I’ve known many of you for many years now. Bilbo said it best, really:
I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.
Bilbo said that on the occasion of his 111th birthday, before he popped off to Rivendell, leaving Frodo, whose birthday it also was, turning 33 and leaving him with a certain ring in an envelope.
And now I leave you — forever.
And he vanished in a puff of smoke, helpfully provided by Gandalf, and was never again seen in the Shire.
Today is the occasion of my 65th birthday, and I am officially a Senior Citizen. I know a lot of you knew how old I was, and now you all do. I’ve been bombarded for the past several months by scammers who want to mislead me about Medicare, special weird life insurances, funeral home ads, special retirement seminars (the latest one: for women only! Whee! Make sure your partner is not here with you!) Ads for hearing aids, my god do they want to push hearing aids. Retirement homes. Funeral arrangements. People who want me to sell my house to them. Where am I going to live? I don’t know. I guess they figure hospice care, because I’m surely running out of time.
EverQuest and EverQuest II will tell you how long you played, in total. I just now checked: I played Tipa on EQ1 for 260 days, 3 hours, 3 minutes. That’s 24/7/365; almost a year of my life playing that character. On my cleric: 181 days, 11 hours and 42 minutes more. I’m not going to look at my druid, but across all my characters, I’d be surprised if I had spent less than three years, real time, of my life in this one game. That’s a good 5% of my time on Earth. On this one game.
Bree from Massively OP asked a question today that really got me thinking about the amount of time I’ve spent playing MMORPGs: “How many MMORPGs have you played to date?”
Geez, that’s a hard question to answer. Some I played for only a few minutes. Some, a few weeks. Some, months. Some, years.
But, I tried. And this is a list of the ones I could remember:
- Island of Kesmai (on CompuServe, no graphics)
- Nexus: Kingdom of the Wind
- EverQuest
- EverQuest II
- Dark Age of Camelot (during an EQ break; it was actually really fun)
- World of Warcraft (another EQ break, left before Burning Crusade, game was FULL OF DRAMA and logging in was NOT FUN).
- Rift (first game after my decision to not start an MMO unless I was prepared to play NO OTHER MMO during that time. It worked! Had fun!)
- Runes of Magic (F2P WoW! What could possibly go wrong?)
- City of Heroes/Villains
- Champions Online
- Neverwinter
- Star Trek Online (played with some other bloggers for awhile)
- Guild Wars (played with someone I met on Google Plus. Remember G+? Remember Circles?)
- Guild Wars 2 (still playing!)
- Dream of Mirror Online (really liked this game, not only for the cool cel shading. It had a lot of innovative ideas).
- Dragon Saga (my first 2D MMO)
- Chronicles of Spellborn (played this one religiously, but I never really got into the PvP and groups were so rare I never was able to get as deeply into the game as I wanted. Still, super innovative.)
- EverQuest Legends — still playing!
- Landmark! I paid a hundo for the privilege, too. This is the game that really made it clear I had no sense for architecture.
- Mythos! I followed this game closely while in development, played all the alphas, and the game kept getting worse and worse. What launched, eventually, was nothing like the original concept of the game. I bought the current zombie version on Steam and played it recently. It’s… not okay.
- Secret World — not much luck finding groups so eventually just moved on
- Vanguard: Saga of Heroes — I think of this as EverQuest’s real sequel. Loved the minigames.
- Final Fantasy XI Online. I was unemployed and filled my time with this. I played with Japanese people during the day, Euros in the afternoon, North Americans at night. It was so hard to unsub.
- Final Fantasy XIV Online. I did play in the original, failed version, and didn’t like it. Just like everyone else! I played the followup for a couple of years.
- Aion! I couldn’t remember the name of this one, but people on Mastodon were super helpful. Sure, everyone had wings, but you had to level up your flying ability. I guess mostly you could glide with panache, maybe fall with style, but not flying, not for very long. For all that, the gameplay was not super different from every other MMO at the time.
- Wizard 101. This blog was once an official W101 blog, for awhile.
- Pirate 101.
- Lord of the Rings Online, in which I met many of my static group without knowing it, and had previously also met them in EverQuest without knowing it. When I formally joined Team Spode and we started comparing notes, it turned out I’d know all of them at least a little from those two games.
- Florensia
- Pirates of the Burning Sea. I two-boxed in this one.
- LaTale, with its weird 2D/3D hybrid thing going on.
- Dragon Nest was fun, very active fighting style.
- Dungeon Runners. This game just wanted you to have a good time. A little on the expensive side for me.
- Realm of the Mad God. Some people in Team Spode were deep into this for awhile.
- D&D Online
- DC Universe Online — played this for many years
- Star Wars Galaxies, though it didn’t run well on my system.
- Gatheryn. What a let down. I was so looking forward to it, and then when it launched, I was all, “what, this is just a dressed-up minigame portal?” Which was different than…
- Free Realms, which was just a dressed-up minigame portal, but you knew that going in and the minigames were fun.
- Palia. Was bored to death. I’m not going to diminish anyone else’s love of this game, but I did my best but couldn’t bring myself to log in one day and have never been back. I do not have the patience for social games, especially since I am not a very social person. I’ve always wanted to be; just never worked out. I really don’t know what I expected from this game; they produced exactly the game they said they would.
- Fantasy Earth Zero. What if you were a unit in an RTS and you could be upgraded? This was a lot like Battlefront, actually, but there was an open world RPG grafted onto it, too. Quirky game.
- Glitch. The devs went on to create the team communications app, Slack.
- Hello Kitty Online. I know they have made a new Hello Kitty MMO. This one isn’t that one.
- Lucent Heart. This was a cool game.
- Project: Gorgon
And now for some games which may or may not be MMOs, depending upon your definition:
- Diablo 3 and 4. Especially 4.
- Erenshor. I don’t want to hear about how it’s not a real MMO.
- Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet. I told you I didn’t want to hear about how it’s not a real MMO.
- .hack/gu. What did I just finish telling you? Twice?
- No Man’s Sky, it’s become more MMO-ish as time goes on
- Project Powder. They said it was an MMO. I said it was an MMO. My coworkers at Massively said it was just a multiplayer lobby. I’m still counting it. I made so many friends that I forgot instantly when it went offline.
- Elite: Dangerous. I even bought flight sticks for this.
- Microsoft Flight Simulator. And also for this. YES IT IS MULTIPLAYER. I once attended a “fly in” where you had to coordinate with the various REAL PEOPLE flight controllers along the way. I have never been so nervous in a game. So yes, MMO. Also, I chose a really slow airplane so everything took a really long time.
- Dune: Awakening. I spent a lot of time here.
- Black Desert Online. I’ve never played an MMO that discouraged grouping so much.
- World of Warships. It was fun. Sue me.
So the grand total is over 50, and there almost certainly have been a few more that I played for just a few days. At least 50.
Wasted life? I dunno. I’ve had fun, met great people, met my partner with whom I’ve been happily living for several years.
Even though I am top of the list for wishing people a happy birthday – I actually had NO idea how old you were! So. I’ve added that to the useless knowledge I know about each of my online friends. Also I think we’ve played almost all of the same MMORPG over the years, though certainly not at the same time.
I’m very happy I know you.
Likewise!
I don’t look my age; most people really don’t know exactly how old I am. Late 40s to mid 50s is what I usually get. So the people at work are probably going to be a little surprised when I retire next spring (if things work out).
A lot of these MMOs I got into while working for Massively. I just loved almost all the games I saw to one degree or another 🙂
Happy Birthday! I am a few years behind, but the ratio of our ages grows ever smaller.
The whole MMOs played thing… that is something of an archeological expedition. Reading your list reminded me of a couple I had forgotten about, like Dungeon Runners, and brought into question what counts and what does not.
If Island of Kesmai counts, do MegaWars 3/Stellar Emperor and Stellar Warrior, and Gemstone count as well… and MUDs in the 90s… and where does one draw the line?
I favor a persistent world, where people come and go but the game remains running, as a measure, as opposed to anything that is lobby/match based. Still, that does leave No Man’s Sky feeling pretty MMO-ish. (Also, it turns 10 tomorrow.)
This will probably become a post for me… maybe… I have a blog anniversary coming up, so it might be ripe to coincide with that. A history week or some such.
When I wrote the post, I went through the categories on my blog and “remembered” more of them. I also remembered a few I’d only played for about a week, like Wakfu and Mabinogi, so didn’t feel they made the cut.
Re: Project Powder, yeah, this was pretty much the objection from the Massively crew. Persistent world seems to be the kicker. World of Warships has the same deal. But then you get to games like Guild Wars. Everyone considers that an MMO, but it does not feature a shared, persistent open world. It’s an “I know it when I see it” kind of deal, sort of like “Well, is Pluto a planet or is it ain’t?”
Guild Wars was always an odd one, and all the more so because ArenaNet said it wasn’t an MMO early on. They wanted a better Diablo and even their name is an echo of Battle.net at Blizzard, from which they mostly came.
So you get down to “it feels more like EverQuest than Call of Duty” sorts of arguments and details like, while the world isn’t shared and is instanced for you and your group, things like quests and NPC interactions in those zones persist between sessions, which mostly gets you back to Diablo.
The biggest problem is, as always, our need to define and classify things.
GW has always felt like an MMO to me, even though it really wasn’t. But I have a looser definition of what an MMO is. I consider Fortnite an MMO, for instance.
Happy Birthday and congrats on making better life decisions than I did.
I’ll be able to retire when I drop dead. Or when I am just no longer able to work and wind up on the streets mumbling to myself about Dark Age of Camelot or something.
That Medicare stuff really stressed me out. I wound up signing up for … sheesh I can’t even remember. Plan A or something. The most basic level, since I still have insurance through work. But all these dire warning about penalties if you don’t sign up at the right time… stressful. At least for me it was.
Well, we’ll see if I am able to retire. I hate doing the calculus on how long I expect to live. It’s like one of those “press your luck” games… how long can you go before you retire or die? You’ll get more $$$ for another year! Bet your life!
I hate everything about this.
Happy Birthday! And yes, you’re a little older than I’d have guessed. I’d have put you in your mid-late 50s just based on the content of your posts. Also grats on retiring if you do. I got my state pension about 18 months ago and surprised myself by not retiring immediately, which I always thought I would. But then I was already only working two days a week so I guess I’m semi-retired. And I’ll be fully retired in October, just before I hit 68. I really think that’s old enough.
My list of MMOs is quite similar. I start with EQ and hit many of the same nodes. I had time out in DAOC when it started and enjoyed it. I think Vanguard is the real EQII, much though I love the official one. I found your blog, West Karana, when I was playing Wizard 101 and it popped up when I googled some question or other about the game. I was also very disappointed – and confused – by Gatheryn. It was supposed to be a steampunk mmo! Rift was great for six months, Guild Wars is not an MMO. (Black Desert is though.) And so on and so on…
I did a post a few years ago about all the MMOs I’d played. At the time it was about 150 I think. It was supposed to be a two-part post and I thought it would get lots of comments because everyone would want to go “Oh, I played that one…” but it got no response at all so I never wrote the second part. And I obviously gave it some “clever” name because now I can’t even find it! I’ve played a lot more MMOs since then so i would guess the total must be over 200 now. I tallied mine last time just by going through the exhaustive list at MMORPG.com and going “played it… played it… played it…” Maybe I’ll do it again sometime.
I look at other women my age and I utterly cannot understand their lives. But yeah I typically run with a younger crowd.
On the other hand, you’re older than I thought!
Knowing you’re as old as my sister makes me mad my sister isnt as cool as you.
Happy belated!
🙂
And to you!
Happy belated birthday. That’s a lot of games. I have a similar but slightly less expansive list (was in the same LS in FFXI with you and followed you to a guild in EQ2 you recommended). Also tried Rift, Pirates of the Burning Sea, City of Heroes/Villains, Warhammer Online, Matrix Online briefly, Lineage 2, Guild Wars (I think it counts), GW2, Vanguard, Secret World (loved the non combat aspects, like the puzzles). Elite, Diablo 4, and Project Gorgon more recently.
I think I’ve come to the conclusion that MMOs are something I like more in theory than in practice, and mostly only when they first come out, before they slather on five hundred complex currencies/leveling systems to track like they are competing to out-gacha gacha games. But I keep coming back to them.
And I look forward to at least reading about the next 50 you try out. 🙂
Hey wow! Long time etc!
I’ve been avoiding MMOs pretty much, though I guess it doesn’t sound like it. Most of those I played back when I was writing about MMOs a lot; I felt I really needed to know these games to write about them. These days, not so much. It’s all FOMO, after all, but these days all MMOs are pretty much the same, maybe with one difference they can call their own, but it’s the same old same old so I don’t feel I’m missing much anymore.
EQL is going to be a short term fling. One last throw.