I long for the days of yore, but I never really got into MMOs until WOW and I’ve always been jealous heating the stories of people playing MMOs prior.
At some point in the future I’m going to be making an XP era PC build where I plan to play some older games from my childhood as well and any MMOs from that era that I missed out on
Also going to try and get properly into FFXI at some point too but I’m wanting to hear other suggestions too.
I’ve tried everquest but the way they center the character in the 3rd person view starts to mess with my motion sickness a bit feeling like I have to look at the ground a lot more than I’d normally prefer.
Ragnarok Online was pretty great and you can still play it with private servers. This is a very chill game, mostly about the vibes and hanging out, you’ll probably need a friend to enjoy this with because IDK if you’ll get much out of it just grinding with random people. When you pick a private server you should probably find one with low exp rates, like 10x or less, if you’ve never played before.
Phantasy Star Online isn’t really an MMO (it’s pretty much a clone of Diablo except 3rd person and sci-fi) but it was heavily marketed as one. Grab the “Blue Burst” version for PC and play on a private server. You’ll probably want to use a controller for it. This one you could play with randoms.
City of Heroes was awesome and it holds up today, but is only available on private servers.
CoH was so cool. I’m not typically a big MMO fan but that was definitely a good one. I did also play on the private server briefly when that came out. This thread was about pre-WoW though so it doesn’t qualify.
CoH was released before WoW. In fact, WoW pretty much killed CoH. The servers went to full all the time to barely populated. I migrated over to WoW myself.
Holy crap that’s surprising to me lol, CoH seems so advanced. I never got into WoW
I still play Ultima Online to this day, albeit not on the official EA servers.
Currently playing on UOAlive, which is a casual non-PvP-focused shard that’s pretty chill. I used to be more into the PvP aspect of the game, but these days I’m over it.
The original Guild Wars. I initially only bought it because I couldn’t afford the subscription for WoW, but oh boy did it end up a good idea to buy GW :D
I love DAoC, though just on freeshards.
What’s DAoC?
Dark Age of Camelot. Old school MMO from 2001. It still has a love server, however, it moved too far from the DAoC I knew back then, so I limit playing to freeshards. The great thing about it is PvP, or rather, RvR: Realm vs. Realm.
There are three realms that fight each other in a large zone. It has a low number of skills, yet a high skill ceiling. CC has a true impact - you could be unable to do anything for 1 minute if you are not careful, have no defenses up or no healer in your group. It is engaging to play in a team in groups of 8 vs 8,to decide which target to pick etc.
See here from minute 1: https://youtu.be/GruFJD_b918
Ooo I’ll definitely have a look into this, thanks for the recommendation