Month: February 2021

Hey Friends! I have been doing this thing where I run down the various MMORPGs that I have played in the past and talk a bit about each of them. We are on part 4 and up until this point we have covered 45 different games and today we tackle another fifteen. Why fifteen? I have no clue that jus sort of worked out to be where I lost steam and was unwilling to keep moving forward on that first day… and then after that the format stuck.

Runes of Magic

I knew once I started down this list I would think of some other games that I played quite a bit that I failed to throw on it. As such yesterdays discussion of Echo of Souls… made me remember the first soulless free to play WoW Clone that I ever played. I am talking about Runes of Magic which released by Taiwanese developer Runewalker and at the time was what felt to be one of the most shameless copies of World of Warcraft out there. Of course it didn’t actually feel anything like WoW, but that is sort of the charm of these low rent knockoffs and I remember it being extremely popular for a while among my friend who specifically were struggling to pay that monthly subscription fee. It too was what I would term as “aggressively mediocre” but I had some fun. It introduced me to the concept of temporary bag space and item rentals… which seems to be part and parcel with the RMT game nonsense. I’ve often wondered if the game ever improved.

Forsaken World

If Runes of Magic was the first for me… I think the one that FELT the most like World of Warcraft was Forsaken World from 2012. This was built by Perfect World which at the time was a nonsensical name that meant absolutely nothing to me… little did I know that they were just about to go on a buying spree and snap up a bunch of games that I actually cared about. What Forsaken World improved upon was the general feel and flow of combat and the art style. It felt significantly less asset flip and while completely copying the art style of World of Warcraft, the world felt cohesive. I was particular partial to the Stonemen… which was sort of a Granok before Wildstar kind of vibe. The key problem I had with the game is that each race was SEVERELY limited in the number of classes they could choose from… so for example as Stonemen I could be Protector… which admittedly is probably why I went with that race in the first place whereas my more traditional Dwarves could only be Marksmen. This game also suffered from another favorite from the free to play genre… gender locked classes. If you could look past all of that bullshit however the game itself wasn’t half bad.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

After that brief aperitif we get into the actually good games. However I have to admit when I first heard that Final Fantasy XIV was being re-released I threw that notion some significant side eye. Were it not for Ashgars insistence that he wanted to play it and ultimately dragging the rest of us into this nonsense I likely would have been a lot slower getting into the game than I was. Fundamentally Final Fantasy XIV is the greatest comeback story of all time as far as video games go. It went from being a game that I struggled to engage with back when I was testing 1.0 to a game that I cherish almost above all others due to the extremely Final Fantasy story. Now when someone asks what my favorite Final Fantasy game is I often times rattle off VI out of habit. In truth if I get to count the entire run of the story starting with A Realm Reborn, through an entire expansions worth of post patches, to Heavensward, Stormblood and now Shadowbringers… the story arc presented is the best Final Fantasy experience you will probably ever have. I just wish I was better about sticking around the game once the story is over, because I pretty much bounce immediately after hitting the level cap each expansion.

Marvel Heroes

I was admittedly late to this party, because I did not play Marvel Heroes by Gazillion until 2014 or so and didn’t really get heavily engaged until 2015. By that time the game had sorted out a lot of its early problems and had one of the best feeling free to play implementations I have experienced. The game had a nonsense number of heroes available and when I started you could play any of them through level 10 and then choose a single hero to unlock all of the way to level 60. I went with one of my perennial favorites Captain America… and thinking back that character might be the reason why I am so focused on tanking with a Sword and Shield. The loss of Marvel Heroes is still a tragedy that I feel all of the time and I had hoped that Marvels Avengers would replace that niche in a loot focused beat em up… but it very much did not. I want this game back so badly and I keep hoping at some point someone out there will leak the source code and maybe get some emulator servers.

Neverwinter

Neverwinter is a bit of a tragedy for me personally. It is a great game but it is a game that is shackled to a less than amazing free to play design. Had this come out during the heyday for World of Warcraft and the subscription model, I think it would have been a significantly better gaming experience. The thing that kills me about Neverwinter honestly is bag bloat. You end up with so many items of questionable usefulness that personally takes me out of what is otherwise a pretty great action MMO. The constant need to do bag triage as I sort through the countless items that drop but aren’t actually useful at all along with a handful of competing currencies and the shop interactions all take what would otherwise be a really fun experience and taint it a bit. That said I still poke my head in from time to time and it is very much an enjoyable experience other than these few frustrations. I really enjoyed all of the user created content that was once available for the game and it is sad that the system was removed.

Trove

When Trove released into alpha I was so completely on board. As I probably hinted at in my discussion of Rift, I had a lot of love for anything Trion. I mean you want your friends to do well in the world right? When they released this “Minecraft with a Purpose” game I was super on board because around the same time I was still poking my head regularly into Minecraft. The game still has one of my favorite concepts called the Cornerstone where you get a plot of land allowing you to build a base on the structure and then move that base to any available and unclaimed plot of land later. This really suited the adventure nature of the game allowing you to build up a functional base of operations and then move it around the world as you shifted up your adventures. Mine ended up being towers with exits and different levels because you ever knew for any certain what biomes might have interesting things going on underground. If you are curious what Trove looked like in Closed Alpha… I recorded a number of videos on it.

The Elder Scrolls Online

Oh god I have so much emotional attachment to The Elder Scrolls Online that it is going to be very hard for me to talk about it in any sort of a partial manner. ESO released in April of 2014, but at that point I had been regularly playing the game since February of 2013 when I was invited into the first wave of private testing. My good friend and AggroChat staff Tamrielo was a game designer on Elder Scrolls Online and as a result I got pretty attached to various aspects of the game. The experience of launching this game and the subsequent toxicity from the player base and literal death threats he received are also why he is no longer in the games industry. For me I had always wanted an MMORPG set in the Elder Scrolls universe and when this released I knew I wanted to take it seriously… and as such I organized some epic levels in that our day one guild had something like 140 people in it which was silly. I stuck around far longer than most of my friends and I still return pretty regularly to play some of the story since I am several content drops behind. This comes from an era when I was pretty regularly streaming so there are a lot of videos of me playing Elder Scrolls Online out there from the launch of the game.

Destiny

I will always carry a torch for Destiny 1 on the PlayStation 4, because this is the game that I wanted to play enough not only to buy a console…. but also to learn how to play an FPS game with a controller. You have to understand what a level of commitment that is because I am a diehard “Keyboard and Mouse for Get the Fuck Out” player when it come to video games. I will use a controller for platformers and “Nintendo” era games but if there is any sort of a 3D camera I want a Mouse and Keyboard. I purchased my PlayStation 4 and timed it to coincide with getting into the Alpha test for this game, and then desperately tried to catch up on twenty years of learning how to control a first person game with two thumbsticks. I have so many cherished memories but my favorite times were raiding Oryx with then Axioma Clan which eventually turned into Tequila Mockingbird that I am in today. My favorite thing in the game however was probably the Prison of Elders, which I used to have a reoccurring date with Jex and JazSquirrel on Thursday nights to do. God I wish I could get back in the habit of playing with other human beings again.

Wildstar

Oh Wildstar… you were such an interesting mess of a game. I wanted to love you so much but there was just something about the interface and combat design that always kept me bouncing. This will go down in history as having the single most interesting housing system in existence and even though I struggled to love you… I still did begrudgingly love you. I have several friends who were super into this game and admittedly a lot of why I kept trying to play was so that I could hang out with them in their native environment. I think in many ways this game is a victim of the hype and attitude that the marketing pushed in front of it… as being sort of the last best hope of achieving the “WoW Killer” status. As such we expected way too much out of this game and when it didn’t deliver on all of those hopes it was treated like a complete failure. Instead I view it as a bit of a beautiful and chaotic mess that was the first game in a long time to compete for the WoW space while evolving the genre in a bunch of meaningful directions. The soundtrack and art design were so damned good, but I think the combat was a little bit ahead of its time.

Landmark

Today’s remembrance is just going to be full of some twelve sads out of ten moments and I am sorry… it just sort of worked out that way. I loved Landmark and I miss it greatly, especially now that I am currently in a binge of playing games like Minecraft and Valheim. There are honestly so many times in Valheim recently that I wish I had the tools that were available in Landmark. Yes I realize that Landmark was less a game and more a development toolkit sold to the player base… but I don’t really give a shit to be honest. I enjoyed what it was for what it was… and the glimmer of hope that it might end up in a magical game called Everquest Next was just the cherry on top. Thinking about this whole situation and the death of Sony Online Entertainment always makes me nostalgic in the wrong direction that makes me want to go downstairs and fix a drink. I had so much fun playing around with these tools and I would love to see this game resurrected at some point…. even though I know it won’t. What I want more than anything is a modern game set in Norrath, which I also doubt is going to happen any time soon.

Skyforge

Such a great game with such a weird gameplay model. Skyforge is one of those games that I always enjoy when I am playing it, but also something that I never think about when I am not. I am not sure exactly what the pricing model for this game was designed to accomplish because I have never once had any desire to give them money for currency. There was never anything that I wanted to buy and I feel like they left so much of that money on the table. For all I know they may do this now, but once upon a time all I wanted was the ability to purchase class unlocks because the leveling system in this game was some grindy nonsense. I think this is also one of the games that plays better with a Controller than with a mouse and keyboard. The storyline is kinda nonsense but it doesn’t matter because the action combat is really fluid and enjoyable. I know Obsidian partnered with the Allods team to develop this game… but I have no clue WHAT they did because the story isn’t exactly a strong point. Well worth checking out however if you have never played it.

Albion Online

This is another game that dates back to that period of time when I was attempting to write gaming news. I got the key and I believe wrote a review of it and largely put the game to bed until it eventually released on steam. I feel like I lack the requisite nostalgia for Ultima Online to really enjoy this sort of game. It does a bunch of interesting things and the game world itself is charming enough, but I always sort of just felt like I was going through the paces. Eve Online is a game with a bunch of interesting things going on, but whenever I play it I just end up mining the Asteroids. Albion Online is similarly a game with apparently a bunch of interesting things going on… but when I play it I end up lugging stone and metal back to town to craft things and then repeating the process over and over until I get bored and leave.

Monster Hunter World

This friends was my first real Monster Hunter experience and I loved it so immensely… and then suddenly stopped playing it and I have no clue why. I was super hooked and I think the big problem that came between me and this game is that it split the game community into a bunch of different bubbles. Remember earlier when I said that I was ride or die for the Mouse and Keyboard? My platform of choice for MHW is the PC… but it released the better part of a year later than the PS4 so I started my adventures on console. The challenge there is that most of the people that I used to play with… also still play it on console but now that I have tasted the forbidden fruit of KbM I struggle going back to a controller. I’ve also been in hyper turtle mode since the pandemic started and other human beings are scary even when it is just playing a game with them online. I need to get over that mental block because I had a freaking blast with this game.

Pokémon Go

That is right friends… I just called Pokémon Go an MMO and there is nothing that you can do about it. You have friends and have the ability to play with other people in the real world and digitally trade things… so that seems like an MMO to me. Like most of the country I was super obsessed with this game starting in July of 2017 and continuing on for a few years of regular play. When the pandemic is abated I have considered picking it back up as a way of convincing myself to actually go out and walk the neighborhood. I remember those heady days after release of going all sorts of strange places in search of unique and interesting Pokémon. There was one specific shopping center that had a high concentration of Pokestops, and at lunch you would see folks parked in their cars doing the telltale motion of throwing a pokeball. I still from time to time launch the app and catch anything that happens to be around me… but I have to say playing in the suburbs always sucked because of lowered density problems.

Dragalia Lost

I am also going to blaspheme and call Dragalia Lost a MMO as well given that we had a guild and played with friends online through mobile phone. This is ultimately the “Gacha” that got me, because I was super into this game for a period of time. I still fire it up from time to time if I am bored in bed, but the magic has sort of faded. For awhile though this was a nightly occurrence of me at a minimum playing through my daily quests before falling asleep each night. I would still love to see this game ported to the Nintendo Switch where you could have significantly higher fidelity controls than a touch screen. If you think I am sassy about a controller… I really hate touch screen interfaces. Great game… interesting characters and just the right amount of friction. Shit… now I sorta want to fire it up and play it again… dammit.

Sixty Down

There we go folks… that is sixty MMOs down and in theory I should be able to wrap things up tomorrow. It is going to be a bit of a jumbo sized episode because I have more than fifteen games left to talk about. I started down this path and now am committed to finish it. The post MMOs Nostalgia Thread – Part 4 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Last week I started a thing and this morning I am continuing it. There has been a thread going around Twitter asking you to list all of the MMOs that you have played in the past, even for a day. I quickly realized this was not going to fit into a tweet and instead I have turned it into a trip down memory lane as I talk about a bunch of different games. Were I planning this better I would have started it on a Monday so that all the posts could have been contained within a single week but that is not a thing that I did. Instead it spans a weekend and has been broken up by an AggroChat post. Today I continue that journey as we have covered thirty games to this point and my goal is to talk about the next fifteen on the list.

Star Trek Online

So one of the things that I need you to understand about Star Trek Online and me is the fact that while I enjoy Star Trek quite a bit… I wouldn’t call myself a Trekkie or Trekker or whatever the current favored version of that is. Star Wars was my jam and I always struggled believing that the world of Star Trek was ever our future, given how we can’t seem to even get everyone in a single state to agree on a common goal let alone all of humanity. Deep Space Nine for reference is my favorite series, which is the one where they are in a space station in hostile territory trying to hold together a tentative peace. So all of that together is why I was curious about this game but also why I largely bounced off of it. I feel like I am not engaged enough with Star Trek as a whole to really have this speak to me. I’ve returned a few times over the years since beta testing it and it has never really done it for me. I greatly appreciate the game that it is and the people that love it, because it seems like a genuinely good experience if you are into it.

DC Universe Online

I am not entirely certain why I am not playing this game. On paper everything about it seems tailored to my specific tastes. It is a more action oriented MMORPG where you play a super hero set in the DC universe and based on everything I remember about it I enjoyed it quite a bit. I liked the whole side tale of Booster Gold introducing you to everything in the DC Universe. I made it through I think three zones before I sort of just petered out and stopped playing. I was going the Batman archetype given that he will probably always be my favorite super hero in the DC universe… even as a little kid I was team Batman. The only thing that I can think is that probably some other game released and distracted me from it, which happens pretty often. I’ve returned a few times but I have to admit the free to play conversion damaged my joy because one of my favorite things about the game was the way that you unlocked costume components and I remember logging back in after the conversion and having some of my favorite looks removed. I keep thinking I will return and start from scratch but that has yet to happen. Side note this is one of the first MMOs I can remember to show up on Consoles making it a bit of a leader in that notion on the PlayStation 3.

Mythos

The Diablo Killer that never was. Mythos was super interesting to me because at that time I was very into a game called Fate which in itself was a Diablo style game but introduced really neat pet interactions. Travis Baldree the creator of that game joined with a bunch of folks formerly of Blizzard North to create Flagship Studios and one of the games that they were working on with the spiritual successor of Fate called Mythos. I remember beta testing this but I don’t think it ever actually made it out of beta before Flagship shuttered. It was doing a lot of interesting things and I remember it having a lot of traditional MMORPG trappings of having a common hub that allows players to interact freely and then instanced areas for you to go off and explore. With the death of Mythos, Travis went over to Runic games and Torchlight happened which is very much a spiritual successor to both Fate and Mythos. I remember enjoying Mythos quite a bit but honestly the lines blur a bit between it, Fate and Torchlight at times.

Hellgate London

I hold such a massive candle for this game that it isn’t even funny. You can’t talk about Mythos without talking about Hellgate London, the game from Flagship Studios that did launch… was received poorly due to extremely difficulties and ultimately caused the collapse of the game studio. This project had a lot of pedigreed names associated with it but probably the biggest two were Bill Roper and David Brevik. Still to this day it has one of my favorite cinematic trailers and while the 3D graphics look dated it still tells a really cool story. I loved the concept of the game in part because I loved Doom growing up and I was super into the Hell on Earth post apocalyptic setting. The game suffered significant problems with network play but I remember subscribing to the game and House Stalwart having an active guild. I remember being super engaged in the first event that was based on Guy Fawkes day. I am pretty sure I stayed subbed to the game until they announced the death of the studio in July of 2008. I have been briefly excited and disappointed as this corpse has been resurrected a few times. I would love someone to buy this IP and then do a modern game with it.

Rift

This is the game that got me to quit World of Warcraft for the first time. Now I had been a “WoW Tourist” many times, where I would play another game for a period of time only to return back to the fold once the infection had run its course. Rift was the game that made me change my religion… if only for a short period of time. In fact I was so bought into this concept that I rebranded my blog to be a Rift fan site for awhile. When I log into the official Rift forums, my account is still flagged as a fan site which cracks me up a bit. I got to know the team, some of which I am still in infrequent but friendly contact with. On paper this is the game that I always wanted, one where I could forge my own class out of a bunch of different skill trees. It gave me a tank that not only had charge but if I did my spec in just the right way… had death grip as well. I think the problem that we suffered is that we were not a serious enough guild to make much progress in the raids, but that there wasn’t enough serious but casual content to hold our attention or feel like we had a path forward. I returned at least five separate times and revitalized my love for the game even if it meant I was mostly just soloing. Rift still is high on my list of games that I have played the most of over the years, but I have not returned since Trion was sold to Gamigo. I have no clue if my characters are still in their same state or not. When all of my friends who worked there were let go during this transition… I have to admit that a lot of my attachment also faded away.

Star Wars the Old Republic

Star Wars the Old Republic was the next big WoW Killer on the list. Once the hold World of Warcraft held on me was broken, I never really returned to having that one game that I was playing all of the time. SWTOR was a game that we all knew we were going to play and I remember once again trying to organize heavily and get everyone that I knew would be playing together in the same guild. I wish I had partaken of raiding in this game, but I was just burnt out on the concept after failing to really get it started in Rift. I think partially it was a time frame sort of issue, that when the raids were going on it was happening at a time that was less than opportune for me. My leveling experience was super interesting in that I decided to group up with a friend and do a dedicated play through where I as a Jedi Guardian and he as a Jedi Consular would experience all of the content together. You could even duo dungeons with us each bringing a companion and it more or less worked. A half dozen or so years ago I spent Christmas Break playing through all of the stories that I had not already seen and this game really is a master class in the Bioware formula. I am so thankful that I was able to experience it all, and while vastly different… I still really enjoy the Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne storylines. The free to play conversion also damaged this game a bit so that I have zero interest in ever playing it unless I am subscribing. Too many silly restrictions.

TERA

TERA has the weird distinction of being the last physical PC game that I’ve bought. Even then it was only because there was no viable digital delivery option and the only place that had a copy left was Gamestop. This game was absolutely a case of the internet Zeitgeist grabbing ahold of me and making me want to play a game… and then almost immediately feeling buyers remorse. Like TERA is doing some interesting things but as a whole I just don’t love the game. It is a game that feels like it is slow walking through the paces of being sufficiently fantasy enough to past muster but at the same time sorta soulless. I can’t tell you ANYTHING AT ALL about the story of this game. I just remember action based combat and a weird class that had a lance that telescopically extended when you went to attack. I mean it was an enjoyable week I am sure but I am pretty sure I didn’t play past that.

Blade and Soul

There is a side tale that can be told here. I have a lot of trouble getting engaged and enjoying localized South Korean MMORPGs. I keep trying them, because really there are no new North American MMORPGs in the works and I keep ending up disappointed. Blade and Soul is being stuck in here out of the proper chronology because we didn’t actually get the localized copy until much much later. Attempts were made at playing it and the storyline felt super disjointed. I feel like I am just not enough of a fan of the martial arts movie genre for this to really be my thing. I tried a big gruff humanoid and I also tried a little squirrel person but in neither case did I really feel engaged with the characters or the narrative being told. I played a little in the localized beta and actually bought in at launch because I had some friends who were also playing… and I probably lasted a week before wandering away like a bored toddler.

Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 and I have a fraught relationship. I was an Alpha tester for this game and I remember the insane process required to get into it. I had to sign a bunch of paperwork, get it notarized and then physically mail it back into Arena Net before about a month later being granted access to the game. Everything was directed four hour blocks of testing and during that time you were required to be on Ventrilo. The first two hours were focused on whatever the Arena Net team wanted tested specifically, so like we were all directed to create new Asura and see how far we could make it through the zone before the time limit. After that initial two hours we got free play where we could do anything else in the game. The problem being… I just did not enjoy the game and I didn’t really grasp what it was trying to do. As a result I resigned from the Alpha test and had my credentials pulled, thinking I would just walk away knowing that the game ” wasn’t for me”. Then I found myself getting engaged with it again because once more I was caught up in the whirlwind of internet hype… only to similarly realize that the things that the game is doing just isn’t really for me. I’ve returned and bounced so many times since then because on some level I really WANT to love this game. It is doing something interesting but I just struggled to engage with it. Right now pretty much all of the AggroChat folks are playing on a regular basis and I would love to feel happy to do the same… but I just don’t like the gameplay.

Phantasy Star Online 2

I jumped through a lot of hoops to play this game and battled the Hiragana boss in 2018 to play the Japanese version of this game. I never realized how hard it was to match hand written characters to computer generated characters…. because a lot of them looked super similar. I love Phantasy Star Online 2 but the problem is that when we got the game officially in 2020… it was effectively a ten year old game and it FEELS like a ten year old game. I still enjoy it greatly and at some point need to return to it, but what I am really looking forward to is the reboot that should be releasing at some point during 2021. I want to play this game… but re-imagined with more cogent gameplay and not quite as many nonsense systems. I have extremely love for PSO2 but hope that the reboot is going to be exactly what I am looking for.

The Secret World

Oh the deep burning flame that I have in my heart for what this game might have been. I am super into the occult/secret society/horror storyline of The Secret World. Much like Rift this game promised a system of being able to pick from a bunch of different skill lines and design a class of your own tailored towards your tastes. As a result I went with a Blades and Shotgun build that focused on exploiting the penetration weakness that both weapon lines could provide. I think the nail in the coffin for The Secret World is that we wanted to be way too serious about the game too quickly. The dungeons were all really fun and then after we beat the game… we started working through the Elite versions of the dungeons which were also phenomenally good. However when we started working on Nightmare versions of the dungeons we hit a massive wall. It turns out that none of us were playing optimized enough classes to deal with putting out the level of damage and healing required to progress through that content. After some tweaks we tried a few things to make viable classes and did manage to make some progress… but in many cases that forced us down paths that we didn’t want to go down. The characters we were playing were no longer the design we had in our minds that we enjoyed so much to that point. The game as a whole had phenomenal storytelling and I stayed thoroughly engaged through the first Issues released. I need to at some point to give Secret World Legends a proper try. I did the account linkage thing to make sure my stuff transferred over given that I was a lifetime subscription holder, but past that I didn’t do much.

ArcheAge

So this is another one of those games that on paper seemed like the perfect adventure for me. I love crafting and I have loved player housing systems in games. I went far down the playing housing rabbit hole in both Everquest II and Rift. However the one sticking point that ArcheAge has is the fact that it allows players to negatively impact the lives of each other. I remember my experience from alpha testing went a little something like this. Early on in the game you reach this point where you have to cross a channel with a rowboat. I was somewhat late getting access to the game and when I got to this point… there were a number of way higher progressed players with much bigger boats and a number of them would sit around in this channel and capsize the poor little rowboats as they attempted to cross. I am pretty sure there is a group of griefers that bounces from game to game making the lives of other players hell. A few years after release a number of us returned and the game as a whole was really enjoyable, but also very South Korean… so the story was sort of nonsense. I played a Catman fighter type character and had a lot of fun but eventually wandered away from it.

Defiance

I cannot with any certainty tell you why that I did not latch onto this game with both hands. I played it a bit in Alpha and Beta and then played it a bit more after it launched. I loved the Television show but it sorta felt like the blending between TV and game wasn’t near as smooth as I would have hoped. It was a VERY ambitious project and I wish the Television serious had managed to last a bit longer. This game however will go down as having one of the best soundtracks out there. I still listen to it regularly. I remember there being some weirdness with the user interface and it suffering a bit from what I now refer to as “The Borderlands Problem”. Not all weapons are created equal and in this sort of game I find myself gravitating towards one specific weapon type. Since loot is so random however you cannot with any frequency guarantee to keep upgrading your favorite archetype. When I have to play with a gun that I don’t like… because it is not much better than old faithful… my enjoyment lags. This is a problem I have dealt with in Destiny and Division as well and I remember it absolutely being a thing with Defiance.

Dragon’s Prophet

I feel like I was probably one of six players that were super into this game. For starters it had either the absolute worst trailer or absolute best trailer depending on your proclivities. It also suffered from having a pretty horrible name, but the hook for me was the fact that you could tame new dragons to fight with you. This alone should have been enough for most people, but I feel like it wasn’t adequately advertised. Unfortunately this was one of the first casualties of Sony Online Entertainment thinning the herd ahead of the eventual Daybreak purchase. I remember it having pretty fun action based combat… but really it was dragon taming that made me super happy. Apparently it kept functioning in Taiwan and Europe until 2020 when it ceased operation in May. I had zero clue that this was a thing until doing some research this morning. I would have probably kept playing occasionally were it an option because it was pretty great.

Echo of Soul

Echo of Soul or EOS… I have to admit that I played this game in large part because I was paid to. Some of you might not remember this time in the life of Belghast where I briefly was a freelance writer for MMOGames.com. One of the games that I was asked to write about was Echo of Soul, who was a significant advertiser for the website. This is one of the most generic fantasy games I have ever played and it suffers from many things I have hated about South Korean free to play games like temporary bag space and mount rentals. The combat was aggressively mediocre and the story was sort of this vague amorphous fantasy shaped blob that gave you the impression that there was something there… but only really enough to justify you going to the next quest giver. It comes from an era when free to play games were rare and unique… and folks who couldn’t afford to buy a game were just happy to have something to play. Now there are so many better options out there.

Bitterness Ensues

I am somewhat concerned that it feels like the longer I write about these the more bitter I get about various MMO tropes. I have no clue if this is entertaining at all for anyone but 45 games in I am starting to question my wisdom for going down this path. However now that I am on it… I want to see it through to the end. The post MMOs Nostalgia Thread – Part 3 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.