Good news and possible assistance

Okay, I've been commissioned to write a 3500 word piece on the history of MMOs for a British magazine with a weekly circulation of over 20,000 people. As such, since I was incredibly late to the MMO party, if you have any experience with anything antique like Everquest or Phantasy Star, or any other alternate MMOs like Tabula Rasa, The Matrix Online, Pirates of The Burning Seas, Guild Wars, Final Fantasy XI, etc. and you want to make this easier on me, this would be the thread to speak up in.

Cheers.

I could talk about Ultima Online. That's ancient. What do you want to know?

Yeah, my big question is what was it like playing MMOs back when dinosaurs roamed the earth?

Well, okay. Some other general questions: How massive was the MMO aspect (simultaneous users)? How much did you have to play with others? What was the in-game stuff like? How does it compare to WoW? What's it gonna take to knock WoW off its perch aside from player apathy and exhaustion?

Basically, just tell me everything about it you can remember and I'll try to go from there.

Everquest I played just a few times before I basically shut it off. The people were blockheads like the old Playstation games (remember Tomb Raider? The block head NPCs whose mouths didn't move when the spoke?? Creepy.)

Also I know that it literally took hours to get from one place to the other. So those of us complaining about long WoW rides to get to the other continent, should go play EQ and see how long they wait .

The only thing I liked OVER WoW was that in EQ you could dye your armor to whatever color you wanted.

Rob played Diablo online and Phantasy Star, get with him on that ..I know Phantasy Star was kind of cool from a "watcher's" standpoint but he' can tell you more about the mechanics of the game.

Ultima Online (UO) was a 2d top down perspective. It wasn't the 3dish style graphics like WoW. But oddly enough, I really liked that look. It was great for the feel of the game. It was very colorful, but yea a little flat. But the great thing about that game was that you never noticed because you were too busy having fun.

I think UO peaked at about 150,000 accounts. It's since slowly gone the way of the dinosaur, but one thing I still miss about it is the fact it was really a game of freedom. Each character could be anything... sort of. There were no levels. You had stats.. dex, strength, int. And you had skill points. Things like Swordsmanship, Tactics, Parrying, Alchemy, Magery. And the skills all worked together in different ways. You had 700 skill points, so you could have a swordsman, blacksmith, miner that could protect himself while out whacking at the mountain with a pick.

It was really customizable in a sense. You had armor dye tubs, and clothes. And you could wear a robe over ugly armor. You also could own your own house! It was a great place to hang out, work skills, store all your junk.

The game required friends to a point. If you wanted to go after power scrolls or stat scrolls that increased your skill/stat caps, you had to go to Felucca. That was the open PvP lands. And PvP in UO was a LOT different. If you died, you lost your crap. Your killer could loot it. And killers had a penalty. You turned red and became freely attackable and for a long time couldn't go into towns or guard zones without being whacked. And if you died while red, you took stat loss and lost stats/skill points. Felucca was dangerous, I miss that. So you took your guild of buddies, went to PvE and had PvPers there to protect you from the people who would come take your spawn. Was great fun.

PvE in Trammel was pretty soloable depending on class. Went faster with a friend, but you could solo farm. There were no instances, dungeons were open and anyone could go in. And loot was really weird. Actually I blame one of the WoW devs for ruining UO with one of the xpacs. UO used to have loot like.. Silver Katana of Vanquishing. That was hot stuff. Then it became all resists, damage percentages, elemental types. Fast cast, etc. It got really complicated and it took a long time to figure out what made a good suit.

We used to go have pirate adventures. We would make newbie characters, grab some explosion pots and arrows, buy a ship, jump on in Fel, and go gank AFK macroers and loot them. All while RPing. That's something I miss too.

It was a different age. And while there were leet speak PKers, hardcore RPers, and those who did a little bit of everything, it was a great community and one I was sad to see die off. WoW really did kill it completely I think.

And that's that. I hope it helps.

UO is still around, though most of the subscription base is Japanese. Same with EQ and EQ2. Sony put out a whole big flat rate subscription plan for all their MMO properties to try and keep competition between the various things to a minimum.

Then WoW came along and ate their lunch.

I know a lot about Battle.net, but the Phantasy Star thing would be great. Also, if any of you played the old AOL version of Neverwinter Nights (91-97) -looks at the old timers- and would care to talk about it, that would be even better, since it was the first widespread graphical MMORPG.

Let me see if I can get a few people here to post. I was UO fanatic too, I really miss UO, it didn't make me sea sick. And I loved soloing the Rat King, for the life of me I can't remember his damn name. It was great stuff.

Brief update: Article is due Monday, April 14. I'm about 2000 words, with another 1000 or 1500 to go. I'll go over my allotment, of course, so I'll actually be able to trim words pretty freely. Let's hope it doesn't suck.

I need 300 DPI images for this article, and a lot of them unless I'm reading wrong. Halp

I read it wrong, as it turns out I am a dumbass. The article ended up being 4300 words when I was done, then I went through and red-penned myself to death. Now it's a healthy 3200 or so, and reads like it was written by a vaguely competent human being instead of a meth addict.

I heard meth was supposed to give you all types of genius insite.. or was that weed... or... er what ever good luck man

pheonix wrote:

I heard meth was supposed to give you all types of genius insite.. or was that weed... or... er what ever good luck man

It's actually LSD, maaaan.