The golden era of a video game

[DrgHybrid]

So an interesting thought came to my head.

I'm a big kid at heart. So much so that I've always enjoyed video games. Ever since I was a kid. Of course, games have evolved through the years and so has the people that play them into what we have at this current moment in time. MMO to keep it short. We'll use MMO, for the sake of this post, as a broad term for any MMORPG's, Popular FPS's, standard RP's, and sandboxes. Only condition is that it has to be a "game" with many multiple people.

So I've been in several of the games of course. Furcadia, Unreal Tournament 2004, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Quake Arena...just to name a few. It's almost been depressing to see their downfalls. Sadly, the games don't really die. They linger on forever with a forever dwindling amount of people that cling to life until they go down in defeat. At this point they've lost their former glory. So will give just some examples of the ones I mentioned.

Furcadia: This was probably my first true MMO style game. Had a broad community, hundreds of Beekin volunteers, dream portals choking the hallways in this very simple visual RP game. You could find any type of game that you wanted to play the visuals changed upon each and every dream. Everyone wanted to build a dream and be one of the big ones with staff members and a large amount of visitors. It's still there of course, dreams are hit and miss and only has a handful of the Beekin volunteers left. Course, still guys like myself that occasionally login. I still keep my Beekin membership active by attending a meeting every so often. I believe I worked to get to that position, so will try and keep it.

UT2004: I LOVED this game. Get me in a Leviathan or a Raptor and I was unbeatable. At once point in time I even had to change my game name there because people were wanting to invite me all over the place. The game has been kept alive by making it FTP for a few maps. I checked it out awhile back and there are still private servers up, but they are all modded with hyper players and it's just not the same.

Second Life: I know, not really a "game" per say, but it still falls into that category. I blew quite a bit of money there just for all cosmetic. I never contributed to the RP, I just enjoyed hanging out in my Dragon avatar, or werewolf, or various other avatars. Most of them furry of course. I haven't installed it for quite some time, but I looked back at it awhile back and it still has a lot of it's worlds, but the population has all but trickled down to a crawl of people.

Quake: I haven't touched that one in awhile. Last time I did it literally took half an hour to even locate the game. You could tell that the ones that were still playing were masters. Probably had been playing since day one and haven't stopped beyond to eat and use the restroom. Might even be doing that while gaming.

WoW: Ah, World of Warcraft. This was the true MMO game changer for me. 12.5 million people in it's shinning days and it shinned most from BC - LK - Cata. Since then we've had Mists, WoD, and Legion come out with an ever decreasing player base. I spent WAY too much time with this game. Have a crap ton of mounts, achievements, pets, cosmetic items, and just about anything else. I finally cancelled my own subscription about 2 months ago but haven't played in about 5 months. It's sad to see it in it's current state though to me. I wouldn't say that WoW is anywhere near death, but it's numbers aren't near as impressive as they once were.

Overwatch will be the new one for me in the upcoming years. However, it's barely reaching a year being out, so I'm going to stay positive.

What are some of everyone else's favorite games out there? What old MMO's do you miss? Comments otherwise?

[Longingtobenude]

I mostly played runescape.  It was the only game I could play on a dial up connection so Its what I was stuck with at the time.  Other than that as far as online games go, I played a bunch of the Halo Combat Evolved trial version.  Its amazing how strong that niche community was. 

You could only use one map -- Blood Gulch.  Other than that though, all vehicles were on the table, and modders really took it to new heights with specific game types.  It ran for a long time, probably longer than the full version.  Its a shame they finally quit hosting servers for it.