18
votes
What are some older MMOs that can still be played?
I’ve missed a lot of the older mmos growing up like Everquest and dark age of Camelot. What are some good older mmos to play that can still be enjoyed either as a single player or coop experience with friends that still have online and supported servers? Doesn’t have to have a massive player base or anything, it can even have just a few thousand players. I would also like to avoid WoW, I’ve had a fair amount of time in it and don’t have any desire to go back.
Old School Runescape is still online with an active player base if that floats your boat.
Vanguard: https://www.vgoemulator.net/index.php
EverQuest: https://www.project1999.com
Spell Born: https://spellborn.org
Wizardy Online: https://wizardry-online.com/#/
Free Realms: https://www.frsunrise.com
Return of Reckoning: https://www.returnofreckoning.com
Earth and Beyond: http://www.enbx.com
Neohabitat: https://frandallfarmer.github.io/neohabitat-doc/docs//
Kingdom of Drakkar: https://www.kingdomofdrakkar.com
MedievaLands: https://medievalands.com
The Realm: https://realmserver.com
Meridan 59: https://meridian59.com
10Six: http://www.projectvisitor.com
Furcadia: https://cms.furcadia.com
Dark Age of Camelot: https://darkageofcamelot.com
Asheron's Call: https://emulator.ac
City of Heroes: https://forums.homecomingservers.com
Tibia: https://www.tibia.com/
Nexus Kingdom of Winds: http://www.nexustk.com/index.html
ShadowBane: https://magicbane.com/index.html
This is pretty much true of all games now. Within hours/days/weeks of release, most things have been discovered and put online.
The challenges can still remain in singleplayer and small-group play, where it's easier to resist the siren song of infinite knowledge. But once you have larger groups, even if you refrain yourself you will be impacted by those who don't.
How do you preserve mystery and discovery in an era of infinite knowledge? I'd certainly like more of it.
The only thing I can think of is per-user/group generated content.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. For me personally the discovery and problem solving is the party I really enjoy about games. Nothing can recapture the feeling of discovering how a new game works, opening up new areas, learning new abilities, etc.
I've been playing Valhiem with friends and have looked at the wiki once when I was truly stuck, but have otherwise stumbled along "blindly". Each new item unlocking recipes that where previously unknown and unexpected.
I've been thinking about what a game might look like if it had both good design, as well as unique procedural generation of a tech tree. Not to make it harder, but to make it unique (and perhaps more replayable). So one person/group might play and have to use bricks to build their first house, where another might use unubunatanium.
That's part of the reason I mentioned MUDs in my top-level reply.
Some of the tech advancements that could power a next-gen MUD, if they aren't already:
Procedural generation becomes infinitely easier to implement when graphics are a non-factor. Descriptions are only limited by imagination.
Somewhere between level 30 and 40, your character gets randomly bonded with 4 other characters who play at an overlapping 1 hr interval. Nobody is directly notified of who. You're only given some sort of spidy-sense when getting closer to them. When all characters converge, they are given a unique quest, one that could take weeks or months.
Because any given MUD realm could have unique topography and boundless size, you could find a corner of the world uniquely yours. You could have not just player-owned houses, but player-owned nations. Warring and shifting borders.
Problem of course being barrier to entry, since most of the gaming market would dismiss out of the gate. Perhaps it could be marketed to book lovers though.
A text-based game you could play on e-ink and a 2g connection.
Weellll crap, there goes my weekend. Thanks for this.
For anyone of a real certain age Neohabitat is the successor to Club Caribe by Q-link. Very interesting history, and probably the legitimate "1st graphical MMO" on a large scale.
If you're "old enough" to remember or care, there are also servers that run Tradewars if you look around.
Classic Everquest is still around. The Project 1999 team servers are the most active, and honestly the population size there is only a bit lower than what made for a standard EQ server back in its heyday.
It probably has 99% fewer bugs than traditional EQ did, though. Patch day (and the resulting pure chaos) was part of the experience.
Final Fantasy XI is still running and being actively updated. It launched 19 years ago in Japan, and about 17.5 years ago in North America.
Some of the oldest mmorpgs are still around, believe it or not. Off the top of my head, there’s Meridian 59 (which is free to play now) and Ultima Online. And if you are feeling particularly adventurous (by which I mean sociable), you can skip the rpg elements and play Furcadia, which might just predate them all.
Very few people ever played 10Six, but one of the original programmers is still running a derivative of it. He's actually still working on it in his spare time, bug fixing and adding features.
It was the first MMO I ever played, so it holds a special place for me even though it's gameplay had some huge mechanical problems.
Heh. There wasn't a single old-school MMO without those issues. Since it was a new problem space and style of gaming, most of what designers were doing was bad, and the rest was broken. I kinda miss that sometimes, since it made for some crazy, unpredictable gameplay.
Genesis MUD still going since 1989.
Maybe it's nostalgia, but IMO everyone should try a text based MUD for at least a few hours.
I was going to suggest a MUD too, and even though the server is still up for the one I played in the 90s, it doesn't look like anyone has connected to it in a long time, and it really needs other players to be worthwhile. I agree that everyone should try one. What I liked the most about them is that because they are text based, I was able to create a much richer world in my mind than I experience in most graphic games.
Oh, and you can get mud clients for your phone too!
There’s a Vanguard: SoH private server under development afaik — last time I checked it out they had a lot of the stuff done but very very low population. Now that was a game I wish succeeded a little more both in terms of achieving their vision and player count.
The Realm is a graphical MMO launched by Sierra back in 1996. It has changed hands since the, but it’s still live. Most recent patch dropped on the 15th of this month.