it was absolute kino and a few years later I found this place and that was kino too. Social media and the growingpopularity of nerd hobbies ruined gaming, and then all the tourist phoneposter mongoloids ruined this place.
paying to work. i guess it wasn't so bad when stratholme and ubrs were endgame dungeons, but when onyxia/mc released (forget which came first) gold became a lot more important. it was kind of exhausting too because leveling to 60 gave you just enough for your spells and like 50% of your mount.
>LOL HAVE YOU HEARD?! >NOT ONLY DO YOU HAVE GOLDEN, BUT ALSO SILVER AND COPPER COINS >OMG A WHOLE NEW DYNAMIC ECONOMY CAN BE BUILT AROUND THAT >let's check it out, I got my copy in my mail today - only took half a week! >weekend LAN happens and everyone brings their PC and CRT over >silver and copper coins stop being relevant almost instantly
>friend in class tells me his cool older sister bought him a new game >he offers to share it with me >I make a human warrior >Elwynn forest is magical, immersive, and the experience leaves me longing for more >lose years of my life to this game through off an on again playing habits
The game would disconnect you if you logged in on a second computer, so my friend and I would constantly have login battles but neither of us understood why we were getting disconnected
The first memory I instantly return to when I think of old WoW is listening to Smashing Pumpkins and strafe jumping up the cliff in Duskwood, accidentally finding the portal and having no idea what it was.
I don't know why that's the one, but memory do be like that.
It was fun, I had a guild master that wanted me to tell him my RuneScape password and when I said no he called me a loser and kicked me from the guild.
>LFM DM (deadmines) in SW zone chat for an hour, sometimes more >we all run to the instance, or take a gryphon >takes 20 minutes to get all players to the abandoned town out front >another 15 minutes to get everyone all the way into the dungeon entrance >wipe before the first boss, keep doing so, trodding through >in the end, 3-4 hours spent trying to clear a low level instance and often not succeeding
why did I love it so much
I think you mostly miss having that much time on your hands without the pressure to succeed in life and work a shitty boring job really. Grass is always greener and all
imagine getting home from school and hopping directly into a ventrillo or TS server with 3-4 of your mates quickly increasing to 10-15 guild members as you all discussed random life shit as you were grinding your quests, before splitting into groups and clearing everything for the day to get those last items you need for the raid on sunday.
These days you have no connection to anyone you're in a group with.
>in 2005
I played it in 2004. I joined an end-of-beta group of lv12-20ish Horde characters who decided to "invade" Ashenvale and hunt elves. We ran around killing a handful of stragglers and then died to guards trying to infiltrate a town. 8/10 would do again.
What made vanilla interesting at the time wasn't the game, it was the people and the fact that nobody had done anything like that before and everything was new and everybody was up for messing about and exploring and treating the videogame like a videogame because we still did that in those days. There was no race to an 'endgame' because we didn't know what an endgame was. Nobody was minmax'ing anything, they were just running about.
I played a lot for few days, since I thought the simple kill quests would be for the first 10-20 levels, and then I would be buying a house and joining wars against the other faction. When I realized the game is exactly the same all the way through, I stopped playing.
I may have been able to get into it if I waited until battlegrounds released.
One factor is also that the game somehow got an extremely bad reputation in my school very quickly, and everyone who played it was labeled a bottom of the barrel nerd. Because of that, I didn't dare to ask if anyone wanted to play with me
Yup, it took me only a few moments to realize what kind of static, liveless time waster these "MMO" things were. Goddamn disappointing after all the promises and hype WC3 and its WoW promo material implied.
Main difference was the community. You still ran into buttholes, but it wasn't nearly as sweaty back then and people would fly across the entire continent just to help you out with a quest.
Game felt like a really interesting and cool world that was fun to explore, and the PVP zones were actually tense. It took a (relatively) long time to level up and you ended up seeing a lot of stuff by the end. I remember meeting up with guild mates when they hit 60 and that sort of thing.
Also the game was so much more polished and well put together than every other MMO. EQ2 came out the same week I think and just got totally mogged by it.
>going to school from 8am-4pm >grinding from 4pm-4am trying to server-first max level my warrior >instant bros with the other extreme autists that hit max within a day or two of each other >ganking the rest of the server for a month while everyone else is still leveling up >server-firsts for endgame dungeons, raids
It was unironically fricking great.
It felt amazing to play the game before everything was solved. Lack of info about everything made playing the game feel like a real adventure.
Many reasons related to game design and culture made your character investment and reputation more important which resulted in all gameplay feeling like more was at stake
Magical as frick. It felt great to be in, lore was great, the zones were amazing. You had a real sense of adventure and exploration. You didnt have the game give you a quest then just tell you where to go in the map. It gave you content in terms of quests but then the rest of the world gave you MORE afterwards naturally. You may have ran into the other faction and got into a fight, you may have found a cave that you never explored before along the way, you may have met another quest giver or met another player who needed help.
The story was loose so you made it what you wanted it to be unlike FFXIV bullshit where you're forced to watch the most autistic mary sue anime shit with some of the worst voice actors ever.
it really cenemted what a MMO was and should be moving forward. Really, any MMO with loading screens for each zone is dogshit in 2022.
>get peer pressured into playing it by friends >actually almost never played with them >the graphics are amazing and still are, you get to enjoy that while grinding on solo >you probably give up before level 20, you might replay it a few years later
It sucked and it was very casual compared to every other MMORPG out there except maybe runescape. Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, etc. were all tougher and thus more fun. WoW was made for idiots.
I think the smooth controls was the thing that sold me on the game. The 3D MMOs I had played before WoW (Lineage 2, Anarchy Online, few others I can't recall right now) all had click to move, and even the ones that let you control with WASD had a lot of janky shit in it like invisible walls or no jumping. Even to this day, WoW has some of the best feeling controls of the genre. Funny thing is that I was a massive WC3 fan but I wasn't so keen on playing WoW until mid 2005 when my IRC mates forced me to get it. Even back then people on IRC called it the game that would kill your social life. They were right
How it was pitched to me: What if Ultima Online or Everquest didn't suck
Information was built on rumor and speculation, people were genuinely superstitious about shit in the days before datamining
Since each server was unique and communities didn't cross over, you knew the people you were going to run into, on both factions. You could and did earn a real reputation based on what people saw you do. Ninjas for example had to roll on other servers because they were functionally banned for life.
If you hadn't ever played an open world game up until that point the feeling of being able to go anywhere you could reach can't be overstated
>Since each server was unique and communities didn't cross over
This is an important point when discussing early online gaming in general. Early online games of every genre tended to segment communities into tiny groups where you would be playing among the same 100 or so dedicated players on a server. This applied to things like FPS games as much as it did MMOs, and even massive games with matchmaking like WC3 ended up still being segmented by community content because people would play mods like DOTA and each small mod might only have a tiny playerbase. Communication was done through forums and IRC servers which again only really supported a small number of active people and so everybody was extremely visible because each little pocket community was small.
People remembered you, you remembered other people, reputations were gained and ruined, people would talk more because relationships mattered. It might also take you 3 hours of shouting/waiting to find a tank for BRD and that's the price you paid for that close community. All of that is now lost because modern games pile as many people as possible into faceless random queues where you're unlikely to ever meet the same person twice.
>endless world pvp between southshore and tarren mill >battlegrounds dominated by honor-farming set groups made by endgame raiders wearing the best shit in the game >pulling the green dragon to orgrimmar and watching the chaos unfold >putting a random raid together to go attack teldrassil and cause massive world pvp resulting in server slowdowns >"where is mankrik's wife?" >turning up to a dungeon 30 minutes early to conjure high level water, 2 bottles at a time, for the entire fricking raid >sheeping random alliance lowbies while theyre questing to heal them to full, and getting thanked through emotes >"ugol" >binding fireball to mousewheel-down and beating almost everything in a dungeon one-handed >no "meta" as we know it today, no gearscores, as long as you had some gear from MC and knew how to play your class you were welcome to most BWL raids >real rivalry between horde and alliance, no gay shit like sharing cities and working together
I was perma banned from wow forums because I complained about a porn thread being left up all weekend with something like 24 pages.
No, the thread wasn't taken down either. Little did I know I'd spend half my life on a website that does the same thing.
>No, the thread wasn't taken down either. Little did I know I'd spend half my life on a website that does the same thing.
what a strange fate for poor soul.
Samegay here. I posted on WoW forums, mainly my server's and the off-topic board, from around 2006-2009, and it was the only place I had ever seen the word 'simp' used regularly, up until the recent upsurge of popularity in the word over the last years.
It looked absolutely amazing and had amazing gameplay in 2004 especially for an MMO. In the end it got sort of boring though due to the lack of a death penalty and the repetitiveness of the genre. Though people had more of a sense that a game wasn't necessarily about the objective or 'winning', after all it was a roleplaying game so people would find it fun to just frick around and exist within the game world.
I used to play the game exclusively to duel random people (you would find people dueling almost everywhere back then) and infilitrate enemy cities. Despite the game earning a reputation as something for nerdy poopsocks early on, it was very chill and people took their sweet time playing it.
I guess the only part of the "MMO train" I ever really hopped on was Maplestory, but even that didn't last long. I never understood it. Seemed like a massive money and time sink. Why the frick would I try and get my parents to pay monthly so I can grind stupid shit in a game when I could just play any of the dozens of games across all the consoles we had at that point?
As someone that never played it I would guess it was just a product of it's time.
When it came out it was considered the extremely entry level and hand holdy which just made it the most accessible MMO.
Logging into a game, seeing someone's character and thinking >Thats a real person...
is an amazing feeling the first time when you're 12 years old. When all you know is the online world you're desensitised to it all.
Basically, it's the same shit it is now. It's just not new anymore.
I've seen people point to OW1 now as this legendary game that shook up the entire industry while in reality it was a £40 TF2 clone with loot boxes that came out 2 weeks after another hero shooter that didn't have micro transactions while also having pve and about 6 months before yet another hero shooter that pretty much did everything OW did but better.
wow wasn't the first online multiplayer game, the novelty wasn't simply the same as launching into an overwatch queue with randoms for the first time in your life.
I feel like it's kind of implied by the way they said the appeal of WoW back then was >Logging into a game, seeing someone's character and thinking 'that's a real person...'
as if people hadn't done that before
I feel like it's kind of implied by the way they said the appeal of WoW back then was >Logging into a game, seeing someone's character and thinking 'that's a real person...'
as if people hadn't done that before
I think you might be misinterpret me.
I'm not saying WoW WAS the first MMO I'm saying that when it came out it was considered the most accessible MMO so it most new players gravitated towards it, it wasn't overly complex and had a lot of dumbed down systems. It was the casual MMO
You see the same thing with FFXIV in a sense, that game doesn't target MMO players but JRPG players.
I played many MMOs before WoW, it was a niche genre designed for actual roleplayers like in Second Life afaik. The only difficulty came from extreme and insane grindyness, like many times the 1-60 stretch WoW in a confined room, the combat was typically nothing more than autoattacking. WoW brought players who wouldn't have been interested in the genre at all because of good gameplay and graphics.
This is fundamentally what separates an enjoyable mmo from the way tings are now; you had fun before being [level cap].
On DAoC I would always explore zones that were far beyond my level and in that game even walking a straight line from zone wall to zone wall took a good 15 minutes. To do that while avoiding creatures that can kill you in one hit and trying to find sizable gaps for you to safely slip through turned that into hours.
Heck even without voluntarily exploring, the amount of times I was in the wilderness leveling but got lost heading back to town only to run into mobs I had no hope of handling if they looked in my direction is crazy [and entertaining].
>log on >have no idea whats going on >feel guilty because your single mother doesnt want you playing, and it costs money monthly your poor household needs to save >also takes over your life >but hey you got 2 levels in 1 day and your fiend was online and is levelling faster than you so you have to keep playing
I tried it back then but never got into it. I remember watching friends play it and wishing I could be as into it as they were, I loved hearing them talk about it and even watching them play was fun. But whenever I played myself I felt none of that, I was so bored.
I've been like this with all multiplayer games, I don't play them because I just get no enjoyment out of playing with others, I wanna be completely alone when I play games. I'm not even autistic so its weird and sad because I feel like I'm missing out
>Describe playing 2005 WoW
Reading the quest text in my quest log carefully in order to try and decipher where I'm supposed to be going. Spending my hard-earned silver on vendor items at level 8 because they gave more armor. Running off the beaten track and exploring zones I had no business being in, corpse-running over and over again for like an hour so I could keep seeing more of the world even if all the mobs one-shot me. Bumping into strangers in the wilderness and having a friendly conversation. Constantly rerolling different characters because I wanted to try all the different classes and see all the starting areas. Gawking at high level players in epic gear from Molten Core.
>i feel like having fun ill spam av for a few hours till raid
>i feel like getting bored so ill grind gold
>spam av
whoops! moron alert!
looks like you confused vanilla with Classic WoW
>he thinks i played till AQ opening
you seem to be the moronic one
>spam AV before AQ opening
you just disproved your only possible argument, moron.
there was no "spamming AV" in early WoW, zoomzoom
yea, because leaving one and entering the next one isn't spaming it moron
>BUT IT LASTED DAYS
so you never finished a single av good for you
>a buh buh buh
exposed
also cope
You fricking liar. AV lasted hours even after the changes they made. There's good reason why Classic uses the retail version of AV.
Getting excited over uncommon items that most games throw at you constantly now. Dopamine overload ruins modern games.
Mostly WoW in 2005 was a lot of running around the world. Not a ton of action.
Pretty cool
it was absolute kino and a few years later I found this place and that was kino too. Social media and the growingpopularity of nerd hobbies ruined gaming, and then all the tourist phoneposter mongoloids ruined this place.
The same carrot on a stick garbage as all Blizzard games.
paying to work. i guess it wasn't so bad when stratholme and ubrs were endgame dungeons, but when onyxia/mc released (forget which came first) gold became a lot more important. it was kind of exhausting too because leveling to 60 gave you just enough for your spells and like 50% of your mount.
also arcane crystals were fricking miserable to get and those were absolutely mandatory for enchantments.
reminds me of the time I got 3 crystals out of one rich vein
>LOL HAVE YOU HEARD?!
>NOT ONLY DO YOU HAVE GOLDEN, BUT ALSO SILVER AND COPPER COINS
>OMG A WHOLE NEW DYNAMIC ECONOMY CAN BE BUILT AROUND THAT
>let's check it out, I got my copy in my mail today - only took half a week!
>weekend LAN happens and everyone brings their PC and CRT over
>silver and copper coins stop being relevant almost instantly
>OMG A WHOLE NEW DYNAMIC ECONOMY
sounds like you was stupid
it was a lot of fun. got some free trials off a mate. ran like shit on my Compaq pc but i didn't care. ignorance was bliss.
>friend in class tells me his cool older sister bought him a new game
>he offers to share it with me
>I make a human warrior
>Elwynn forest is magical, immersive, and the experience leaves me longing for more
>lose years of my life to this game through off an on again playing habits
The game would disconnect you if you logged in on a second computer, so my friend and I would constantly have login battles but neither of us understood why we were getting disconnected
The first memory I instantly return to when I think of old WoW is listening to Smashing Pumpkins and strafe jumping up the cliff in Duskwood, accidentally finding the portal and having no idea what it was.
I don't know why that's the one, but memory do be like that.
It was fun, I had a guild master that wanted me to tell him my RuneScape password and when I said no he called me a loser and kicked me from the guild.
>spending hours looking for a group to do a 20 minute instance
peak ludo
should have played on a non dead server
>LFM DM (deadmines) in SW zone chat for an hour, sometimes more
>we all run to the instance, or take a gryphon
>takes 20 minutes to get all players to the abandoned town out front
>another 15 minutes to get everyone all the way into the dungeon entrance
>wipe before the first boss, keep doing so, trodding through
>in the end, 3-4 hours spent trying to clear a low level instance and often not succeeding
why did I love it so much
I think you mostly miss having that much time on your hands without the pressure to succeed in life and work a shitty boring job really. Grass is always greener and all
I have been unemployed for years. No real pressure to succeed. What made you assume those things? Is that your situation?
imagine getting home from school and hopping directly into a ventrillo or TS server with 3-4 of your mates quickly increasing to 10-15 guild members as you all discussed random life shit as you were grinding your quests, before splitting into groups and clearing everything for the day to get those last items you need for the raid on sunday.
These days you have no connection to anyone you're in a group with.
>in 2005
I played it in 2004. I joined an end-of-beta group of lv12-20ish Horde characters who decided to "invade" Ashenvale and hunt elves. We ran around killing a handful of stragglers and then died to guards trying to infiltrate a town. 8/10 would do again.
What made vanilla interesting at the time wasn't the game, it was the people and the fact that nobody had done anything like that before and everything was new and everybody was up for messing about and exploring and treating the videogame like a videogame because we still did that in those days. There was no race to an 'endgame' because we didn't know what an endgame was. Nobody was minmax'ing anything, they were just running about.
that might also be the wrong webm
playing this with a PC that struggled with Diablo 2 was quite something
I was blown away by leveling phase as a young one, it was a nice feeling.
I played a lot for few days, since I thought the simple kill quests would be for the first 10-20 levels, and then I would be buying a house and joining wars against the other faction. When I realized the game is exactly the same all the way through, I stopped playing.
I may have been able to get into it if I waited until battlegrounds released.
One factor is also that the game somehow got an extremely bad reputation in my school very quickly, and everyone who played it was labeled a bottom of the barrel nerd. Because of that, I didn't dare to ask if anyone wanted to play with me
Boring and soulless as frick.
AKA: exactly the same shit as today.
t: oldass WC fan that tried the damn thing for 2 hours during my 2-week free trial, and then just let it rot.
>t. guy who tasted a single drop of the beginning of the game
based moronic boomer
Yup, it took me only a few moments to realize what kind of static, liveless time waster these "MMO" things were. Goddamn disappointing after all the promises and hype WC3 and its WoW promo material implied.
If you were a true WC fan than you missed out on a ton of soul. Probably because you couldn't run it or mommy wouldn't pay for the subscription.
This lol.
Real WC fans creamed in 2004/2005 being able to be in the same world Thrall, Lothar, Uther and Arthas stood in.
Main difference was the community. You still ran into buttholes, but it wasn't nearly as sweaty back then and people would fly across the entire continent just to help you out with a quest.
looks comfy
Game felt like a really interesting and cool world that was fun to explore, and the PVP zones were actually tense. It took a (relatively) long time to level up and you ended up seeing a lot of stuff by the end. I remember meeting up with guild mates when they hit 60 and that sort of thing.
Also the game was so much more polished and well put together than every other MMO. EQ2 came out the same week I think and just got totally mogged by it.
>going to school from 8am-4pm
>grinding from 4pm-4am trying to server-first max level my warrior
>instant bros with the other extreme autists that hit max within a day or two of each other
>ganking the rest of the server for a month while everyone else is still leveling up
>server-firsts for endgame dungeons, raids
It was unironically fricking great.
It felt amazing to play the game before everything was solved. Lack of info about everything made playing the game feel like a real adventure.
Many reasons related to game design and culture made your character investment and reputation more important which resulted in all gameplay feeling like more was at stake
Good game but a bad MMO that hyper casualised the genre and consisted mostly of people that hadn't played actual MMOs like Lineage, Ultima, etc.
>wow this is fun
Reach level cap
>wow this sucks ass, i don't want to spam dungeons and raids all day
I went back to SWG.
>paying a monthly fee to play a cookie clicker game
Pathetic.
Magical as frick. It felt great to be in, lore was great, the zones were amazing. You had a real sense of adventure and exploration. You didnt have the game give you a quest then just tell you where to go in the map. It gave you content in terms of quests but then the rest of the world gave you MORE afterwards naturally. You may have ran into the other faction and got into a fight, you may have found a cave that you never explored before along the way, you may have met another quest giver or met another player who needed help.
The story was loose so you made it what you wanted it to be unlike FFXIV bullshit where you're forced to watch the most autistic mary sue anime shit with some of the worst voice actors ever.
it really cenemted what a MMO was and should be moving forward. Really, any MMO with loading screens for each zone is dogshit in 2022.
>get peer pressured into playing it by friends
>actually almost never played with them
>the graphics are amazing and still are, you get to enjoy that while grinding on solo
>you probably give up before level 20, you might replay it a few years later
immersive. the feeling of exploring a world with your friends
It sucked and it was very casual compared to every other MMORPG out there except maybe runescape. Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, etc. were all tougher and thus more fun. WoW was made for idiots.
>tougher and thus more fun
Cringe. I bet you think Dark Souls is hard and never shut up about beating it.
Refused to play it kept playing wc3 zero regrets
I think the smooth controls was the thing that sold me on the game. The 3D MMOs I had played before WoW (Lineage 2, Anarchy Online, few others I can't recall right now) all had click to move, and even the ones that let you control with WASD had a lot of janky shit in it like invisible walls or no jumping. Even to this day, WoW has some of the best feeling controls of the genre. Funny thing is that I was a massive WC3 fan but I wasn't so keen on playing WoW until mid 2005 when my IRC mates forced me to get it. Even back then people on IRC called it the game that would kill your social life. They were right
How it was pitched to me: What if Ultima Online or Everquest didn't suck
Information was built on rumor and speculation, people were genuinely superstitious about shit in the days before datamining
Since each server was unique and communities didn't cross over, you knew the people you were going to run into, on both factions. You could and did earn a real reputation based on what people saw you do. Ninjas for example had to roll on other servers because they were functionally banned for life.
If you hadn't ever played an open world game up until that point the feeling of being able to go anywhere you could reach can't be overstated
>Since each server was unique and communities didn't cross over
This is an important point when discussing early online gaming in general. Early online games of every genre tended to segment communities into tiny groups where you would be playing among the same 100 or so dedicated players on a server. This applied to things like FPS games as much as it did MMOs, and even massive games with matchmaking like WC3 ended up still being segmented by community content because people would play mods like DOTA and each small mod might only have a tiny playerbase. Communication was done through forums and IRC servers which again only really supported a small number of active people and so everybody was extremely visible because each little pocket community was small.
People remembered you, you remembered other people, reputations were gained and ruined, people would talk more because relationships mattered. It might also take you 3 hours of shouting/waiting to find a tank for BRD and that's the price you paid for that close community. All of that is now lost because modern games pile as many people as possible into faceless random queues where you're unlikely to ever meet the same person twice.
>endless world pvp between southshore and tarren mill
>battlegrounds dominated by honor-farming set groups made by endgame raiders wearing the best shit in the game
>pulling the green dragon to orgrimmar and watching the chaos unfold
>putting a random raid together to go attack teldrassil and cause massive world pvp resulting in server slowdowns
>"where is mankrik's wife?"
>turning up to a dungeon 30 minutes early to conjure high level water, 2 bottles at a time, for the entire fricking raid
>sheeping random alliance lowbies while theyre questing to heal them to full, and getting thanked through emotes
>"ugol"
>binding fireball to mousewheel-down and beating almost everything in a dungeon one-handed
>no "meta" as we know it today, no gearscores, as long as you had some gear from MC and knew how to play your class you were welcome to most BWL raids
>real rivalry between horde and alliance, no gay shit like sharing cities and working together
I miss the trash talking in server forums
I shitposted a lot on the off topic forums to the point friends made their own
I was perma banned from wow forums for trolling
I was perma banned from wow forums because I complained about a porn thread being left up all weekend with something like 24 pages.
No, the thread wasn't taken down either. Little did I know I'd spend half my life on a website that does the same thing.
>No, the thread wasn't taken down either. Little did I know I'd spend half my life on a website that does the same thing.
what a strange fate for poor soul.
My threds were not even bad it was things like "WHY IS ORGRIMMAR NOT LIKE MORDOR! WHY IS IT PINK??"
ASCII threads were the most fun
Samegay here. I posted on WoW forums, mainly my server's and the off-topic board, from around 2006-2009, and it was the only place I had ever seen the word 'simp' used regularly, up until the recent upsurge of popularity in the word over the last years.
It looked absolutely amazing and had amazing gameplay in 2004 especially for an MMO. In the end it got sort of boring though due to the lack of a death penalty and the repetitiveness of the genre. Though people had more of a sense that a game wasn't necessarily about the objective or 'winning', after all it was a roleplaying game so people would find it fun to just frick around and exist within the game world.
I used to play the game exclusively to duel random people (you would find people dueling almost everywhere back then) and infilitrate enemy cities. Despite the game earning a reputation as something for nerdy poopsocks early on, it was very chill and people took their sweet time playing it.
I guess the only part of the "MMO train" I ever really hopped on was Maplestory, but even that didn't last long. I never understood it. Seemed like a massive money and time sink. Why the frick would I try and get my parents to pay monthly so I can grind stupid shit in a game when I could just play any of the dozens of games across all the consoles we had at that point?
>am clueless rogue in WSG using two swords
>run at a warrior and a paladin unstealthed
>they see me coming and run away
it was a strange experince
As someone that never played it I would guess it was just a product of it's time.
When it came out it was considered the extremely entry level and hand holdy which just made it the most accessible MMO.
Logging into a game, seeing someone's character and thinking
>Thats a real person...
is an amazing feeling the first time when you're 12 years old. When all you know is the online world you're desensitised to it all.
Basically, it's the same shit it is now. It's just not new anymore.
I've seen people point to OW1 now as this legendary game that shook up the entire industry while in reality it was a £40 TF2 clone with loot boxes that came out 2 weeks after another hero shooter that didn't have micro transactions while also having pve and about 6 months before yet another hero shooter that pretty much did everything OW did but better.
wow wasn't the first online multiplayer game, the novelty wasn't simply the same as launching into an overwatch queue with randoms for the first time in your life.
That isn't what they said though
I feel like it's kind of implied by the way they said the appeal of WoW back then was
>Logging into a game, seeing someone's character and thinking 'that's a real person...'
as if people hadn't done that before
I think you might be misinterpret me.
I'm not saying WoW WAS the first MMO I'm saying that when it came out it was considered the most accessible MMO so it most new players gravitated towards it, it wasn't overly complex and had a lot of dumbed down systems. It was the casual MMO
You see the same thing with FFXIV in a sense, that game doesn't target MMO players but JRPG players.
I played many MMOs before WoW, it was a niche genre designed for actual roleplayers like in Second Life afaik. The only difficulty came from extreme and insane grindyness, like many times the 1-60 stretch WoW in a confined room, the combat was typically nothing more than autoattacking. WoW brought players who wouldn't have been interested in the genre at all because of good gameplay and graphics.
I played Guild Wars instead
Really miss the MMO golden age
I wish I could get some WoW timecards without paying for them. I don't want to give blizz money but I would like to try out Wrath : (
Can't you play retail and get a token?
I hated the game it was so boring the combat was boring and the quests were just go here kill this 5000 times
You RP with fellow autismos for hours at level 10 and don't do quests until a month later
This is fundamentally what separates an enjoyable mmo from the way tings are now; you had fun before being [level cap].
On DAoC I would always explore zones that were far beyond my level and in that game even walking a straight line from zone wall to zone wall took a good 15 minutes. To do that while avoiding creatures that can kill you in one hit and trying to find sizable gaps for you to safely slip through turned that into hours.
Heck even without voluntarily exploring, the amount of times I was in the wilderness leveling but got lost heading back to town only to run into mobs I had no hope of handling if they looked in my direction is crazy [and entertaining].
I didn't play WoW. I was playing FEAR and CSS. When 2006 rolled around I switched to Sins of a Solar Empire. After that it was ARMA. and now it's 2022
>log on
>have no idea whats going on
>feel guilty because your single mother doesnt want you playing, and it costs money monthly your poor household needs to save
>also takes over your life
>but hey you got 2 levels in 1 day and your fiend was online and is levelling faster than you so you have to keep playing
I tried it back then but never got into it. I remember watching friends play it and wishing I could be as into it as they were, I loved hearing them talk about it and even watching them play was fun. But whenever I played myself I felt none of that, I was so bored.
I've been like this with all multiplayer games, I don't play them because I just get no enjoyment out of playing with others, I wanna be completely alone when I play games. I'm not even autistic so its weird and sad because I feel like I'm missing out
>Describe playing 2005 WoW
Reading the quest text in my quest log carefully in order to try and decipher where I'm supposed to be going. Spending my hard-earned silver on vendor items at level 8 because they gave more armor. Running off the beaten track and exploring zones I had no business being in, corpse-running over and over again for like an hour so I could keep seeing more of the world even if all the mobs one-shot me. Bumping into strangers in the wilderness and having a friendly conversation. Constantly rerolling different characters because I wanted to try all the different classes and see all the starting areas. Gawking at high level players in epic gear from Molten Core.
TL;DR: Soul