Well folks, we are here. We have made it to the end of this list thing… and I feel a little battered for it. Going through all of this has been a bit of a mental journey. I started out thinking that it would be super easy to list out all of the MMOs that I have played in the past but then you run into challenges of which ones deserve to be included and which were far too brief to even mention. Further compounded is the fact that as I sit down and list these out I am certainly going to miss a few in the process. My memory as I age has become terribly fallible. Hopefully you my fine readers have at least gotten some measure of enjoyment out of the process.
Destiny 2
I love Destiny and when I refer to the game I sorta blend together the gap between the first and second games… but there was most definitely a gap. When I first sat down and played Destiny 1, the only thing that I wanted more than anything was to be able to play it on my platform of choice with my gaming implements of choice… aka PC and Keyboard and Mouse. With Destiny 2 it seemed like that reality was finally going to come true… albeit with a significant lag between the console and PC versions. The problem with Destiny 2 at release is that it felt like a massive step backwards as far as content and functionality. The thing is when Destiny 1 finished its run it was in a really great place. Rise of Iron was a phenomenal expansion and improved so many things in the game and with the launch of Destiny 2… it was very clear that this was in progress for some time and completely missed the memo on a number of those changes. It wasn’t really until the Forsaken expansion that Destiny 2 saw the same sort of greatness that its predecessor did. The core problem with Destiny however is that they have landed on a seasonal model and it feels very much like I need to play ONLY Destiny in order to complete everything before the next season ticks around. Additionally I hate the model of a revolving door of content that we get some new activity and then a few months later it is removed in favor of something else. Finally more recently with Beyond Light they began the process of removing large chunks of the game for the sake of progress and I just cannot get on board with this. I love Destiny but I am in a frustrated state with the experience right now.
Anthem
Anthem had so damned much potential but launched in an incomplete state and never really got their feet back under them. I legitimately love what this game could have been, because it is hard to actually love the final product. I love the Javelins and I love the flow of content, but the games content was an exercise in trying to come up with the minimum viable product. Anthem feels like getting the first novel in a Wheel of Time style epic story… and then the Author walking away from it. The story was great, but it felt like we got only the first chapter and the thing that every single game like this seems to struggle with is nailing the release cadence because content is just harder to create than anyone plans for it to be. The team got mired in post release patching which was desperately needed and started missing windows and before long the entire roadmap was tossed out. Do I think Anthem Next will fix the problems and deliver the product we wanted all this time? I somehow doubt it… not everyone gets to be FFXIV or No Man’s Sky and have the comeback tale where everyone embraces it later and cheers it along. I want this to happen because there were so many phenomenal moments… but we just needed more of them and for someone to fucking learn the right lessons from the itemization failures of the past. You can’t be a game with diablo style randomized (often times useless) loot and then be stingy as hell with it.
Dauntless
Dauntless was a cool concept and it saw a niche that was not being served. Up until this point there really was no true Monster Hunter experience on the PC and when I first experienced it at Pax South I was intrigued… and also really damned bad at playing it. The monkey wrench thrown into this plan is the fact that I doubt the Dauntless team expected Monster Hunter World to be launching on the PC. Once that gauntlet was thrown down it became a race to market and Dauntless did not launch near fast enough for it to gain the sort of platform traction required to stave off the assault of the real deal. All of that said Dauntless has done a really good job of carving out their own niche. Platform agnostic cross play is a HUGE part of this equation, but for me personally it still feels like I am playing a clone of Monster Hunter with maybe not as many highly detailed systems. The monster design feels a bit more generic and the art style isn’t really my jam for this sort of gaming experience. I played quite a bit of the game when it first launched and then have not really touched it since apart from occasionally claiming Twitch Prime rewards.
Warframe
Warframe is the best game that I cannot stand at all. There are multiple layers that get in the way of me playing this game. The first is the uncanny combination of the POV, camera position, and the speed of movement ends up giving me motion sickness. That right there alone is a deal breaker and while it lessens a bit when I am on my 4K display it is still there. The other core problem I have with the game is the art style. I do not love the whole biomech Guyver thing going on with the suit design. If you had put them in Gundam/Robotech/G1 Transformer looking mecha bodies then I probably would have fought through the first problem to keep playing. When I look at Warframe suits I just see the dumb choices made with the Michael Bay movie Transformers. Lastly what I find I really want in the game is some sort of big open world leveling mission equivalent to a Destiny patrol. I am told this thing exists but every attempt I have made to play the game in this style has ended up with me feeling like I am forced down a mission path. All of this said… there is no team out there that supports a game quite in the way that Digital Extremes does and the product that they are delivering at least on paper is phenomenal. I am jealous of the folks who are super into this game much the same as me being jealous of the folks who enjoy Guild Wars 2, but similarly I just can’t get into it.
Genshin Impact
I was so damned into this game for a few months last year, but recently I have struggled to get back engaged. Genshin Impact is a weird mishmash of an Action MMO, Breath of the Wild and a loot box Gacha game. The combination can be super addicting and as such there are folks who have legitimately spent tens of thousands of dollars chasing characters from the loot box pulls. I spent a fair amount of money myself but nothing even vaguely close to that order of magnitude. I really need to get back into the pattern of logging in and at least doing my dailies, but the problem that I run up against is the artificial caps. Like everything that I seemed to need came from the weekly boss fights, so if I fought them and got bad luck I was locked out of meaningful progression for another week. Traditionally XP boosters in a game are a way of speeding things up… but in Genshin Impact there is no viable way to level characters without using them, meaning that you can’t even focus on leveling alternate characters when the things that give you meaningful progression are on cooldown. The game is constantly changing and evolving and I need to catch back up at least on story… but I would love to see them address the experience gain issue.
Devilian
In the “Games No One Remembers” column, I present to you Devilian. There was a period of time where Trion games was spending a lot of effort localizing a number of games. One of these was a Diablo clone from South Korea called Devilian. I honestly enjoyed it quite a bit but had some key problems with the game. I remember it suffering from the F2P MMO trope of having gender locked classes which always feel awful. I was super happy when I got into testing on the game because I am a huge fan of the Diablo ARPG genre. Going back through my posts about it I am remembering now that the community was sorta toxic. I liked playing the Berserker and apparently that was “casual mode” and anyone that wanted l to play that was trash that you shouldn’t ever invite to a group. The other challenge is that the game didn’t feel like it had any sort of a Sword and Board tanky character, which is another trope that I really enjoy in this sort of game. I love the Diablo 3 Crusader for example. The game had a lot of potential but ultimately was shuttered in January of 2018.
Animal Crossing: New Horizon
So I realize you are just about to say “But Bel, Animal Crossing isn’t an MMO” and I am going to say bullshit. The way that the community interacts with this game and the complex systems of player based trading that has evolved and visiting each others Islands… ABSOLUTELY makes this game an MMO. Animal Crossing New Horizon was my very first foray into the franchise and I was super freaking into it for a month… and it got me through the worst of getting adjusted to this post apocalyptic pandemic hell that we now live in. I bounced once I realized that I felt a sense of urgency to do all of the things each day for fear of losing imaginary progress. At some point I want to return but when I do I am going to time travel like a fiend and do things on my terms rather than the real world day/night cycle of this game.
Crowfall
Crowfall is a game that I keep periodically booting up and trying to play, but I can’t for certain tell you what in the hell the game is actually trying to do. There is a crafting system and then there is combat… but everything else about the game feels sorta wishy washy in between. The combat is vaguely interesting as is the crafting but the two of them combined do not necessarily add up to be a compelling gameplay experience. I have not followed the Crowfall community and as such I am largely viewing this game as an outsider and I can’t say I get it yet. This is a long time of games that I backed once upon a time and I keep poking my head into it. I would love someone to explain to me what Crowfall wants to be when it grows up, because right now at this very moment it feels like it is trying to be a chaotic mess.
Lineage II Revolution
You ever find yourself playing a game and you don’t really know why? This was me for a few months as I was poking my head into Lineage II Revolution each night on my phone. This is probably the first game that I tried to play from the “mobile mmo click a button to have the game do the thing for you” genre. It was pretty short lived because I rapidly realized that the gameplay itself wasn’t really anything worth completing on your own… which is why they give you the button that just makes the game do it for you. I am sorta glad though that I played through something like this so I at least feel like I understand this genre a bit more. I was trying to approach it as though it were a traditional game, when instead it is just a loot box with pretty graphics.
Moonrise
This is another in a long line of games that I remember fondly… but likely no one else does but the developers. When I met with the Undead Labs folks at Pax South, they were showing off two games… State of Decay: Year One Survivor Edition or YOSE and Moonrise which was intended to be the second game released from the studio. It was this amalgam of a Pokemon pet battler with an online MMO and I honestly found it really enjoyable. You were a Warden and something made the local fauna get angry and start attacking people so you used your trained pets to battle them and calm them back down. At least that is what I remember of the core story. The battles were really enjoyable though and it was targeting PC and mobile platforms with cross play. Had they managed to bring this to market I think it would have been a pretty big success. I have no clue what happened in the development process but it was ultimately canned in 2015.
Project Gorgon
If the Uncanny Valley were a video game it would be Project Gorgon. Gorgon is a game that I believe strives to play like your memories of Everquest and Asheron’s Call. What ends up causing the uncanny valley effect is the high fidelity rendering of the world with very low fidelity gameplay. The other challenge I had with the game is just how universally awful your characters gear always looks because you wear things out of availability, not because they look good. In fine art and music there is this concept of “Outsider Art“, or artists who are completely self taught without any mentorship or contemporaries and the end result often ends up both brilliant and wildly jarring at the same time. Project Gorgon feels like an Outsider Art video game.
TemTem
Have you ever found yourself uttering the phrase “There should really be a Pokémon MMO”? Grats it exists and it is called Tem Tem. This game is a love letter to the Pokémon Franchise delivered originally on the PC and in MMORPG format. I originally backed this game when I believe it was on Kickstarter and then played it off and on during Alpha and Beta tests. It evolved slowly from very much not a game to a fully fledged designer impostors Pokémon game. Tem Tem is the game that made me realize that I don’t ACTUALLY like Pokémon games that much. I didn’t grow up with Pokémon and I first played “Blue” on a Gameboy Emulator and then it wasn’t until X/Y that I picked up the series again. I enjoy the collection of new critters but I do not really like pet battles at all. That is not to say that I won’t get sucked into the hype of a Pokémon game at some point in the future, but I am realizing my own tastes a bit more.
Lego Minifigures Online
Did you know that Funcom created a Diablo Clone that involved you buying the collectable blind bags of Lego MiniFigures and then using the code inside to register new characters? It is okay, no one else did either and that is I guess why this game more or less just sort of faded away. One series of MiniFigures had the codes and the next didn’t and the project was never spoken of again. The entire thing officially closed in September of 2016, but I remember the game fondly. It was actually rather enjoyable and many of the characters had wildly different combat methods. You built a team of three characters and then could switch back and forth between them freely allowing you to focus on the strengths of each and rely on the team as a whole to solve any challenges you might encounter. This is yet another game that tried to ride in on Skylanders mania only to flop when the Physical Toys as DLC thing faded from the zeitgeist for everyone but diehard Amiibo collectors.
Diablo 3
Diablo 3 right now is probably my favorite MMORPG, but mostly because of the concept of seasons and the way we interact with them. Diablo 3 itself is a great gameplay experience and I have so much freaking love for this game. However the parts that I really love are the intangibles that come from the way that I play it. Namely my friend Grace and I and occasionally other folks have this tradition of staying up and playing Diablo 3 on the opening night of a season. As we have gotten older we have lasted shorter periods of time in this initial grind, but we more or less treat it like the launch of a new MMORPG, which for me is the most exciting period for a game. We have this condensed week or two of serious play and then get as far in the season as we care to get… and then walk away for three months until the next season starts. It ends up being this great cycle of intense activity that we can walk away from easily without feeling like we are missing something.
Monster Hunter Online
Sometimes I do some really dumb things and go through a lot of effort for very minimal enjoyment payout. When I get into something I have a bad habit of getting super obsessed with that thing for a period of time. When I was into Monster Hunter World I was trying to engage with as many Monster Hunter things as I could in a short period of time… and among those rabbit holes I found out that apparently there was a Monster Hunter MMORPG that only came out in China. This process involved me faking some sort of Citizen ID that is required to sign up for any sort of online game. The end result was a really poorly playing online MMORPG that was immediately forgettable, but I kept playing it because I felt like I needed to get something out of the effort I just went through. Sometimes I think I do these dumb things just so I will have a story to tell about it.
Sky Saga
Sky Saga was the first game that I remember playing that was very much “Minecraft but an MMO” that I played. It had its moment in the sun as the new hotness and so many of us played it for so brief a period of time. One of the great things about my blog is it serves as a journal of what I cared about at a specific time. I apparently cared about Sky Saga in February of 2015 when I got into the Alpha and then stopped caring about it when that phase of the alpha was over. I am sure I probably got invites to other phases but I can’t really remember playing it much other than that initial push. It did lead me to discover Creativerse as well which I played for a time. I am not sure what happened during the development of the game but it permanently halted in August of 2017.
Wolcen
Wolcen and I have this wild ride. I bought into the game when it first showed up on the Steam store and it was very much not really a game at that point. More recently it shaped up into what was a pretty solid adventure with a completely reasonable story. When it officially launched the first chapter of the story I played it hard and heavy for a month, got through the main story… survived its awkward bugs and then then just sorta wandered away because some other shiny object caught my attention. I need to return to it and see how it has progressed in the time I have been away from it.
The Division 1/2
I am going to largely lump the two games together because I have ended up with a very similar experience from them both. I really enjoyed Division when it first launched, in part because I was enthralled by just how detailed the world was. The world was completely miserable and joyless… which sort of ground on you as you played it and I think kept me from engaging much further. Division 2 improves on a lot of that giving you a reason to care about what you are doing in helping out the fledgling survivor communities. The thing I have learned about by playing both games however is that I am not really that into “Military Fantasy” as a genre. I like blowing up aliens and monsters far more than I like killing folks trying to survive in the burnt out husk of society. The other core problem I have had is that there are a very limited number of weapons that I enjoy using, and because of the way in which the drops work… it is somewhat hard trying to make sure I have a current and viable version of one of these weapons on me at all times. I do want to get back in and play some more Division 2 because I think I COULD like it… but I also don’t want to use the level boost and skip all of the story.
Marvel’s Avengers
Marvel’s Avengers has a delightful coming of age story featuring one of my favorite characters Ms. Marvel aka Kamala Khan. I had a lot of fun experiencing that story and that is pretty much the end of positive things I have to say about this game. The problem with that game is that the moment to moment gameplay of Avengers is just not enjoyable. It ends up being repetitive tedium as encounters are way tankier than they should be and the attacks land without feeling any gravity to them. Then there is the whole uncanny valley that is the facial models of this game. They are clearly going for a MCU feel but did not get the rights to the actual actors… leading to the game sorta feeling like you are playing as the stunt doubles. That eventually faded as I played more of the game, but the lack of enjoyable gameplay really was the thing that caused me to bounce. I leveled 2 characters to the level cap, geared out out pretty much to the max and then as I was leveling a third character I asked myself what the hell was the point.
Fallout 76
Fallout 76 has been lampooned by gamers, the press and influencers as this bug riddled money grab by Bethesda. However my personal experience was considerably different and I had a lot of fun running around with friends in the Fallout setting. The whole taking of territory and defending of a base was some of the most fun I have had in a game like this. My schedule did not align with the others and as a result I sorta faded away from the game, but I would love to return to it at some point soon. Since I did not really make significant progress, part of me wants to just start fresh so I can experience what the new player experience is now as compared to what it was previously before the introduction of NPCs. I think there is probably a compelling game here and I just need to sort out the time to really engage with it.
Tired of Typing
Well folks… I think that is it. Todays post ran considerably longer because as I was thinking about games… I remembered other games that I figured I should probably include. The second I create this it will immediately be out of date given that I am constantly engaging with new online games. For those wondering the final tally at the end… is 82 games. Now I am ready to not do this thing and talk about something else.
The post MMOs Nostalgia Thread – Part 5 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
