As I continue my trip down memory lane, I want to talk a bit about my first MMO experience ever. It wasn’t World of Warcraft(WoW)… It was Lineage 2. Not only was it my first MMO, but it was also the first game I ever pre-ordered at EB Games. That’s an old name not many people will remember. EB Games merged with Gamestop in 2005 and is now more commonly known as Gamestop.
However before I pre-ordered the game I played it in Beta. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my childhood. After the beta was over I immediately pre-ordered the game, you had to go to the store to pre-order the game by putting down a deposit. Not an easy thing to do when you are not a grown up yet.
I don’t remember how I got into Lineage 2, but I do remember hearing about MMORPG games and the massive worlds with crowds of people just coexisting in those worlds. The thought of that fascinated me, in part because I was an avid fan of Final Fantasy series. I always wondered what it would be like to play a game like that with other people. What would it be like if your characters were not controlled by you or by the computer, but were actually other real people participating in the game? You could talk to them, make actual plans, ask actual questions. The idea of that was so incredible to me, that in that moment when I realized that Lineage 2 was a game like that is when I thought “the future is now!”
Like I mentioned I don’t remember how I heard about the beta, but I did and went ahead and started downloading it. I believe it was under 1 gb of size, but you know this is when 56k was the only internet connection available to me… so it took days. The patience that we had back then is really amazing to me now… Days to download a game, like what? Who does that nowadays?
The game is all downloaded and ready to go, you start it up, you get an incredible intro video and then get to the an amazing looking login screen. You start your first character, of course you read all the backstory, of course the decision is hard. I knew I wasn’t a Dark Elf at heart, and Light Elves were weird, I didn’t want to play a Human because… well I am a human and I play that character everyday. Dwarfs were weird too, the male model was great but the classes were weird, the female model was a little girl…. I am not sure what NCsoft was going for there but it was just a weird thing to me so I skipped over it. I chose an Orc, now not the ugly version of orcs we are all used to now a days, these guys were big, handsome, and the classes sounded really cool. I was, now that I think about it, overcompensating for my own lack of confidence as kid. But who cares… the orcs were awesome!
Almost all classes in game split into two archetypes, melee and magic, there were ranged and close combat classes. Orcs, from what I believe didn’t have a ranged classes to start with, they were still able to use bows, but there wasn’t really a classes development for it. Like I don’t remember there being any skills that favored ranged styler for orcs, like there were for elves for example. I didn’t want to be a scrawny magic user, so I went with the melee fighter archetype.
It was fun, you jump into a world, with no real quests, or direction of where to go, you just start killing monsters, also known as grinding experience, until you level… as far as I was aware that was it. Now that I think about it, that is so baren compared to what the games offer nowadays. But, wow I was in love, a persistent world with other people all of which presumably had their own goals and agendas in the world. I had no idea what it meant to play a sandbox game, I didn’t even know that was a thing. I don’t think the world knew that until WoW, popped up and showed us what a themepark MMO looks like.
But sandbox MMOs are typically games that provide little content, and a ton of tools to create your own, like contest and festival, clans and other group content. I didn’t know any of this, I just ran around killing wolves until I leveled up and moved on to the next spot where the monsters were a higher level to keep grinding. You had to find a good hunting spot, because people could steal you mobs, and steal your loot. Which now sounds like absurdity but it was real, you were afraid someone would run up to your kill and just grab your stuff. The drop rate was so low in the game that there were no different color items to signify their power, any item that dropped was and incredible stroke of luck. And when you found stuff you could sell it, but you didn’t have the convenience of an auction house, like you do now, you had to set up a shop and leave your character online for as long as you could to sell your things… The electrical bill in my household made a significant jump.
You would leave your character over night, to sell things, computers weren’t super quite at the time, so you were in and out of sleep for the duration of the night and then got up and went to school. As you can imagine grades didn’t improve with that style of life. And again, I was operating on a 56k modem, so the game could disconnect at any time during the night, and I would have no idea. That was the life of an mmo player back then.
This post has gotten a little lengthy, so I will cut it here, in the next part I want to talk about these things:
- Stayed home when everyone else went to family camp
- Joined my first clan
- Participated in my first castle siege
- Got ganked
- Admiring the beauty of the unreal engine, with seamless transitions.
- Getting cable internet for the first time
Tell next time!
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