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.
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