I know it’s becoming an age old question at this point, but is there life after World of Warcraft (WoW)? In my opinion, WoW took some of the best ideas from all other online games, perfected them and put them in one package. Unfortunately, there still lies a few issues that even WoW hasn’t solved. I’ve dabbled in online role playing games ever since the days of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons, yeah, that ages me doesn’t it). My next few blog posts will be on this subject. I have such a long history I had to break it up in parts.

My first graphical online game was the first one of it’s kind, Neverwinter Nights on America Online. Back then, the thrill of being online at all was exhilarating enough, let alone playing a role playing game with other people. America Online soon got to expensive for my part time job wages and I had to abandon Neverwinter Nights for good.

Many, many years later, my next online gaming experience was Diablo II. This game began the idea of putting over 100 hours of play time for me. Also for the first time, I experienced the dark side of online gaming. People would kill you for no reason at all (referred to as PK or Player Kill). This was a shock to me initially. This idea of logging on and fearing that your character would be slaughtered by other players seems to negate the fun in a mass mulitplayer game. So many times me and many bystanders would be killed over and over. At this point, I began disliking playing any game on the Internet. I refer to this point of gaming as “The Diablo Massacre”.

I’ve moved on to Phantasy Star Online (PSO) which actually kept my attention for the longest out of any online game thus far. I started playing the Dreamcast version, moved to the Gamecube version, then ended up grinding the PC version. Initially, when your character died you’d drop your money and weapon and yes, other players could pick up this and keep it. You can imagine the horrors when you died carrying some of the rarest weapons in the game. Your newly found comrades would practically fight over your loot, and quickly leave the team in glee of their new present. Sega eventually put an end to this. However, malicious players still found other ways to PK others.

To Be Continued…

Tags: Blizzard, Mass Multiplayer, Online Gaming, Rant or Rave, RPG, Sega, Sierra Online, WoW

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under PC Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.