Reading over Regis’ post “One, Two, Many, Lots” got me thinking about my MMO gaming history. For me it all started with Diablo 2 on Bnet. I wonder how many gamers got their starts there? Nothing was greater than running the secret Cow Level and slaughtering them and King Cow. This was the first game, let alone rpg that that I was able to play online with friends.
After a while, my D2 buddies got onto Final Fantasy XII. I’m talking initial release on the PS2. You know the one, the one that came with the hard drive you had to bolt on to the back of the PS2…YEAH old school there. I remember I played the elf-type race. I don’t remember much but I remember a few things. Server stability was horrendous, crashes and glitches galore. Game play was mediocre at best. And once you hit level ten it was damn near impossible to get anything done solo. Talk about a pain in the butt, especially when you had to fish for a party for an hour and then only got 30 minutes of game time in before someone had to split causing the whole party to fall apart. I lost interest pretty quickly in this game. Could never get on and meet up with my friends especially since they were higher level than me and quit without ever having an alternative in sight.
Then came World of Warcraft. I got on a few months after initial release and played on and off, never seriously enoughto get through the mid levels(30-40). I peaked out with a 54 orc shammy after Burning Crusade came out. Last year i just got sick of it and quit all together. Before I had quit I started following another game in development.
…that game was Warhammer Online. I eagerly waited for the game to release and went crazy with all of the delays, despite the fact they were done to make the game better. I just wanted to play and built a new computer so I could bask in the awesomeness when it came out. A lack of funds and rash of good console games put WAR on hold but a few patches and some new content later I’m back in the game and loving it.
There have been elements of all these games that were good. I think that D2 laid the ground work for early MMOs like FFXI and EQ. Everything was laid out on a the UI and point and click adventures and hunting for gear started with that game for me.
We have yet to see multiclassing like was available in FFXI. (For those who don’t know. Instead of having unlimited character slot, they gave you 1 free character slot and you could play all the classes on that character and eventual have a primary/secondary class active at the same time.)
I think WoW has laid a lot of groundwork for what people come to expect from an MMO and is by far the most dominate on the market. A lot of game play across the board comes from the platform that WoW built for us gamers.
I thank all the developers who worked on these games and can’t wait to see what’s i nthe future, especially you Mythic. MMORPGs devouring time and money since 2001 woohoo!
sorry ’bout the wall o’ text there
