I love MMORPGs, especially old obscure ones. Do you have any old obscure MMOs you go back to...

I love MMORPGs, especially old obscure ones. Do you have any old obscure MMOs you go back to. My first one is Anarchy Online. It was designed for MMOs at a different time. The gameplay doesn't hold up. There is no instances and everything is open world. There is no tactics to fights just tank and spank and throw people at it. I would love a sci-fi MMO that isn't ships in space and Anarchy Online could have been that game if Funcom cared about it. It would need to be rebuilt from the ground up tho.

The second I guarantee you the majority of you have never played, it's called Kingdom of Drakkar. It's the oldest continuity running MMORPG. Me and my friend found it in high school. It pre-dates UO and has it's roots in a text MUD.

WoW was a shit influence on the genre.

You're not wrong, but it's basically the Halo syndrome: A good game on it's own, which simplifies the game/genre and makes it accessible which floods it with casuals and makes everyone copy you for the worse, even if their games are technically superior in every way.

You're wrong, it WAS a good game.

Anarchy Online is one of the best games ever and I came in this thread to tell you about it, what a meme. There actually are some instances though, and public dungeons. Especially in Shadowlands and Alien Invasion content. Fucking Shadowlands is tits. Wish Funcom would make a sequel, but they fucking put the profits from the new Conan game into The Shit World of all things. AO also has one of the best MMO soundtracks I've ever heard.

I enjoyed AO, but the OP is right. There weren't any tactics, even WoW was more mechanically interesting. I'd love to play it again if it could be updated. I really loved the dual automatic burst uzi weapons.

Ryzom is a 2004 game where virtually all gear comes from crafting, and most materials are gathered from a "gathering" skill. Also, you can make your own abilities by balancing effect vs cost. This lets you be really flexible (ex. to pay for increased damage, you can choose to pay with 20 stamina or 10 stam and 10 HP). There are 4 races and 2 factions. I only really got out of the tutorial (it's a great deal longer than most other games) but the line between factions seems to be determined by doing quests for them, which lets you pick freely or choose to remain neutral.

The setting is a planet where nothing is made out of metal, so you make weapons and armor out of bones, wood, animal hide etc. Some guys dig too deep and open a hole to a hive of evil insects called the Kitin that swarm the surface and kill everything. There are two factions: Kami and Karavan. The Kami are the nature spirits of the planet. The Karavan are humans with spaceships and laserguns who came to the planet and are trying to convert the native species to worship their goddess Jena.

The gameplay is tab-targeting style with an emphasis on teamwork. The game actually fucks with your exp if you try to be a hybrid (e.g. casting damage spells and using melee weapons) by halving the exp you get from participating in a kill. The population is really tiny and most of the people are from Europe. That said, everyone I've met was very nice. Also they have a strict naming policy: I tried to name my character "Asscastle" and a mod contacted me, changing it to a placeholder name "Defaultwrggy" or something like that.

Are you trying to sell, the game or warn us away from it? The half-exp and censorship tell me to doubly avoid. I have to admit some of the setting and design choices you've detailed are really interesting.

He said it was a good game though.

I'm just giving my honest opinion of playing it. On the whole, I think it's pretty good. I'd say the positives outweigh the negatives. The exp-penalty thing just means that you specialize more, where one guy is the healer, one guy the spell dps, one guy the tank etc. You can level all of them up on the same character, as there are no classes. You can solo monsters as either melee, range, or spellcaster, but healing requires a group. Also, you can only cast healing spells on other people; there is another set of cooldown abilities for self-healing, movement speed, invincibility etc.

As far as the censorship goes, I'm sure this is a place where you will get banned for politically incorrect humor. That part does suck.

AO has way deeper gearing and character customization over WoW and most MMOs in general. The IP system giving you a limited number of points to distribute into everything at once and then having implants be a thing, and then having gear you can ladder implants with to equip things you couldn't in order to equip other things you couldn't or other implants you couldn't etc. Then all of the inventory items you can use for much the same, some without equipping, some for in-combat purposes. Perk system results in similar customization options atop shitloads of skills to press. It's not only complex as fuck, it's basically a nightmare unless you have turboautism. As a turboautist that thinks normalfags should suffer, I enjoy that most people are outright barred from success besides being given a multitude of ways to fuck up completely and cripple themselves. The game is dead because 2deep4most/brainlets, tbh.
It's lit, but if I had to pick a combat style it's triple-wield martial arist because when the fuck else are you even going to be able to TRIPLE-WIELD? It's fucking madness!

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It's also got a monthly fee, and apparently your experience with getting a GM to "correct" your behavior isn't singular. It seems that the people who do play this game are so willing to ensure their game remains a safe space that they'll comment on the negative reviews, saying to bring your friends and ignore the people who report you… Even though reporting you means you can't ignore them. Thanks for the observations though friend.


I didn't play the game that much, it was maybe a decade ago, so most of what you're saying is gobbledy-gook to me, so I can't argue. I guess all I'll say is it looks like WoW frontloads a bit more gameplay difference, but in AO it seems to be all mid to late game. I also don't remember dual-wielding, but I do remember wanting to try to play a ranged character that might be able to have minions/utility? It might have been the wrong choice, especially alone.

The Realm and Meridian 59 are still around but most of the userbase are older people who are way too friendly.

Meant triple-wield, my bad.


Censorship sucks, but I remember seeing MisterListertheSisterFister on TF2 several times back in the day and nothing happened to them. How is this less "offensive" than a large digger named Nick? Since "offensive" is in the eye of the beholder it's a ridiculous concept, but at least when enforced literally for curse words it maintains a train of logic, albeit ill-formed.

The super serious MMO needs super serious names. Hat Simulator 2017 does not.

It's definitely a game of the old style where you start with few options and end up with a ton of them, you start as some guy and end as a god. Every aspect of the game is like this, really, when you're a level

There was a weird one I played briefly called Sherwood Forest. You make a character and I guess dick around for a bit. It was really weird I only recall going in some dungeon. It was a browser based game. I’m not sure if it’s still around but I haven’t heard others talk about it

My bad, it’s called Sherwood dungeon. And apparently it’s still going on

I have two actually. One is Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative. Was published by 3DO and lasted less than 5 months before they gave it back to the devs. They then contracted out the GMing and event planning to the same company that would later found The Escapist. It was a space-sim with a near neutonian physics model, which took into account the mass of everything in your ship. All the ship parts, excluding the base hulls, had to be crafted from finished goods that themselves needed to be crafted from asteroid ores or collected from nebulas that would move through the star map. (basically a space storm chaser). Nothing was instanced, and regularly, player squads would blockade the stations that would produce equipment and racketeer said goods. It was basically EVE, but with ACTUAL GAMEPLAY!

The other game also has an interesting story. Back in the late 90's Sega actually had a PC division, called SegaSoft. They were also running a game lobby service called HEAT.net. The game 10six, now known as Project Visitor, was a neat concept. An mmo FPS/RTS hybrid with a dash of card game. The world was divided into square plots of land you would build bases in. Each plot had 5 mineral deposits that fuel the base you needed to defend from being destroyed. Each faction had their own "element" which would affect how you would fortify your base defences. Where the card game mechanic comes in, is that every object in the game is purchased with your sold mineral deposits in a pack of 10 random items from your faction and the neutral faction (kind of like NS weapons in Planetside). All the items have a set number of times they can be destroyed before they disintigrate, and everything is lootable after you blow it up. When other players attack each other's plots, they can only command their units from a first person perspective, base owners can freelook around the map from inside the base though. It was an interesting game, but it was also the game I consider patient zero of the microtransaction cancer, because you could buy item packs that would have guaranteed good faction items with cash, on top of the monthly fee for access. This was in 1998, mind you. Have a promo vid, voiced by Tony Jay.

I had a friend who would RP in that game a lot. I mostly played MUDs at the time and since I knew he liked to RP I decided to introduce him to one but he didn't care much for it.

Obscure mmos you say?

My bad, I should stop posting when tired.