got thinkin' about them, so mmos i have played in my life:
og everquest: baby's first mmo experience. absolutely wowed young shean with the huge 3d maps and explorability, the options in character creation, everything about it. 3/4 of the screen was covered in a blocky wraparound ui initially and then the moon dlc that 'upgraded' things resulted in a snarled mess of a ui and somehow uglier graphics (reminder that simple stylization can often look way better than more 'realistic' attempts when it comes to 3d, especially older 3d). absolutely brutal, unfair game tbh, enemies would chase you the entire length of a map, loading times if you wanted to switch maps could be like ten minutes, you lost xp when you died which meant you could lose multiple levels if you had a bad run, and if you couldn't get back to your body (corpse runs could be really long), you permanently lost all gear and money on it. but hey it let you play as a frog
world of warcraft: played from launch through cataclysm, had a decent time exploring and doing stuff, really liked some of the character/class choices. you really did wind up running around the barrens for a large chunk of your wow career no matter what, i have a david bowie album permanently associated with the barrens in my mind because i listened to it for the first time while running across the damn thing. spent way too much time doing the same instanced content and raids over and over again for a chance at getting loot. the never-ending leveling and gear treadmill with gear scores, the pvp that could be forced on you if you weren't careful, having to fight with other players to access loot and even gathering nodes, and high monthly subscription fee that made you feel like you had to play all the time or it was a waste, all eventually became too much and made me quit forever. also i'd tried gw2 for the first time and realized oh, it doesn't have to be like this, and i was getting increasingly fed up with blizzard even before i found out how wildly evil they are
guild wars 1: only dabbled in it for a relatively short time, sadly, back when it was new, and before the dlc campaigns came out. for whatever reason i just couldn't wrap my head around how it worked and what it was asking of me at the time? it definitely had some interesting stuff going on, and i know it's a well-loved game that's still being played by a number of people to this day, so i'm excited for the big reforged update that's dropping next week. gonna go back and give it a proper playthrough for the first time, and not just for gw2 hall of monuments stuff
the elder scrolls online: man, i feel so wildly conflicted about this one. on the one hand, i've always wanted to get into elder scrolls, i played a fair amount of skyrim, have been making attempts at oblivion, and i've osmosed a lot from wikis and the internet in general. and lore-wise, teso does kinda rule? there's so much interesting writing going on, done by people who clearly love elder scrolls and the ability to dig deep into various aspects of lore and story. but it's also the least fun i've had actually playing an mmo. the combat, the approach to the class systems, fast travel and horse-riding, the in-game economy and auction house, personal inventory/storage, the wildly expensive/predatory loot box system, microtransactions, and ten zillion little dlcs, et cetera. it just, did not click for me. doesn't help that a lot of the fashion and general look of things in the world can be really bland and generic fantasy. and the super high-quality cinematic videos and trailers they put out from time to time makes me wish the character models looked even just slightly better. maybe i'll go back to it someday, if for no other reason than i really wanna delve into elsweyr more
guild wars 2: my personal mmo goat, as the kids say. i've played the game on-and-off since launch about 13 years ago, am still going strong in it. it being a 'you buy the game, you own the game, period' mmo where there's no monthly subscription and you can stop playing for multiple years and then come back and everything's still where you left it, is honestly such a big deal. next to no fomo, and it's horizontal progression instead of vertical, so none of the anxious gear treadmill nonsense of wow. all loot and gathering nodes are personal so no fighting for gear or resources, everything is open-ended meta events that you can wander into and take part in if you please, and because of the way map instances are handled and the aforementioned horizontal progression, there is no dead content, there's always people in all maps, and people actually socialize and help each other in the game, because the game is built from the ground up to be a social teamwork-based experience. honestly arenanet has some kind of eldritch wizardry going on in how much they're able to keep their maps populated and their servers stable and up, there's no maintenance downtime, even when turning off seasonal events, updates just need a quick restart, and servers actually going down is fairly rare. as far as flaws go, it doesn't always have the most amazing writing; there's some great stuff here and there throughout, but a lot of it is in smaller moments and the stuff you find while exploring. there's been multiple expansions that started out really strong in writing, and then had mediocre to outright bad endings (sometimes due to things like covid and deadline panic). the current dlc, visions of eternity, has started out great, hopefully it can stick the landing this time. there's also way too many currencies to reasonably keep track of, lol. but the classes and elite specs you can play are neat and combat feels really good, there's a ton of really great maps to play in and exploration is really chill and very rewarding, there's all sorts of little things to do and npcs to find, the in-game economy is straightforward and stable, dailies/weeklies are tied to a battlepass-style reward system that's very rewarding and also permanent so again there's no fomo, there's always some kind of big meta event going on somewhere to take part in, and while there are loot boxes and a cash shop, like 90% of the stuff in it is cosmetics, and the rest optional upgrades. and if you don't mind grinding gold a bit, it has a system to convert that gold into shop currency, so you don't even need to spend real money on it if you don't want. i'm also fond of the original setting and species of the game; while some fill particular fantasy trope niches, there's no elves or orcs here, for once. the single standard fantasy species is the dwarves, and they turned themselves into living stone and 99% of them fucked off deep into the earth a while ago. there's communist molerat people
