A list of all the MMO's I've played (or watched enough of to form an opinion).
This list is a work in progress as I add my own impressions of each game.
By the way, I hate the fact that I can't format the text in the comments for each game.
I still don't consider this an MMO but some people do... so... Personally, I was never a Battlenet person. If I played this online with others, it was over TCP/IP. I didn't play it for a competitive mode or to be the most epicest badass out there. I played to have fun. The Diablo games are considered the ultimate dungeon crawl these days. But the parts about it that people, including myself, enjoyed the most were the randomly generated loot and the randomly generated dungeons. No playthroughs of the game would ever look exactly alike. Most levels, other than certain boss levels, changed every time you played through the game. The loot was also randomized. Sure, there were some specific "named" uniques. But otherwise, loot was often made up of specific prefixes and suffixes that would describe attributes of the item, and these prefixes and suffixes were randomly mixed with the item itself. But there's just no way the Diablo games can be called MMOs. You don't play online with a MASSIVE amount of other people, even if you're playing through Battlenet. Not to mention that the game was made as a single player game with multiplayer capability. It was not made as an ONLINE game. I love my Diablos, but I always shake my head when people call them MMOs.
*1999, Release*
Boy... I started playing Ultima Online in 1998 or 1999. I only played it for a year or so I think, if even that. As someone who came from playing MUDs, UO was like suddenly playing a MUD with graphics.
One of the things that bothered me about this game, ever since the beginning, was the floating chat. There weren't chat boxes (back then, at least) like most MMOs have now. All chat floated above the character on the screen.
Another thing that came to bother me as soon as EQ and other games came out, was the two-dimensional aspect of UO. Sure, it was fun. But once 3d MMOs started coming out, UO just seemed terribly dated. Another relic of the last decade/century.
That being said, one of the things that was good about UO was the skill system. You skilled up in something as you used that particular ability. Boy do I remember casting the same spell over and over and over. There was no particular class system, that I recall. You skilled up particular skills to create your character to be of the type of class you were looking for. Some people still prefer this level of open-class system.
One of the interesting things about UO, also, was that one of the first expansions for the game had split the world into 2 alternate universes basically. One was PvE and the other was PvP. I always thought this was an interesting way of addressing both crowds without the need for different servers.
UO was also cool because you could "own land" which was player housing. You could build your house as you pleased, put in it what you pleased. It was all a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, because after all these years, UO has tried to stay true to its roots, I just have never been able to go back. Once I went to 3d MMOs, UO lost its magic for me. That, and I think I preferred the class system - that way in groups, everyone basically knew what their role was.
UO is long past its prime, but it's still kicking after over ten years. Congratulations, UO.
*2000, Release* Ahh EQ, although I may have told UO he could have it, it was you who truly popped my MMO cherry. EQ led the way for every MMO that came after it. People always compare everything to WoW, but truly, EQ was where WoW got everything from in the first place. The main difference was simply timing. Gaming, in general has become more mainstream now than it was when EQ came out back in the late 90s. EQ was a TOUGH game. Getting a group to quest or grind entailed at least half an hour of getting to where you needed to be, finding a group, having everyone else get there, buffing, getting mana again, and then getting started. When you died, you had to RETRIEVE your corpse, and all the belongings you had on it. And that meant hoping you could either make it back to your corpse, or that some SK would summon your corpse for you so you didn't have to try to get it from under that dragon's claw. Dying in EQ was a much bigger deal that it is in games at all anymore today. Then there were the Epics. Epics in EQ didn't mean what you raided every day for. Epics were something you planned for six months before you even got the chance to do it. Each class had their "epic weapon." As a cleric, we affectionately called ours, noodle. Don't ask. The real name was something like the Ankh of Water Sprinkling or something. Just know that it had a clicky rez on it, which was awesome for raiding. I swear the prequests took forever as it was for our noodle. Then you got to the meaty quests. Where you stood in line with other cleric who were each waiting on a 3 day spawn timer for a dragon who had an item. That probably took another month, depending on how long the line on a server was. And that's just one of the bottleneck parts, though for quite some time, that was the biggest bottleneck. And here priests in WoW complain about 15 minute spawn timers for the Benediction quest. Although EQ may be looked at as a relic by many now, it still remains, to me at least, the forefather of this genre. I realize there were others, but EQ is the one that many others modeled themselves after.
With the expansion of Kunark came something that MMO players began to learn... some may say to a detriment. With Kunark, Karnor's Castle, and the area outside it in the Dreadlands, came what I fondly recall as chain-pulling. What's interesting about this, and how I recall it, is that I wasn't even a puller. Or a DPSer. I was the healer. And I had to make sure to have mana for what we started to call chain-pulling. What was this new thing we'd come up with? Before one mob was dead, our puller was off grabbing the next mob for the tank. It was nonstop until someone yelled for a break. As a healer my job was to sit and look at my book. That was how you regained mana in EQ - you "meditated," which meant you sat down with your spellbook open, taking up your entire screen so you couldn't see what was going on. They later fixed it so that your spellbook no longer took up your entire screen. Ahh the macros from those days... /stand, /cast Heal, /wait 5, /sit Sure, there are other things about Kunark, but Dreadlands chainpulling, and Karnors trains are some of the best memories.
Velious was yet another EQ expansion. Added a couple more factions, and quests, etc. More dragons. Better gear. What I loved about Velious though was the landscape. I've always been a sucker for snowy lands. Velious was beautiful. And it was a damn lot of fun.
Luclin is the moon of the Everquest world. Somehow we figured out how to get there, and learned that cat people live on the moon! /rolleyes. I wasn't terribly impressed with this expansion. However, Luclin did have a couple of great additions to the game - it was a complete graphics overhaul, it added another form of instant travel in the form of the Nexus, and added the Bazaar. Now for each of these - the graphics overhaul was MUCH needed. It was akin to Goldeneye 007 on the N64 verses the new Goldeneye 007 on the Wii. Back in 2001 we were blown away by the new beauty of 3d-ness. The Nexus allowed travellers to instantly teleport to/from Luclin from various places on Norrath (the original world). Previously, any instant travel was limited to being good friends with or paying a druid or wizard. Finally, the Bazaar was a step towards today's Auction House of WoW. The Bazaar allowed people to set up their toons as shop keepers overnight or something, set prices on various goods they wanted to sell, and sell those goods. Alternatively, you could look for something you wanted to buy by checking all these people, rather than sitting in E. Commons, shouting "WTB: FBSS" every five minutes. I should probably mention that Alternate Advancement skills were added in this expansion. While leveling, you could choose to divert some of your experience, or if max level, all your experience, would go towards gaining Alternate Advancement points which you could then spend as you pleased. There was a general tree that everyone got, an archetype tree, and a class tree. Unfortunately, I think AA's just became another "I'm better than you" statistic. They were (and still are, I suppose) kind of like the Gearscore of today.
Planes of Power was a great expansion to follow up Shadows of Luclin. One of the absolute best things about this expansion was Plane of Knowledge and the PoK books. Plane of Knowledge was a central zone with portals to nearly every zone of the old world. It could be equated to Dalaran in its WotLK days. In addition to being able to instantly transport players to most zones, it also had two banks, trainers of every class and crafting profession, a direct zone to the Bazaar, and all in all became THE place to be. The "PoK books" were small pedestals with books on them. At least one could be found in most zones, and these would instantly transport the player to the Plane of Knowledge.
*2001 Beta and Release versions* When it came time to take a break from EQ, my new MMO of choice was DAoC. This game was very EQ-ish, and yet not. It took place, obviously, in the mythical world of Camelot. There was indeed a Round Table and everything. The game DID have a few things that EQ didn't. Like creating armor and weapons... and even better yet, creating armor and weapons that were comparable to or better than the stuff you looted, thereby creating viable tradeskills and a player-driven economy. DAoC also had mounts a LONG time before EQ finally implemented them. Another thing I remember in a good light was that as a healer, I could get experience just by running by and healing someone who needed it - I didn't have to be grouped with them! Unfortunately, DAoC's population couldn't compare with that of EQ. DAoC did bring something with it that caught on with many of the big name MMOs that came after. It was the first game to make you choose a faction, and make you stick with that faction on that server once you chose it. DAoC was also the first game to really introduce RvR (Realm vs. Realm) combat which was basically faction verses faction, as opposed to PvP. I remember now that I did go back to DAoC sometime later... perhaps in 2007 or 2008, and it seemed that the game had become more RvR based than PvE as it had previously been. DAoC is also one of the few games that has done three different factions, and has done just fine with it. People seem to believe that three factions simply couldn't work, but one need only look at DAoC and the few others to see otherwise.
Anarchy Online had arguably one of the worst MMO launches ever. The release was incredibly buggy. Crashes all the time, lag, broken quests, you name it. I hadn't tried the launch version of the game myself, but I heard nothing but bad about it. Then a year or two later my husband decided to try it out. I was still kind of against it because I had heard so much bad, but after watching him play a bit, I could tell lots of work had been done. I started up my own account, and sure enough, the game had improved immensely, even by Funcom's own reports. AO was the first game to really implement instanced dungeons. When you went into a dungeon, it was just you and your group. No one else to fight with for mobs or loot. This put the game lightyears ahead of EQ in that regard. Another great thing was how much the GMs were actually involved in the game. They didn't just show up to answer people's questions. They took part in live events that they even coordinated with players sometimes, and these events would be tied into the lore of the game. Anarchy Online is also one of the few games that has done three different factions, and has done just fine with it. People seem to believe that three factions simply couldn't work, but one need only look at Anarchy Online (and DAoC) to see otherwise.
*Beta and Release* I enjoyed the heck out of Planetside. This was probably the first real MMOFPS, though many people don't know about it or have never tried it. I didn't expect I'd be that into it, but it truly was a blast. One of the things about this game is that we didn't have "maps" we were trying to win. We didn't have battlegrounds, or instanced pvp of that sort. It was all world pvp, and it was great. I often went medical or cloaking in this. Medical satisfied the priest/cleric side of me, but Cloaker allowed me to sneak in and cap something, or get behind their lines and take them out from behind. One of the good things about this game also was that it was a three-faction game. Sure, you can still have a dominant faction, but it always changed. Also, there were bonuses for the underdog factions. For anyone considering trying this game, I'll be fully honest - I don't recall a single bit of PvE in this game, so if you're looking for any, you'll get disappointed. However, this may appeal to the CoD players of today.
*Trial* Shadowbane was supposed to be awesome because you could build up your own buildings, towns, etc, in this persistent world, but they could also be torn down by other players while you're offline. I never got that far. The graphics, UI, and controls for this game were poorly implemented and I ended up being disinterested with the game because of those things after about half an hour of play.
*Release version* To this day, I still say that Horizons had one of the best tradeskill systems in MMOs to date. Horizons was yet another fantasy-based MMO, although it did have some interesting classes to it. It also had some gorgeous graphics, and best of all, REAL player housing with functional buildings, like storage capacity houses, or tradeskill workshops. First, regarding the crafting system - depending on your craft, you could find fields of your particular resource. Somethings required dabbling in multiple crafts. Building houses was much this way. Much of the building of houses was done through stonemasonry, where stones were collected, cut, and placed. But other crafts were used too, such as weaving or smithing. I use housing as an example because these often took the most amount of time to complete. Players would even contract other players to work on building their home for them. The system for this truly was ingenious. And crafted accomplishments felt like true accomplishments. The class system in this was of the sort that you chose one of seven base schools, and from there you can choose to specialize further. Oh yeah, and you could play as a dragon.
Release version ********** Best Character Creation Ever
Release version ********** See above
(Husband)******** This game has been closed down by EA.
(Husband) I'm not one of those HUGE FF fans. I can live completely happily without any FF games in my life. Not saying I don't like them. I have enjoyed some of them. But they're just not all that and a slice of bread. When FF came out with an MMO, people thought it would be a great IP that would draw a large crowd. And perhaps it would have... if the game were more intuitive. If they had kept their game at least somewhat similar to the MMOs of the day, without completely trying to reinvent the wheel and making the game simply difficult just to navigate the UI, they might have done better. I understand that they did end up fixing that, but a crappy release is really difficult to overcome, as I mentioned under the Anarchy Online tag.
(Husband) Talk about an original concept for a game. First, a racing MMO. But it's not just a racing game. You're racing for pink slips. And you had to make sure to repair your car and junk like that. While I didn't play the game myself, I thought the concept was really interesting. It's too bad that EA decided not to continue to support it.
(Husband) I will be fully honest. I have never tried Eve and never plan to. I've watched my husband play Eve and it just looked boring as hell to me. I don't want to spend most of my time, or even half my time flying around in a spaceship. This game sounds like it takes the fun out of MMOs. From my understanding from various people, even here on GB, basically you spend a large portion of your time collecting, attacking, and defending resource nodes to build up your base station and ship. None of that interests me. So as I mentioned, I won't be trying this one.
After being gone from the game for a while, my husband and I returned to find that Frogloks were now a playable race (which was kinda cool) but that the zones around where they were regularly hunted had been completely revamped to accommodate the new race. This totally threw us off, as we had a particular place there we liked to hunt. Or camp, if you insist. But the new quests were interesting. Otherwise, I can't say that I recall much else about this expansion.
Although I believe there may have been a couple of instances with the introduction of Luclin/PoP, LDoN was the expansion that really introduced instanced dungeons to Everquest back in 2003. These instances weren't like the WoW instances today. Although there were only a handful introduced, they each had variations and difficulty levels that the players could choose from. In addition to any loot obtained during the instance, the players also gained Adventure Points that could be spent on items, skills, and augmentations.
*Beta* Here's what ticked me off the most about LOTRO - No female dwarves. You have to understand. I'm a 5'3 chick myself, and built stoutly. Not fat, but I will always have meat, even at 120lbs. So I totally get dwarf chicks. And having a dwarven race, but not having female dwarfs REALLY ticked me off. So much so that I never really got past the character creation. I have been meaning to go back and try the game out now that it's free. Haven't gotten around to downloading it.
Beta and release *********** Most Addictive of All
Beta and Release ************ I still need to write something up for the full version of this game, but since I recently started playing the free version, here goes: I downloaded and installed Everquest II Extended. The free to play version of the game only allows you to play one of four available races (out of a total of 19 for subscribers), and one of eight available classes (out of a total of 24 for subscribers). There are plenty of other limits too, such as limits on trading, mail, bag and bank space, etc. But I knew that even this pared down verison of EQ2 would satisfy the itch I had. And sure enough it did. After letting it download overnight on Saturday, and installing on Sunday, I played for a while on Sunday between errands and got to level 10 before I had to quit for the eve. I made an Erudite Wizard because in my old subscription account, I hadn't really messed with Erudites.
Demons and Blood Elves and Death Knights, oh my!
Beta and Release versions ******** More adult-oriented. Fairly different combat system than the typical cookie-cutters.
Beta and Release ************* Best PVP of All
More EQ
More EQ
More EQ
More EQ
Beta ********* This game shut its doors. Had a LOT of potential, but wasn't anywhere near close to ready for release at the end of beta. People complain about lack of content in higher levels in other games, but when you actually start running out of quests at level 30 (and the game went to level 40)... Not cool.
*Trial* In short, EQ without being in the EQ world. Worth a play though now that I think it might be Free to Play.
Trial. Not even good enough for me to remember much of.
WoW Easy Mode. Seriously. It was tough at first, but then everything became one big steamroll. Lame.
*Private server* I'm nearly ashamed to admit that I played this on a private server, because that's almost like pirating. But there were no free trials of the game yet, and I really wanted to try it out to see if I was interested enough to play it. And it turned out I wasn't. I really wanted to like this game. In some ways the game was beautiful. But really, it simply wasn't that great. When I remember what was so unmemorable about it, I'll update this.
*Alpha and Release* I originally tried out Guild Wars during the E3 For Everyone alpha testing. Camera was top-down, and movement was point and click a la Diablo. There was no way in hell I was going to play an MMO like that. I was immediately turned off. Finally sometime over the last year or so, I tried out Guild Wars again. Here's my biggest problem with it: Most of the world is instanced. The second you leave the city, it's just you, or if you have a group, you and your group. That may sound great, but then what's the point of it being an MMO? I think that particular factor helped contribute to the quickly mounting boredom I felt with the game.
Beta and Release ********* You get your own ship, which you can fly anywhere you want. Also: Tribbles. Didn't have enough (any) finger wiggling though, and I simply wasn't interested enough.
Beta - A lot like having a Fallout MMO.
Sorta got back to older WoW, where stuff was a challenge.
**Beta** - I had first seen something about this game at PAX Prime last year. It sounded kinda interesting. Although I had invites to the closed betas along the way, I hadn't had the time to sit down with the game until the open beta this weekend. The game is certainly intriguing. WoW killer? Probably not. Contender? Possibly. *Character Creation* You begin, of course, with the character creation. First, you choose your faction. After choosing your faction, you next choose your base class. On the side of There are the four base classes most people are familiar with: Warrior, Cleric, Mage, and Rogue. From there you customize your character's appearance. The options for customizing your face and hair kind of reminded me of Rock Band. The different faces had names to them, for example, there were "cute" and "oval" (I was making females, of course). The colors for eyes and hair were done in a palette format, which does allow for a wider variety. Overall, I was pleased with the character creation. I wasn't wowed by it, but I wasn't really disappointed either. *Factions and Races* Much like WoW, this isn't so much a good vs. evil, but both sides view the other as the bad guys. While it isn't good vs. evil, one side is definitely more a lighter side, and the other definitely darker. You can see this much in the characters themselves. On the side of the Guardians (the light side) the races are Dwarf, High Elf, and Mathosian (human). On the side of the Defiant, the races are Bahmi (humans), Eth (barbarians) and Kelari (dark elves). *Class System* We'll use Clerics as an example since that's mostly what I played around with. Clerics are the healers of RPGs. But in this game, my cleric may be completely different from your cleric. While I may choose a cleric off the bat, what kind of cleric I become is molded along the way, as I choose my souls that I am attuned to. As a cleric, I have the option to become attuned to the souls of the following subclasses: Cabalist, Druid, Inquisitor, Justicar, Purifier, Sentinel, Shaman, Warden (I may be forgetting one or two). Each soul, or subclass, has its own soul tree, or talent tree, and its own spells available to that soul. By the time I was done with open beta (and I didn't get to spend much time with it) I had acquired the souls of the Justicar, Purifier, and Sentinel. I would be the ultimate healer and smiter. At least that was the plan. *User Interface* The initial UI will remind users very much of the base WoW UI, though the initial scale seems a little too large. Something of note, is that this game allows for more UI customization without the use of a MOD than WoW ever has. Its UI customization is much more like that of Warhammers, where you enter a mode that allows you to play with each element of the UI, even ones you may not see often. You can move them, resize them, do whatever you like. You may then save that profile and import it to other characters if you like. *Starting the game* The game immediately plops you into what feels like the middle of a war. And ultimately, it is. It's a war against these rifts that have opened up and allowed undead and demons and the like to enter the world. Both factions are trying to put an end to this. Of course, you'll get "kill x quests" and "retrieve x quests." And you can skip through reading everything until you get to your first rift. This section played very much like a Public Quest from Warhammer, although when I went through no one else was doing it at the same time. But if that is the case, if they have taken, and improved upon public quests in some way, that would be a boon to this game. Other wise, from my limited amount of time, the game feels very much like most other MMOs that have come out in the last 6 or 7 years. That's both a good thing and a bad thing. The class system may be what sets this game apart. But in all likelihood, like other games, this one will retain a small following. I may end up picking it up at some point for something to mess with. We'll see. One of the biggest problems is that Trion doesn't have the advertising power to make this game widely-known. They'll have to rely on word of mouth.
Recently I checked out the free version, called DDO: Unlimited. I couldn't remember anything I'd heard about this game, so I figured what the heck, I'll give it a shot. Only six races in this game, two of which you're locked out of in the free-to-play version. But I went ahead and made myself an elf. Now, this being D&D, I half expected the class system to be limited. To my delight, I was mistaken. There are 11 total classes, only one of those being unavailable in free-to-play. Within each class, you can specialize, and you can also multi-class. This sounded great! The graphics so far weren't so hot, but I was willing to deal with it if the game was going to be good enough. So I played for a couple hours or so. It was very much like the MUDs and RPGs of old with the die rolls and saves, etc. I was really thrown off by the fact that there was a Dungeon Master/narrator. Wasn't used to that in my MMOs at all. It took a while to get key bindings set up to the way I'm used to from almost every other MMO that I've played. While I don't necessarily want cookie cutter MMOs, I don't want key bindings changed from game to game either. Once I got that all figured out I realized combat still sucked. I had to click for every swing. Targeting was a pain in the ass. Otherwise, it was typical MMO. But the graphics and interface/key bindings are what did it for me in the end. I decided I wasn't too keen on DDO.
Beta, Release. Holy moly - STORY in an MMO! Definitely worth a play
Free-to-Play ****** Great graphics for a free to play. LOTS to do, that's for sure.
Free-to-Play ******** More of a hack-em-up type MMO, a la Dynasty Warriors or something, but still kinda fun.
Free-to-Play ******** Another surprisingly good looking game for FTP. Same company as Forsake World. Worth checking out.
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