2014 is kind of a big year for MMORPGS, mostly because 2004 was a HUGE year for the genre. Ten years ago we saw the release of three of the most notable games of the second/third (depending upon your reckoning) generation: Everquest 2, City of Heroes, and World of Warcraft. I wish I could say I got in on the ground floor of all three, but I passed up the City of Heroes beta/release for Lineage 2, and hadn't yet lost my cherry to the Everquest franchise when the sequel came out. Still, it was a great time, and even though it makes me an old fuck, I'm proud to say I lived and played through it.
The first gen of MMOs was only in its fifth or sixth year when 2004 started. The genre was still more or less young, and publishers were only just beginning to realize the potential profit from persistent-world games thanks to Everquest and Asian titles like Lineage. Back then, nobody knew how long one of these things could last, and I can only assume that Sony, EA, and other wayback machine publishers were hedging their bets that five years was the longest a single game could hold a solid playerbase. Graphics had lept forward in quality since 1999, and it was time for a little sumpin' sumpin' more.
I remember being skeptical of the second gens. I was playing Lineage 2 at the time, and adored its then-gorgeous, anime-style graphics. EQ2's graphics struck me as play-doh-esque, City of Heroes was just a dumb comic book game, and WoW... I loathed WoW. My guildmates dragged me into beta kicking and screaming, and I hated every minute of it. Going from L2's click-to-move, limited-hotbar grindathon to WoW was like going from vanilla ice cream to hot dogs. But when the choice came down to World of Warcraft or GuildWars, I opted for the former...and that only because I hated not being able to change my abilities in GW.
I'm one of THOSE WoW players. You know the breed. We sit back and remember fondly how we had to pay piles of gold for our epic mounts, and how hard that gold was to come by. We laugh about our completely wonky hybrid builds, using spirit gear on our bears and int gear on our hunters. We wax rhapsodic about needing groups for devilsaurs in Un'goro Crater so we could get their skins and keying for Molten Core. The game was so much harder back then, we say. More dynamic. There were more ways to fuck up.
And yet, at the time, WoW was the easiest game on the market. A lot of people forget that when it released, World of Warcraft's biggest innovation was simple, streamlined questing. Previous games had required you to talk to your questgivers and guess at phrases that would trigger the next step of the conversation. There weren't quest journals- unless you counted the notebooks we kept close to hand on our desks. You could SOLO in WoW. On any class. The same couldn't be said of the other MMOs out at the time. And tradeskills... Holy shit, a crafting system that wouldn't give you carpal tunnel or randomly fail/blow up your gear? No meaningful death penalty, bonus xp while logged out...
I still remember camping out at the border between Ashenvale and the Barrens during world PvP gluts, cutting off reinforcements headed for the Crossroads. My hunter buddy and I merrily duoed through content we probably shouldn't have been able to do because we had the right combination of heals, damage, and kiting. My go-to story has always been the time I killed my ghost with fatigue while trying to find the second pearl for my druid's water form quest. It seems farfetched these days, but back then that kind of stupid shit happened every day.
It's been a fun ten years. I've played a lot of games, and over the next few updates I'm going to be revisiting some of my favorite moments, mechanics, and memes from the last decade. Somewhere in the mix I'm going to give City of Heroes the writeup it deserves, because my "In Memoriam" post fell well short of what I'd originally intended.
Got some memories of your own? Give me a yell on Google +, Facebook, or Twitter and share your stories! Never know...might show up on the blog or stream!
No comments:
Post a Comment