Thoughts on my online gaming career

[Melnock]

I have been thinking about the games I have played over the years because I feel like either something has been lacking in the games themselves or I have just become far more picky as I have gotten older. Maybe it is a little of both.

My first online game was a MUD called Gemstone IV and it was far and away my favorite game of all time.

The reason for this is simple.. community. When you died in Gemstone you turned into a spirit that could not move and you had to wait for someone else in the community to come save you or you could "release" and be revived at a significant loss of experience.

Healers had the ability to cast a spell to locate your corpse and another spell to "fog" (teleport) to your location and rescue you and the server announced every character death in general chat.

Another player that happened to travel through the area you died in would always take time out from what they were doing to drag a dead body back to town to get healed and rezzed if no one had fogged in to help you out.

There were invasions of the main cities that were extremely powerful and if you were lower level and got caught up in one you just got owned. No one whined or cried about it. That's just the way it was. It was still quite fun to watch the action (as a ghost) and get excited for the days when you gained some levels and could fight off the invasions along side the more established players of the realm.

There was always a sense of risk when you were out adventuring alone in a new area. A keen sense of danger enhanced by the fact that there were real consequences if you perished and no one came to your aid.

A bunch of people actually role played there, with helped with immersion as well.

My second game was Everquest. There were consequences in this game as well, when you died. Unless you got rezzed by a Cleric you lost a good deal of experience. You had to make naked corpse runs to your body to get your gear back if you couldn't get a rez from someone.

I remember the feeling the first time my guild went into the plane of fear.. anticipation, quite a bit of nervousness.. It was actually a scary place to go.

I think that although modern games have improved tremendously graphically that game play has suffered a great deal.

I have played many games since the first two, but none of them have quite the same magic as these two had for me.

I'm hoping that Rift captures some essence of the magic I felt in those first two games..

The full scale invasions seem promising and the dungeons look challenging. I am hoping that open world pvp with guild mates will forge a strong community here.

I have to admit though, that i was very disappointed the first time I died and discovered the cost of my mistake was a piddling 4 gold.

[Luminatus]

I thought MUDS were fun too when they first came out. You never knew what was going to happen and whatever did happen had to be pictured fully through the mind's eye. Nowadays the gameplay is so much faster, if you go to get a drink of water and come back you'll find yourself dead. I'm glad they don't have stricter penalties on death in this game. that 4 gold adds up when you're just trying to keep yourself hydrated.

[Corwynn_Maelstrom]

I have fond memories of Gemstone as well. I was a healer and spent the vast majority of my time just sitting around, healing and socializing, not adventuring. It is a system I wouldn't mind seeing translated into an MMO, were it done well.

[Aglaranna]

My first online game was a MUD called Gemstone IV and it was far and away my favorite game of all time.

<-- Gemstone vet here. Ah, the memories...

Ebon Gate Festival, the Airship, Tsoran's maps, the death penalty, the bard ability to sing to an item to find out its magical properties (I spent so much time crafting rhymes for this you'd think I'd be a rapper now). The 'societies', the Houses, the Inn, dark orcs...good times! The roleplaying and the community is what made that game so charming. Alas I haven't been to Gemstone in a very long time, not sure I could go back to text-based games at this point. But I will always remember that game the most because I had the most fun in it due to the extremely social aspect of it.

[Vabjekf]

This got me thinking about features i miss from old games i used to play that really only helped with community interaction/made the world feel more interesting.

One was writable paper/books.

In my first mmo, you could get paper or a book, and actually write on/in it.

you could then give it to somebody, leave it on the ground for someone to find, etc. I imagine some people used these to keep track of stuff, some people may have used them to write stories or such on. I know that some were used in player driven treasure hunt events. But it was just neat to have an item there in your inventory that you could interact with. It was fun to pick them up if you found them and see if anyone had written anything on them.

Simple little things like that i think could add a lot to modern day mmos.

[Corwynn_Maelstrom]

This got me thinking about features i miss from old games i used to play that really only helped with community interaction/made the world feel more interesting.

One was writable paper/books.

In my first mmo, you could get paper or a book, and actually write on/in it.

you could then give it to somebody, leave it on the ground for someone to find, etc. I imagine some people used these to keep track of stuff, some people may have used them to write stories or such on. I know that some were used in player driven treasure hunt events. But it was just neat to have an item there in your inventory that you could interact with. It was fun to pick them up if you found them and see if anyone had written anything on them.

Simple little things like that i think could add a lot to modern day mmos.

Unfortunately that's easily open to griefing/exploiting . . .

[Melnock]

I thought MUDS were fun too when they first came out. You never knew what was going to happen and whatever did happen had to be pictured fully through the mind's eye. Nowadays the gameplay is so much faster, if you go to get a drink of water and come back you'll find yourself dead. I'm glad they don't have stricter penalties on death in this game. that 4 gold adds up when you're just trying to keep yourself hydrated.

Yeah, this is the reason this is in off topic instead of the general section.. I'm not expecting any changes on this from the developers. I was just thinking about features that I miss in the MMO games these days.

I honestly don't give any game mechanic feedback to developers regarding their games.. There are quite enough people doing that. It just all becomes noise to them, I would imagine. Found one bug in beta so far that I reported so they really didn't give me much to do test wise, that is for certain.

To add to what I miss about Gemstone.. the mechanic for experience was awesome. You went out to hunt and then your xp bar slowly filled up till it was full. At that point the experience you gained declined until you rested for a bit. It made the taverns busy and encouraged people to actually interact with each other and talk while waiting till you absorbed your experience bar and could go out hunting again. Great mechanic.

The map thing sounds excellent as well! Interacting with items in that manner and having an actual impact on the game world would be sweet. What game was that?