These days I usually dedicate my blog to writing about general issues in games, like games development, trends in game mechanics, or at very least commenting on what people are saying about games. In the past I’ve created sizeable blogs about what games I’ve been playing at the time, but one thing I don’t think I’ve ever done is look back on a game that was important to me when I was younger, and so I thought I’d try out this little experiment. This is the story of my first MMORPG.

As I remember it I started playing Tibia not too long after my family had gotten internet access in our house. It was an amazing prospect to have that massive network of thousands of pages of content at my finger tips and yet when faced with access to this huge web of information and entertainment, my knowledge failed me, I actually had no idea of what websites there were out there I might like. I had all that opportunity and no idea what to do with it, thus Tibia was one of my first genuinely entertaining uses of the internet. After some cajoling from my friends I made my account in late November 2003, downloaded the client, booted up the game, and created a character, I was twelve at the time.

The Newbie

Upon entering the newbie island of Rookgaard and for a ridiculously long time after, I had no idea what I was doing. I stumbled from place to place, killing only the weakest of enemies, collecting measly handfuls of gold coins and where possible stocking up on food to try and keep me alive, and yet this underperformance didn’t matter to me. Just observing the same few sections of this world over and over seemed endlessly fascinating. I wasn’t just playing a multiplayer game (which would have been cool enough given my lack of experience with them); I was part of a real virtual world.

I could know that when I saw another person walk down the street in that game I really was seeing another person walk down the street. That when I turned off the PC the game didn’t freeze in place, but it continued buzzing away without me. Two of my favourite things about the game to this day are the top-down perspective and the rather old-fashioned sprites of the game which made that world. Even in its time such graphics were a little outdated, but they seemed to make the whole game glow with a unique charm.

Reaching the Mainland

Progress in Rookgaard was predictably slow for me. There was a time that even wolves seemed like imposing enough enemies, let alone bears, and God help you if you got stuck down a cave without a rope, the only way you’d be getting back up would be to find some way of dying and respawning, getting a friend to help you out, or else paying a passing spelunker to pull you up and hoping they wouldn’t just run off with your hard-earned money. To get to the fabled mainland of the game you had to reach level 8 and be teleported there by an NPC in Rookgaard’s academy. In Tibia levelling was slower than in most games, but I eventually reached level 8 and after some considerable reluctance bid one last goodbye to Rookgaard.

By the standards of the modern MMO, the mainland in Tibia would probably seem small, it would certainly be dwarfed by Azeroth, but at the time the scale of it all seemed positively vast. There were cities packed with houses upon houses, dungeons that seemed to stretch on and on forever and huge plains sparsely populated with various animals. Many of my early hunts in the mainland consisted of me trekking down to a cave of trolls, taking them out one by one and gleefully hauling a bag full of gold and valuable weaponry back to my home city of Thais. In retrospect a lot of the hunting and indeed other activities in Tibia were one big grind, although having played plenty of Pokémon I was not unfamiliar with the concept of the grind. Even for me though, there was one act in the game which was just too much of a grind for my tastes, “training”.

Fun with Grinding

Characters in the game had eight skills; axe fighting, sword fighting, club fighting, fist fighting, shielding, distance fighting, magic level and fishing. Those first four skills were levelled up simply by successfully hitting enemies. This meant that the most effective way to train these skills was for people to get a low level weapon (so as to kill targets as slowly as possible), lure over some enemies and stand on the spot repeatedly hitting them for as long as possible. Keep in mind that the game didn’t even have an attack button, melee fighting simply consisted of selecting the attack option on an enemy and standing next to them. Training shielding consisted of a similar practise but involved taking hits instead of doling them out. I’d have none of that boring business though, I wasn’t a knight, I was a sorcerer, and had found my own mundane activity to grind.

I found something strangely calming about the act of fishing. A task carried about by repeatedly ctrl-clicking my fishing rod, and then clicking on a square of water. If there was a fish in the square I clicked and I passed a hidden skill-check, I’d get the fish and it would count towards my fishing level, otherwise, nothing. After that I either saved the fish up to be used as my own food supply or sold them on in their hundreds to people who needed large supplies of food for big hunts. You know, the kind of people who spent their time levelling up instead of standing around catching fish all day. Despite the dent it put in the time I could have otherwise spent improving my character, fishing still felt good. It was a simple activity with clearly marked progression, which seemed to level up faster than anything else and didn’t come with the many frustrations of hunting, like death.

Death

Death was one thing the game certainly didn’t take lightly. As I remember it dying would remove a pretty considerable chunk of your experience, cause you to lose your entire inventory (fortunately there were depots in the game to store your items), and there was also a risk of losing any of the weaponry or armour you were currently carrying. The only way to retrieve your lost items would be to respawn and get back to your dead body before someone else did. This penalty was ultimately unfair, but it did make Tibia one of the few games where it really felt like it meant something for a character to die. Death had a genuine impact and became all the more fearsome for it. It was certainly the bane of this poor sorcerer.

Sorcery

Actually, considering I was a sorcerer it was surprising how little sorcery I did. I couldn’t just start breaking out the magic runes and throwing fireballs anytime I wanted, they were far too valuable to be used in such a carefree manner. Substantial quantities of runes took a fair while to make and so they were best used either for more major hunts or for selling on to other players. I spent most of my fights, battling with a melee weapon in hand and as I remember it this was very common for a sorcerer in Tibia, again though, I didn’t mind, that was just how it was and I never felt hugely underequipped in combat. Now the sorcerers all have these fancy shmancy wands to kill their opposition with. We didn’t have those in my day.

The actual process of making magic runes was again, all about the grind. You’d buy up a large collection of blank runes from an NPC, collect together some food, pick out a spot in town, usually one where you could watch people walking by on their daily business, and proceed to the relaxing (or monotonous, depending on how you saw it) act of “mana sitting”. Mana was regained very slowly in the game and thus making runes meant the player had to periodically eat food and wait for long periods of time to restore enough mana to make a magic rune. When a player’s mana was high enough it was time for them to turn a blank rune into a magic rune, sapping a large portion of their mana bar and starting the process all over again.

In another game rune creation might have been carried out with the aid of mana potions, however in Tibia potions were expensive enough that using them for your mana sitting probably would have cost more money than you’d make from selling your runes anyway, or at very least considerably curb your profit. Still, I went on eating food and making runes, acting as a sort of one-man magic factory.

Duder, It’s Over

Once again I’m going to make this a two part blog, as there’s quite a bit more to come. Thank you for reading and I’d be interested on hearing your feedback.

-Gamer_152