The Daily Grind: Do you feel like you missed out on the golden days of MMOs?

by Justin Olivetti on Aug 3rd 2010 8:00AM

Depending on who you talk to and their personal perspective, I could be considered either a MMO newbie or a seasoned veteran. While I tinkered around with Anarchy Online a bit back in 2003, I never started seriously playing MMORPGs until City of Heroes and World of Warcraft in 2004 (and haven't stopped since!). While six-plus years of gaming isn't inconsequential, there are plenty out there who cut their teeth on older titles: the EverQuests, the Dark Age of Camelots, the Ultima Onlines, and even the MUDders. To them, I'm a greenhorn and forever will be.

For those of you who haven't been there since the beginning, do you feel like you missed out on the golden era of MMOs? Do you regret not hopping on board earlier, either to experience these titles in their wild youth or to gain gamer cred by being able to say "I was there back when"?

While I have no delusions that those earlier days and older MMOs were as user-friendly (or even as fun) as games are today, I do wish I had hopped on board right at the beginning. Heck, if I had known about MUDs in college, you bet I would've been in one instead of spending time with girls and textbooks (oh, wait...). I would've liked to have seen those communities in action, and would've loved to seen the genre grow from the very start instead of the middle. How about you?

Tags: anarchy-online, city-of-heroes, coh, daoc, dark-age-of-camelot, everquest, mud, muds, opinion, tdg, the-daily-grind, ultima-online, uo, world-of-warcraft, wow

Reader Comments (91)

I was there when the muds appear, but they dont call my attention.
I checked the first wave of MMOs, but it was not the time for me.
I joined too when WoW and CoH appear, so i think i joined at the proper time for me.

I dont think i've missed anything, i just choose to join the MMO traing when it was fun for me.
Interfaces where so rude in the old times, and i think fun was really less. No doubt players from that time got a great time, but my time in MUDs were really really boring and i leave them soon.

Same here. I was aware of the early games, but they didn't really draw me in. I watched friends play MUDs, Ultima, EQ and the old AOL Neverwinter Nights, but never really got into MMOs myself until the WoW generation of games. I do regret not playing DAoC in its heyday — I think I would've enjoyed that.

No. For two reasons,

I played UO, AC, and SB, so I played the best mmos when they were relevant.

Its hard to say that were on in the golden days, I never thought I could be sitting outside my physics lab talking to a fellow gamer nerd and have 2 pretty girls as me "are you talking about world of warcraft".. Gaming has never been more mainstream than it is right now. Nerd culture is becoming closer and closer to fully accepted.

With bigger and bigger titles and more and more money being put into marketing and development we might be hitting a whole new "more golden days" soon enough.

REALMSMUD!

Gerrof my internets, ya punk kids!

I do like the new mmo's better as CRT's made for sucky graphics. The gameplay has improved some too!

Nice to know that some folks out there remember RealmsMUD. I last took a peek around there several years ago, but I had a blast digging through my old coder directory and playing with some of the rooms and items I had created (but never published).

Somewhere out there, I still have an OOOOOOOLD copy of the source to the other MUD I worked on back then. (Star Wars MUD, still at swmud.org)

Get off my lawn, indeed.

-Gronk @ RealmsMUD
-Antigonk @ SWMUD

Now... Just -Grim

Whose picture is this? That looks like Fenin Ro. I was on this server in a guild called Silvan Rangers. Is this picture from someone that works there? I'd love to talk to them about it haha.

Unless everyone in the picture went to see the Priest of Discord, I assume this is Rallos Zek. As all the different races names are red it wouldn't be one of the later added team pvp servers.

I think this is a PVP server in the picture as all the names are red. I was also on Fennin Ro since the beginning (1999). I was in a few guilds, can't really remember their names, I can remember one called "The Shadowriders" Did you use the name Chavo in the game because it sounds familiar, and I remember the Silvan Rangers lol, I was Dank Mindbender the chanter! ;)

Hmm, I was there from the get go and I generally think the idea that the olden days were golden is bunk.

People were as uncompromising back then as they are today.
Compagnies didn't understand communication back then and they don't today.

Sure the players have changed but the game has essentially stayed the same.
And thats true in both ways.
Fundamentally we are still playing the same games we were playing back then.

Though what was more present was respect for your fellow gamer back then.
The idea that you were playing with someone countries away from you was enough for most people to be humble and apreciative of meeting strangers.
All of that is taken for granted these days.

I'm pretty sure if you had seen the genre start from the beginning you would be close to quitting the genre by now. Because "believe" me when I say that most mmo players did not ask for the genre to evolve as it is right now.

That's a very good point about respecting your fellow gamers.

MUDs tended to have smaller communities to begin with (Nightmare only had 100 or so people online at a time in its heyday circa 1997-98). This meant that the communities tended to be very close-nit and generally pretty friendly to one another. There was none of this trolling people in trade chat and on the forums that you see now, and even PvP (or PKing, as we used to call it) was done much more respectfully with little or no griefing of lowbies.

Of course many MUDs also had some form of perma-death, so that coupled with the smaller communities meant that most people weren't too eager to see the message " ceases to exist" because they knew it could happen to them as well.

you took the words right out of my mouth. I remember the days of EQ when you would ASK someone if you could attack the other mobs. We respected hunting area's, if someone was there first, they had the rights to hunt the mobs that spawned there. You would ask to join their group, and of course they would say yes. or, you would move a little bit away from them and pull stragglers one at a time. It sounds silly, but people had a sense of accountability that is seems to have been lost in the younger MMO culture.

I started on MUDS back in the early 91 and kept playing through today. And I am about done with it now because of what it has become. The games are much more fun to play today, but the community is so much worse. There are many good people still playing, but so many loud mouth arrogant punks it is hard to find those people now.

"I remember the days of EQ when you would ASK someone if you could attack the other mobs."

I'd like to know when this mythical era of politeness occurred because sure as hell wasn't happening when I was playing.

@Wjowski

Did you play EQ the first few years it was out ? Players having spawn rights were the norm and if I recall correctly were even apart of the CoC.

I was an "early adopter" of sorts, logging in to my first MUD sometime around 1994 (holy crap, I was in 5th grade). I bounced around through various MUDs, MUSHes and MOOs right up until EVE and WoW were released in 2004, spending most of my time playing Nightmare (until its fatal crash in 2005).

I still regret that I never got to play Ultima Online. I remember seeing it on the shelf at the video game store MANY times and thinking it looked absolutely amazing, but my parents thought I spent too much time on Nightmare is it was, and didn't want to feed my habit.

I started off playing Nightmare as well. Many good years of living in Krasna, and I still have the logfiles totalling some 90Megs. Most Nightmare users migrated to WoW...I played until the beginning of the year and have since switched over to EVE Online fulltime.

@Sorphius - Who were your characters on NM? I'll say hi to Beakers, Lutra, Constance, Zarek and the others for ya.

-Coren, Grand Druid of Nightmare, King of Weenies

@Coren:

Well isn't it a small world!

Mulciber was my "main" character during much of the 90s, although I had a habit of getting bored and starting over so I don't think I ever made it much past lvl 20. Did spend some time as a druid though before one of my re-rolls. I took a break sometime before Venus' little "shakeup," but came back in late 2004 and played an elf nadeu named Lithuriel up until the crash.

Triad/Cronus is the only old NM person I really keep up with these days, and that's only because he's a RL friend. He's up in Cincinnati this week visiting Isis, Gwyndolin and a couple of others.

I started my first MMO with EQ1 just after the Kunark expansion. They were a lot more complex and unforgiving. And while I fondly remember a lot of funny corpse runs, it wasn't a thing i was sad to see the newer games not employ. Let's face it.. having a week to get your body and all your years worth of gear back from a horrible raid zone gone wrong, wasn't so much fun as nerve wracking.

It was however, a golden era of fun and experience for me that, like many that started around this time, have a hard time getting back.

Let's face it, it's like driving. Once we learn to drive, while the car might change, it's still the same thing, sitting behind a wheel and pushing petals with out feet.

I think that is the feeling most get still with new MMO's and slowly they'll lose that as well and 5 years from now say, "Remember the golden era of gaming when such and such came out? Man, that was great."

As for "street cred" that really goes to the guy that doesn't jump around like a yutz and constantly annoy others in a game because someone pulled his undies over his head in school that day.

nahh.. I was there for MUD's, they were cool.. I honestly didn't like EQ though, my first real MMO began with FFXI and there were parts at the time I loved and didn't love.

with each generation of MMO's they become what I enjoy, more, bigger, faster... I'm greatly looking forward to the next evolution and what it will bring to the table. So to answer your question: No I don't feel as though I've missed it, more-so because we haven't really seen it yet. We've seen MMO's in their primordial days (MUD's), and the stone age (EQ), and the Bronze age (WoW, EQ2), I wonder what the Iron age of MMO's will be?

I don't know if I'd call it the "Golden Age". Things were certainly less set in stone back then. MUDs and such relied on the player's imagination and put the tools in the hands of the players, so there were few if any rules. When things moved into the visual realm, it was more Wild West. That kind of multiplayer game hadn't been done; there were no rules and certainly no formulae to mimic. UO almost didn't happen because there was not predecessor that indicated that it could be done.

IMO, I think there was a lot more high hopes back then because the new genre made people believe that the sky was the limit. Instead, MMOs seem to have run around on the shores of one template, and that heady that we had back then has been severely dulled.

Exactly.

I realize that we sometimes tend to look at those first MMO experiences through rose-coloured glasses, and therefore I will not say that they were better games overall, but instead that they gave me very different expectations about what would be the future of the genre than what we actually ended up with.

When I started playing UO and EQ (and also a failure of a game called Mankind), I didn't think of MMO's as a genre, more as a technology.

Interestingly, from a chronological point of view, the direction the genre took goes hand in hand with the decline of the "immersive sim" (see the series of articles that they ran on the subject at rockpapershotgun). There was a place for the unexpected in those older games that we lost a little in the more directed and polished experiences we have now. I regret that in most games, the "massively" aspect has become mostly anecdotal.

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The Daily Grind: Do you feel like you missed out on the golden days of MMOs?

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