While discussing the possibility of “classic” servers in World of Warcraft, Cameron waxes nostalgic about his own yearning for the simpler days of gnoll-pounding in the Karanas. I loved those days too — my blog is named after one of those old zones, and my header images are all from EQ1, so you know I’m standing right there with Cameron, casting SoW, shooting off careless lightning and healing as best an old-school druid can. I was so nostalgic at one point that I restarted on a new no-transfer server, Stromm, and went through the entire game from scratch (xping in East Commonlands and Permafrost and Oasis, seeing the world once again), so that helped sate that particular yearning.
Honestly, though, you can’t become the person you were, who didn’t know what was around the next corner. Not in a game you have already played. You have to move forward. And so this is my challenge. It is difficult, INCREDIBLY difficult, but will leave you with those same sorts of memories that you had when you first got into MMO gaming.
Pick a MMO — any MMO — and uninstall every other MMO from your hard drive. Additionally, pay no attention to any new MMOs that may be coming out. None of this trying it for a month to see how it goes. Just make it a game you have not played before. The game itself doesn’t have to be new — just you. It could be fun to pick up a really old game like Asheron’s Call and just jump into the deep end, or pick up Age of Conan and wade through blood for twelve months.
One player. One game. One year.
If you run out of content, bug the devs in the forums about expansions and run through the game again. Meet people like yourself. Form new friendships, see things and do things that dabblers will never see or do. You almost certainly did this once with another MMO and now you remember how much fun that was. So do it again. Here’s some suggestions.
Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Mythos, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Chronicles of Spellborn (assuming it ever releases), EVE Online. I deliberately leave out EQ2, WoW and LotRO, since they are popular enough that there’s no mystery or chance of discovery to them at all (especially WoW, but then, you probably already played that game anyway). If you’re daying, you might even try Star Wars: Galaxies. Don’t believe the common wisdom about games. People absolutely thrive on trashing games they don’t like, even though other people may enjoy the game (in which case, they feel, those people are WRONG and should be playing a different game). It doesn’t matter what people say. You’re going to choose your game and through thick and thin, when you decide to sit down a spend a few hours in an MMO, that’s the one you will choose.
MMOs cannot be fully enjoyed by dabblers. Commitment is part of the attraction.
Second step to this is to blog about it. If you aren’t a blogger, Blogspot and WordPress (West Karana runs on WordPress) will set you up, for free, no cost to you, in about a minute. Day 1 of the new game: Create a character and just write about how that goes. Win or suck, this is your game for a year. So keep a journal online, and in five years when you look back upon this year fondly, you’ll remember everything that happened.
The question is — could you play a single MMO for an entire year in order to get that same sort of feeling for a new game that you did for the one you remember?
Me? Well, I’m still loving EQ2. But there will come a time, maybe this year, maybe next, when I *will* take this challenge. Currently, Chronicles of Spellborn and Champions Online (neither with any sort of release date) are at the top of my list. I expect AoC and WAR to be too dominated by griefers to be much fun, but I’ll be trying out both games just to see.
21 thoughts on “The MMO Nostalgia Challenge”
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you know, sunrise and sunset in twilight (sp) sea are lovely. i used to sit there, casting the occasional nuke, when i was feeling melancoly.
but within a month after my raid guild moved to wow and destinations unknown, i had real time friends again and i was dating the amazing lady i’m about to propose to. this after how many years of eqrankings, cross server cleric tells, and late night palm sweating panel pounding.
i’m not making a judgement call here. i miss my comrades terribly (especially you, tips), but submitted for your consideration. as cat stevens said, three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.
Big grats, Mack 🙂
Balancing a life in game with real life is an entirely separate issue, and I shouldn’t really talk, as I now spend more time writing ABOUT games than playing them. Well, except for Sins of a Solar Empire. That game refuses to allow me to stop playing.
For someone with both a busy real life and a love for games, restricting oneself to just one of them is more important than ever! Especially one you can play casually — raiding is an obligation which needs to be measured against other obligations. I definitely found myself unable to continue the EQ struggle, and moved to games I could better afford, like WoW and EQ2. I am looking forward to finding one single game I can call my own for a year.
love to you, darling.
i don’t disagree with anything you said; i just added what i felt needed to be said.
photo shoot tomorrow; i’ll post a pic members only pretty soon.
“Balancing a life in game with real life is an entirely separate issue, and I shouldn’t really talk, as I now spend more time writing ABOUT games than playing them.”
Quoted for truth. Gotta watch out for that blogging thing… 😉
Great post. I’ve been bored lately. Maybe I’ll see about hopping back into VG.
One game? 😛
I’d rather have my keyboard taken away again, thanks. Yikes.
Wow…good luck with that. I suspect that One Player, One Game, One Year, might be enough to cure me of my gaming addiction entirely, and it’s almost certain that my first Player/Game/Year was responsible for making me the game-hopper I am today.
If I was any good with the commitment thing, I would probably still be playing EQ, nine years in, but I’m weak, I get bored and no matter how good the game is in itself, there can’t ever be enough content fast enough to keep me continually captivated for a whole year, to the exclusion of anything else…not any more.
Plus, I’m not sure I’d be able to come up with 3+ interesting experiences to blog about, from the one game, every week for a year.
I tend to find that MMOs cannot fully be enjoyed when they’ve become chores. Commitment for it’s own sake can also be part of the problem.
A tough challenge indeed, and an interesting thought experiment. Think I’ll have to pass though!
I took your challenge a couple months ago, all on my own. Of course, I’m using WoW.
I’m at 101 posts, and my main is level 65. We’ll see if I can keep it up for the rest of the year 🙂
I usually am a one game kind of guy. I try to persevere and stick it out…even though I have maxed only one character in any game my whole life.
But….
Only if I LIKE the game…..
But, if I do not, nothing will “make” me like it either. Case in point one…Vanguard…
I wonder if I am one of those you mention that cannot shut up about a game they “dislike” also (LOTRO being my chopping block, my shooting target of hate)
Tell ya what, I will continue to “stick” with my one game (EQ2) until May (which will be close to a year), when AoC releases. And then even put my effort into AoC as well…But, maybe this does not honor your challenge…
I will instead take on the challenge of not mentioning with vitriol the “Ring” game for a year instead…
Does that work?
If I say anything about that game that people thought was based on the movie, and not the books, it will only be good, pleasant things. The lore laden MMO of casual gameplay will be off my radar until 1 year is up. And at THAT time, I will even revisit that game of Boar , Bear and Wolf hunting with it’s pyrotechnic strobe effects of danger and teeny fonts of doom..and see if they have made some progress…to deserve a replay at that time.
Thanks again for setting my brain a workin’ (you and your, your damnable….insight…HARRUMPH)
EQ amazes me. I was in it yesterday running around (all I do these days on my occasional visits) and there were Fabled pickup Vex Thal and Saryrn raids going on. There were lots of people on, and the game just felt incredibly vibrant. Of course the server population is squeezed into far fewer zones, so most of the zones are entirely empty, but if you stay where the people are, it still looks like fun. And nobody has mentioned SOE’s EQ April Fool’s prank, which just shows how much the game has fallen off the radar. The prank was, they said they had finally introduced gender/race changes, and every non-static zone in the game had an invisible PC listening for shouts of the form “I want to be a gender/race” — like, “I WANT TO BE A BOY!” or “I WANT TO BE A FEMALE GNOME!” I have no idea how many people were shouting this out in the Plane of Knowledge on April 1st. The patch notes tell a story of apologizing that people were getting changed into un-requested gender/race combos, and the service was up and down all day, occasionally coming back up to say people should just go ahead and shout about it. The jig was up when they suggested putting the line “IDontWantToHaveFun = 1” in your EQ2.INI file if you didn’t want to accidentally change yourself into something with a careless shout.
Open; I was more talking about people who constantly trash SW:G and SOE when they actually have almost no idea of the current state of the game, and might never have ever even played it at all. Just uninformed trashing. And the people who, because they enjoy WoW, assume that every other game is a pallid copy of WoW and people should stop playing those utterly awful other games, and just play WoW, which is the best game there is or ever can be. Those people scare me, actually.
People should play the game they like 🙂 I am not saying that everyone should just play one game; all I’m saying is, if you want to make new memories that are as good as the good old days when you were just starting out and played just one game, you’re going to have to do that again, and that will mean taking the bad together with the good. Naturally, if you can’t stand that game, you should choose another until you find “the one”.
I’ve been full time in EQ2 for about a year and a half now. Before that, I was entirely devoted to WoW. Before that, I was entirely devoted to EQ. Before that, FFXI. Before that, DAoC. Before that (and first), EQ. So I have a history of choosing one game and sticking with it, and as such, I feel nostalgic for all of them 🙂
Lately I have been drifting between EQ2, Mythos and Vanguard and not really making a good connection with any of them, though aside from articles about it (and screenshots to illustrate them), Mythos is on hold until open beta, since my main character is non-viable and I might as well wait for the beta wipe to start over.
I am eagerly looking forward to a new game that I can utterly devote myself to. Mature games like WoW and EQ2 just can’t bring back that “shiny new world” feeling.
I have a great idea, Tipa – it’s the only way I can think of to recreate the nostalgia in a familiar medium! *emails you frantically*
gah, I can’t read my personal email at work 😛 well, will read it when I get home!
I’ll do it …. if you do it /snicker (knowing Tipa this will be really really really hard)
Haha, I’m with Van Hemlock. I think I’d have better luck playing 12 games in 12 months, I’m notoriously distracted….ooooh, shiny.
What was I saying?
I love the idea, and there’s a lot of truth to what you say. Everquest had my complete attention until DAoC came out. Well, EQ had my complete attention until the great equipment wipe on the Test Server and I got pissed at Sony, but that’s another story 🙂 Comparing UO and EQ is a little bit of apples and oranges, so EQ was the only game in town for quite a whle. Everyone I knew who was interested in these types of games was playing the same game.
I think I kinda saw the future when DAoC came out and I tried to get all my Druid’s Grove and Safehouse and EQvault friends on to the same server, and everyone else was trying to do the same thing, and it was an incredibly difficult task to manage. It didn’t work, of course. Far too many choices, people spinning off to other servers, and then to other games, it was the twilight of an era. I do miss those days of feeling like we were all in something together, somehow.
I’m drifting at the moment. Gave up WoW, played Eve, moved to Lotro, and I feel the call of other games. I want to see Vanguard for myself. Tabula Rasa is $10, I’d like to see what they’ve done. I don’t feel like any of that will be permanent, it’s more like a game tour. Maybe I’ll be surprised, we’ll see. I’m intrigued by your idea, though. There’s something to be gained by diving headfirst into a world. I’ve always felt that you’ll only get out of a game what you put into it. Without community, the game isn’t giving you everything the developers intended, right? I like your idea, I just know myself, and…oooh, shiny.
I think that first MMO feeling is largely due to not knowing about other MMOs. Unless you can somehow erase my memories of WoW, EQ2, and LotRO, I can’t play those games you listed without comparing them to the big games. It isn’t as if Vanguard was a bad game in absolute terms, it just is tedious compared to WoW, EQ2, and LotRO. Deleting the other games from my hard drive won’t make me forget that, and thus the nostalgia will never come back.
I respectfully disagree. Playing EQ in no way made me feel less strongly (or in the end, any less nostalgic) for DAoC or WoW, and I had that same sense of adventure and discovery when I started EQ2. I don’t play games where I don’t feel that, it has such attraction. Looking forward, I doubt I will get that from AoC or WAR. I am pinning my hopes on Chronicles of Spellborn, which gained a US publisher just yesterday, pushing it back into the fall for European and Asian players. I am VERY excited about that. http://massively.com/category/chronicles-of-spellborn/ I have been writing about every single piece of news about that I can find.
I have been drifting on “the MMO tour” since I finally made a clean break from FFXI. I would love to have a strong attachment to one again like I did with Nexon’s Dark Ages, EQ, EQOA, and FFXI but I have not found one yet. I have pretty much gone cold turkey on MMOs except for fooling around with free ones for a while now. I just haven’t fallen in with a good community. As the MMOs get more people it gets harder to find your niche.
One thing I would suggest to people doing Tipa’s stick with one game idea is to stay away from the forums. Blog about it, keep up with other, positive, upbeat, bloggers for the game; but stay away from the forums. They only drag you down and beat you to death with stupid. This is what I plan on doing with the next wave of MMOs. I’ll probably pick either AoC, WAR, or CoS stick with it and ignore the community outside of people whose opinions I want to hear.