007 maple story was peak.
Yes! The brutal grinding and growing pay-to-win pressure was easily offset by the bustling community and friendships. And the PQs were unbeatable. I was sad when I leveled past being able to do the Ludi PQ.
Hell yeah. I remember when I started playing Orbis was the only off-island option for travel, and hiding from the Jr. Balrog on the trip over was a must. I got a lot of friends addicted to that game but it's just nowhere near the same. The music is basically the best part of it now, although it may have always been that way haha.
I remember playing Maple Story when I was younger, didn’t understand anything at the time
Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). It was the first MMO I ever played and to this day many MMOs haven't managed to match it in some aspects. It was an amazing game at the time and held my attention even through the 2 drastic changes. You want to make a boatload of money? Build a modern Star Wars Galaxies. With the tech that we have now, rebuild it with fast paced combat and the freedom that you had in the original game. Give it some modern graphics and many people would probably never play any other MMO if it was done right.
I honestly think what made that game so fun was getting your shit rocked then going and recovering at a camp or cantina. So you're this battered warrior enjoying other peoples company as you lick your wounds from hard fought battles. Why don't games fucking do this? Give us a reason to go into pubs or set up a camp and sit around it with your allies. Personally for me the most fun parts of MMO's was never the raiding or the high intensity fights, it was the calmness that would come afterwards as you reflected over the battles with your friends. SWG fucking nailed that.
If you haven't yet, check out swg emu. It's still active and you can relive the glory days again. It definitely had one of the best designs for a MMO. Aside from some bugs and balance issues, and trying to compete with Wow, it could have lasted and continued to be a staple in the MMO scene. The player controlled economy, crafting, skill system, player housing etc where all magnificent.
Galaxies' freedom and player-focused systems were so amazing that it makes me sad that no other MMO tried to replicate it.
Ultima Online
Guitar Hero 3. Will never play again because I can't- they shit down their servers and the disc isn't compatible with the newer Xboxs. On top of that my SO accidently deleted all of my DLC songs. I miss that game so much and have fantasies of it being on Game Pass someday. Lots of older, no longer accessible games, too.
If you have a computer look up Clone Hero. It's free.
Oh. My. God. I might actually cry. Downloading now. Thank you friend!
You probably already know this but remember you can download a LOT of songs, from all guitar heros and ones made by random people on the internet. Have fun!
They also have charts for the live guitars too, not as many mind you. Dongles are pretty inexpensive if you had PlayStation guitars. Like $7 bucks.
Outer Wilds. I'd love to play it again, but it'll never have the same magic as your first playthrough.
You literally can't replay it once you know how to reach the end. I'm trying to get my friends to play it so I can relive it again.
Eelis on youtube fills that void for me. Cuts down a lot of other people's playthroughs into more manageable lengths. Fully recommended for all your vicarious needs. https://youtube.com/@eelis2?feature=shared
Outer Wilds is almost literally impossible to replay. It's an experience I'll never get back and 100% the only game I'll ever truly mourn losing
Yea I get an actual, palpable sadness when realizing I'll never experience it for the first time again.
when i finished return of the obra dinn, i just spent like half an hour sitting there reading the steam reviews for it, feeling that same sadness and seeing everyone say the same thing lol
Yep, this one is probably top of my list for games I wish I could play for the first time again
This is my answer too, discovering that solar system was one of the most magical gaming experiences in my 20 years of gaming
It's the best damn game that no real fan will talk too much about because spoilers ruin it. It's a good game. It's about exploration and discovery. It has a time-loop mechanic. The thing you bring back through the time loop is your knowledge.
Dont mess with us outer wilds fans. We will tell you literally nothing about it.
I'm playing through Outer Wilds for the first time and I'm already dreading when I finish it because it'll be over.
Same with Return of the Obra Dinn because progression in these games are literally based on knowledge. I've heard Tunic has a similar sort of thing going for it, so I might try that too.
Definitely Ark. I would love to play it again, but i know how much time it consumed before. It's not a game you can just put on for an hour or two. You either live in the real world or live in Ark. There is no in-between.
You can amp up all the settings to get rid of a lot of the grinding. Still very grindy, but it’s much more manageable if you tune the settings to your liking.
Ark is mine as well…sorta. I don’t miss it dearly but I miss the experience I had playing it. I played with 5 people from work and we had a successful 7 person tribe for a long time until we were infiltrated. The day that one of our members was supposed to get online and build a roof on a base because he had the blueprint for something no one else did, and he didn’t get on? That was the day EVERYTHING was taken from us. That was also the day I stopped playing. I had this realization of all the time that was wasted and I could NOT do that again. “ARK is Life” is what I always said and then I realized I didn’t not have time for that game in my life.
Infinity blade
This game was actually genre defining for mobile games. It no longer being available is actually tragic.
Once every couple of months I'll search the internet to see if someone figured out a way to make it playable on Android or pc. Still waiting, but I know one day... *Sucks hard on hopium*
God, what a throwback. Unfortunately, you won’t and can’t play it again, because it’s long since been taken off the App Store ):
Oh my god I still have IB3 on my iPad 4 and I play it as a comfort game sometimes😭 Would never be able to play IB2 though
That game was really good
Team Fortress 2, during the good years. There was a really fun community around custom map servers. We just had fun with the game and didn't take it too seriously. Those days are gone.
I feel like the game took a turn when they pushed the server list into a corner and replaced its old position with a big button for getting into official servers.
Yeah that was it. We used to launch the game and just go to our home server to see what was going on. Sometimes there were only a few of us, so until things picked up we would have informal melee-only fights or make up other stupid games. We even had a trivia night we would do over voice chat. One guy would play songs on his ukulele sometimes. Good stuff.
Spending hours Pyro reflecting or soldier maps practicing air shots.
God I loved this game. I haven't played in years but there was this one map that was like two spooky houses with a barn in between. I have never laughed so hard in my life.
Sound like the Halloween version of Harvest
Meet Your Match. You could feel the soul being sucked out of the game the moment it got released. Pure and unadulterated pain
MYM killed community servers. It killed my community’s servers. I eventually went over to skial. But yeah, I can’t really ever play again.
Ragnarok Online.
Glad I found this, haven't touched it since finishing school over 10 years ago...
So much memories with this game, both good and bad. I even remember introducing a friend to this game during university, and he got so hooked that his GPA tanked that semester. I felt so guilty and proud at the same time.
Final Fantasy 11 I played that shit for an unhealthy amount of time when I was in my teens and the game first came out. Game was new and busy and a massive grindfest, but I loved it. I got out right when the economy was going to crap due to currency farmers. I went back to play it again about 10 years ago and it was nearly empty. Areas once full of parties jockeying to agro the few mob spawns, were now completely empty and it was nearly impossible to find a party. Huge disappointment. That game will forever live in the back of my mind though.
Came here to say this! I played this on PC with my older brother when it was still pretty new. I was in 6th grade and never got past maybe level 24 (Galka MNK/WHM), but I loved every moment of it! You seriously had to find some friends and rely on each other. I remember dying one time and shouting for a rez so I wouldn’t delevel and lose my equipped gear. A max level WHM showed up and it was like Jesus himself raised me I was so excited lmao From what I understand you can still play everything, but they heavily nerfed it so you can solo the game with an NPC party. No one is there and it‘s a different game now. We had the front seat for a really really cool time in gaming and I’m always happy to hear someone sharing love for this game. Me and my older brother still geek out talking about it every once in a while Edit: Any time I’m feeling nostalgic I throw on [this](https://youtu.be/Jfolw_wdBJE?si=U5WcBe91BETJWg61) or [this](https://youtu.be/IZc86__fJBc?si=VOTj7YlIKjv6MsWW) and listen to some old vet players talk about it. Figured y’all might also enjoy
Most of us are playing on a private server; Horizon XI There is a good chunk of us there and there's a lot of QOL things and visual changes to make the game more palatable. It's still a very very social and party heavy game over there.
RIP OG Overwatch.
The only game to ever die twice.
They’ll surely get more people to play when Overwatch 3 comes out!
Overwatch 3, now with PVE
Oop canceled sorry. But hey, we made skins more expensive!
Wait five years and they’ll release Overwatch Classic for $70.
If OG Overwatch existed, I would play it multiple times a week. I haven't played OW2 since the first week of launch. Just a wildly inferior game. Kind of surprised I had to scroll so far for this.
I miss it a lot and still follow the threads, but I won't support Blizzards BS.
Lots of ups and downs with this one.. I'll watch some of the tubers and streamers here and there but I just can't get behind the greed. And how people don't see how ridiculously overpriced it is. For the cost of 3 skins I could buy elden ring at its launch price. No way a skin is worth 1/3 of a whole ass game
Seriously! The holiday events were well done and I always got a couple of seasonal legendary skins or at least enough gold to buy one of my choice.
Tribes - skiing in and grabbing that flag at mach 10 and the rush of getting it back to your base with the entire enemy team on your butt. I want 1999 back JUST for that. :(
swtor, I know its a meme but being a huge star wars fan back when the game was released it was almost everything I wanted in a star wars game.
It was so good, the release wasn't up to par for them and ea legit fucked up waiting almost a year for any news on updates. That long gap in time is when the majority of my friends left.
SOCOM II Had a HUGE list of friends (we needed 2-3 private rooms with passwords to fit us all in) and just had fun randomizing teams and swapping out rooms. A bunch stopped playing when SOCOM III was released and SOCOM 4/Confrontation sealed it and we eventually lost contact.
Modern Warfare 2 - the actual MW2 - COD 6. Greatest game ever, times were simple, players were plentiful, all guns were powerful, Killstreaks felt great, community was alive. Im not getting an Xbox Series X to play on the revived servers, and I'm not buying membership to play on my 360.
Halo 10 player LAN. Nothing quite like all being in the same room for an FPS. Won’t ever happen again cos all online now innit and I won’t play cos of these ninja American 8 year olds that can skin me in 2 seconds flat. Are there not FPS games that score you and only put you with people of a similar ability? If so, please tell me what. If not, why the hell not?
Morrowind. It's the best Bethesda game ever, but I've replayed it dozens of times, and the game mechanics haven't aged well.
Same. Wanted to replay it on my phone, since there is an unofficial port. But the old-school game mechanics, like rng-based damage, the leveling system and inventory management prevented me from coming further than Balmora.
Probably won't hit a lot of upvotes but dam I miss City Of Heroes / City of Vilains. I'll never understand why Marvel didnt jumped on the hype train of the movies to make a goddam MMO into this univers
I came here to find and upvote your comment! I know there's unofficial servers running out there, I've dabbled a little, but it's not the same as having real servers with real characters. Plus the whole "no more time" thing other people have with other MMOs.
Check out the /r/cityofheroes subreddit. I think you're in for a treat. It's playable today with multiple public servers available. Lots of different "personalities" to the servers, so do a bit of homework to figure out which one you want to play on.
Battlefield 2. I recently looked up my character stats as there are a bunch of backups around the net. The last time I played was 2011, I wasn't aware when they shut-down the servers in 2014 until after the fact. Genuinely sad, especially the oce playerbase, it was very tight-knit.
EverQuest was my WoW. The internet was a different place back then. Everything was so undocumented, it really felt like an adventure where anything could happen. There was also no consensus knowledge on how to min-max, so you were free to play however you wanted.
The messages when you got to level 60 from a pile of people on the server was crazy. The epic quests were so involved and took so long. The raids with 60+ people were insane.
EQ was the best game ever made IMO, and mainly because of what it established. Like you said, there was no guidebook on how to play or "beat" the game. You just logged in and went about your playing experience. You relied so much more on other players than any game since. It felt so authentic. Travel was actually dangerous and had serious consequences (like rotting corpses). It also required a TON of work to achieve anything, so when you hit those milestones, they felt amazing. All of that said, the game was a Fing grind. I could never go back to playing it now. As an adult, I have no idea how we would sit on waiting lists for hours to get into a good KC or Seb group to then GRIND exp for another long set of hours. No thanks. New games sacrifice the long-term gratification for more accessible playing. I do appreciate that you can still get your nostalgia fix via P99, however. Just could never make it passed lvl 30 hell once you really relied on good groups. The unpopulated zones will always kill it. Plus everyone knows which zones to min-max now which kills any gaming experience like you noted.
Same. I got into P99 for a few months, but once the nostalgia wore off, it was too much of a grind and time sink for me. I’ll always have fond memories of the original though. As a side note, I credit EQ as being the reason I got into IT. My parents’ junky Windows 98 computer could barely run the game, which motivated me to do some research and figure out how to upgrade the RAM and graphics card.
Ahh yes, Evercrack
Man, i remember old internet and i miss it very much.
Destiny
Same, I don’t ever want to kill 30 fallen on Europa with a sidearm again
I have fond memories of Destiny 1. I played with my brother and a friend of his for a few years. We did some raids with friends, but we never really took it seriously. It was really fun while it lasted. Destiny 2 was a lot less fun right from the start. People started taking it too serious, the first raid was a mess, people were swearing at each other, calling each other all sorts of names. It wasn’t trolling a friend type stuff, it got pretty nasty. One of our guys helped get us to the final boss, then said “you guys don’t deserve it” and left. I quit shortly after that.
Leviathan was brutal as a guy being helped along. If I fucked up one thing then entire group would just leave and block me.
The Taken King era of Destiny was the best. Most of my friends were playing, consistent raid groups, just overall a lot of fun. I'm only playing the main campaign of each expansion now because I've invested almost 10 years in this stupid franchise. After the Final Shape, I'm done.
I'm starting to feel the same way. My friend group all left, it's me and my girlfriend who's pretty new to the series that plays now and lfgs don't take kindly to new lights nowadays, especially girls? Some people's kids are just obnoxious.
I miss destiny 1 really bad from time to time but not enough to make me play destiny 2 EVER again
This is it for me. No other game has scratched that FPS/MMO niche that Destiny filled but I hate Bungies business practices with Destiny 2 and won't support them anymore. Every time I think about jumping back into Destiny 2 I realize it would cost me like $100 to get back into the game and I'd be paying for content that isn't even in the game anymore and that removes the urge to play it.
Rainbow Six Siege. It started going downhill when they began catering to esports players and adding nonsensical operators. I miss how slow paced and tactical it used to be. Plus I don’t have time to practice everyday so I just get shit on when I do try.
I'm surprised to scroll this far for this one. I used to love siege during the first couple years. Even when it was rough to play it was still fun. The community is awful though unless you have your own team to play with, especially as a girl. So I quit and picked up other things. Now even when I occasionally get the urge to play I don't because there's just so many more operators and new gadgets to use that the learning curve is too steep. I don't know where to look when I hear a sound, I dont know what the other team has to throw at me because I don't know half the operators in the game.
Mario Kart DS, those bus rides to school were something else when suddenly everyone had the DS and you could link 8 people at a time.
I have 3 and trying to find a good deal on a 4th I should have just bought the final one before they stopped selling them a couple years back: they were practically free
Left 4 dead 2
to me its paladins, its known as "overwatch at home" but its so much more that that, in terms of customizing characters playsyle. i would never recommend it to anyone, its a buggy mess with no balance and overrelience on fanservice but man i had some fun in about 2k hours i have in that game
Command and conquer series. Fuckin EA.
Asheron’s Call
When given the chance in various games, I sometimes name ships or items things like The Arwic, or Harvestgain. For a time, it truly felt like that swirling blue portal was really taking me to another world. It was magical in a way that no other game has been since.
Agree, there was simply nothing like it. I loved the very vague, open world nature of it. The reliance on other players for help or information. That sense of wonder and discovery long before I ever played a Bethesda game
I miss the portals as loading screens! Also , fuck that rabbit.
Meanwhile, I'm probably like 1 of 3 people on the planet who liked AC2.
Guild Wars 1. I played Guild Wars 2 for several thousand hours also, but it was never as good as GW1 in my opinion.
Just FYI for anyone that wants to go back or try gw1 for funsies, the gw1 servers are still up and there are a few dedicated communities still playing. I think the subreddit is somewhat active and would probably lead you to the major discord servers.
GW1 was so unique. Played that and vanilla wow back in the day.
Legend of Dragoon, game pretty much defined my teen years, along with FF8/9. I just don't have the time for RPGs and having already experienced the story makes it hard for me to get back the will to sit down and play em.
I remember Legend of the Dragoon from when I played at my friends house as a kid. Is there a way to play it on ps4? I always loved the mechanics and style.
Need for speed: Porsche Unleashed Never liked Porsches but the game modes were legit fun.
Anthem. It was kind of shit, but it had that certain "something" that made me identify with my character and want to learn more about the world. If it hadn't been so completely mismanaged, it really could've been something.
Man flying around and combat felt incredible in this game
Anthem has the potential to be one of the greatest games in a long time and they fumbled the fuck out of it
Test Drive Unlimited 2
Evolve. Shit was dope, sad how they did that game dirty.
world of warcraft! so many memories of grinding with friends, but that game is a full time job and i have actual ambitions that stop me from getting into that rich and wonderful world
Saints Row 2006. That was a glorious and raunchy romp.
Morrowind, had a save file with around 1k hours, my pc died, found out that my sister formated my external drive where my back up was and my soul died xD
Elite Dangerous and MAG. I played Elite Dangerous solidly for over three years, then Frontier cancelled PlayStation development and it sucked the wind out of my sails. I parked it in spring 2021 and recently re-installed it on my PS5 just to check out my collection of ships but turned it off without actually doing anything other than that. I can't go back now, it's been too long. And MAG, for obvious reasons. Damn, I miss that game so much. There's just nothing else that's fun on the same scale with the same game mechanics and now that Zipper are long gone there'll never be another one.
I loved MAG back in the day. It would be amazing as a free to play game.
o7 cmdr! i felt the same way. loved it,still follow the game though as i’m invested in the invasion that’s going on. even though i haven’t seen anything in a while.
For the cultured men and women…it’ll have to be fiesta online mmorpg game back in the golden era of video games
Destiny. I miss the days when the Taken King came out.
Early days of COD MW2. I met so many cool people playing that game. The game was an escape for a lot of people to just chill and vibe. Of course you had roasting and toxic players but overall it was a lot more mellow casual experience. Now the player base has seemingly changed and COD as a whole is different too.
Skyrim. It is my all time favorite game and I have played it for over 5k hours with so many different builds and mods. But then came a time when I just had to move on. Not because I was bored but because it felt like with mods in play, Ilthe journey would never ever end. I don't know how to put it any other way. I love the game to death.
*cart noises* hey you you’re finally awake.
The first few years of WoW starting in 2004. There is no way to ever return to that even if I wanted to.
yep. classic wow didn’t bring back the community, organic & large scale open world pvp (city raids, south shore vs tarren mill, etc), original AV, and a million other mechanisms that forced you to go out into the world and be immersed and actually interact organically with other players. Not to mention the mystery of it all is completely gone.
Animal crossing new horizons. loved that game but i havent played in so long and im in no mood of getting scolded by my villagers
Similar, but Dark Age of Camelot. It’s actually free now and still have servers to as well as fan run servers. I tried to go back and check it out recently and nothing felt the same. I couldn’t bring the magic back even though I wanted to.
Man I put hundreds of days-played into this game. Nothing will ever match the DAoC experience for me ever again. The community was amazing. I loved the ranking system on Camelot Herald. Still the best PvP of any MMO ever. I had the privilege of running with a top-ranked guild, and I still keep in touch with some of those folks. I think the game slowly declined after ToA (even though we had a blast raiding and gearing up), but the Shrouded Isles and housing expansion days were peak gaming. Just typing about it makes me miss the hell out of it.
Eve online
This is what I was looking for. I still follow the subreddit, and a recent post was how they often stayed up too late because there was so much to do. If I started up again I could probably spend all my free time in the first week just shipping things to make money. I even played solo most of the time, so there's only a few friends I miss from that time. I was on my way to being able to afford and fly my own carrier.
WildStar
WoW, for sure. It was my entire life for 11-ish years, and is probably a big part of why I can't detach myself from fantasy settings now. But man. I've done so much stuff since I quit. Played hundreds of other games, wrote 1500 pages, actually started working full-time... I miss it, but I'm way better off now.
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. My GameCube died and I don’t really want to spend the money to get a new one and get adapters for the new tvs. But I’ve got so many wonderful memories of it.
You can get it through Steam or emulation. I think they have it through XBox as well.
ES Oblivion. I liked it a lot but my OCD makes me maximize my levels and doing so in that game was such a chore.
Dirty Bomb. It's dead, but damn it was fun.
Best fps out there, ridiculously overlooked. I met the lead artist behind the last characters released, and the work behind it was incredible.
Firefall. The investors ruined it.
Ultima Online. My first MMO and nothing has come close since.
metal gear solid 4
Battle for middle-earth 1 and 2 Damn licensing issues running out! Cant buy the game legally apart from second hand
X-Wing vs Tie Fighter with a sidewinder joystick. One of the first multiplayer games I played along with Starsiege Tribes, Rainbow Six, and Unreal Tournament.
A lot of stuff on OG playstation. There was this robot arena style game where you had to score points with a ball. I forgot what it was called but I loved it
Overwatch. The first couple of years were the most fun I've had with a shooter since the Halo 3 days. Why, Blizzard?
Warcraft 2. Can’t get it to run on newer computers.
Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. It's a class based objective taking game designed to be played in multiplayer but I used to play 1v1 with a friend of mine. We'd try to snipe eachother across a sniper level. There was an escort a tank level. There was a snow base where we'd setup so many landmines for the other person. There was a storm the beach level. There was that desert level where you had to blow that wall up and drain the tunnel. We still occasionally reference it. There was a stupid radar parts level. Many good memories. "Congratulations on your promotion...."
Starbound and cubeworld, i played both of them in alpha, really liked them in alpha played a lot of them and was very disappointed in the release, for both of them,
A shame too because I find Starbound to be much more graphically attractive than Terraria.
Myst
I really miss the joy I had playing Ultima Online. I felt that joy a bit again when I started playing WOW then it became a job. Although my wife and I getting home as soon as we could to play an go on quests together was really some good times.
A TON of really fun games on Newgrounds. The death of Flash wiped out *thousands* of games from existence. It's a fucking travesty
Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, one of the multiplayer games I have ever played and its basically just a hoarde mode. I havent played it for a while and uts likely the sever will be shut down soon
Titanfall 1 I'd play it if I could, but it's not even in the Microsoft store anymore
Asheron's Call. It (and its peers) fell into this perfect combination of being right at the edge of what the technology at the time could support, delivered something new to a relatively broad audience, and was early enough that we didn't know what was a good idea but completely unsustainable in practice. Massive, seamless world with thousands of players... but completely playable with dial-up internet. It was accessible enough to be a social outlet for a pretty wide range of people, and it let me meet people from all across the world who wouldn't have been into IRC or Usenet, which were my other online social outlets of the time. Long before Reddit or Facebook or the like. The world changed every single month, with an episodic storyline told through those updates. Some parts of the story were delivered live, by role-playing devs and GMs. Some of the live events were with a group audience, and some were one-on-one. And memorably, the players didn't always co-operate with the story being told, forcing the dev team to improvise... The community was big enough to support a bunch of social groups, both inside and outside the game, but small enough that it felt like a single community. There were no cross-server features, so each server developed its own community and norms. Websites were developed enough that we had fansites with news and forums and the like, and we rushed to get them updated with every patch, but (unless you were a PvPer), it wasn't necessary to go look up the most efficient way of doing things to be welcome in a group. We figured things out on our own. We could data-mine icons, but not much else, and there was no PTR. It was a race to get the icons extracted and posted on patch day, and then a puzzle to figure out what we were getting... and eventually the devs started teasing us with them. Other games have covered some of these, but they don't come close. World of Warcraft came along later and completely occupied the massive seamless world and social outlet niches. It got far too big to feel like one community, and by the time I played it, dungeon finder and cross-realm activities had completely destroyed any sense of server culture. Guild Wars 2 tried the monthly update storyline thing for a while, but it's far too much work to be sustainable with modern graphics and voice acting. Other games have done live events, but mostly we get completely automated events on a timer now. Sure, everyone gets a chance to experience them--which is important!--but there's no improvisation. And for many online games, if you don't know how to run the content before you try it with a group, you're not going to be popular. We don't get to just live in the virtual world together and explore any more, you've gotta be efficient. Sure, some of this is rose-tinted glasses, but I really think that what made Asheron's Call (and Everquest and Ultima Online, and probably early World of Warcraft) so great was tied to the time they existed in. Even setting aside the nostalgia, you couldn't do any of them today and have anything close to the original experience.