Do I miss MMOs? Maybe. Sort of. A little.

Back in the olden times of CRT monitors that weighed half as much as I did, I started playing MMOs¹. Although several already existed, like EverQuest and Ultima Online, I didn’t dive in until I got into the beta for City of Heroes (CoH) in early 2004 (the game launched in April of that year). As I learned later, CoH actually broke convention with typical fantasy MMOs in several crucial ways, apart from the obvious theme of superheroes. I played and adored it and made many characters, usually themed around fruit or vegetables, because why not?

In the fall of 2004, two more MMOs launched, within two weeks of each other. The first was EverQuest 2, the other you may have heard of, something called World of Warcraft. Everyone I played CoH with pretty much abandoned it for the hamster wheel of WoW. Eventually, I did, too.

As the years went by, play ebbed and flowed across various games:

• City of Heroes. I kept playing CoH until NCsoft suddenly decided to shut it down in November 2012. In recent years, the unofficial Homecoming servers have revived the game and it’s kind of trippy to return to what is more or less the same game I’d been playing over a decade ago. My original characters are long gone, but it’s been easy enough to remake them.
• EverQuest 2: I played this with three others for awhile and we romped through a fair bit of content. I also played solo, leveling up several characters.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). While it’s unfair to call this WoW with lightsabers, it’s what it was, to a certain extent.
• Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). Very true to the material, I played this oslo or in small groups, but never got to a high level.
• Vanguard. A somewhat generic fantasy MMO that Sony eventually shut down. I played a wolfman and don’t remember much about it now.
• Guild Wars 2. I played so little of this, I don’t recall much of anything.
• Final Fantasy 14. Same for this.
• Tabula Rasa. Richard Garriott’s expensive sci-fi dud. NCsoft killed it after a year. I was there at the end, power-leveling my little soldier’s heart out.
• Champions. Like CoH, but better in some ways (graphics, arguably) and worse in most of the others.
• Probably others I’ve forgotten.

Eventually, every game, even the well-oiled hamster wheel of WoW, wore on me and I left them all behind, apart from occasional forays into CoH, which is completely free to play now (the servers run on donations). And I was fine with that.

But just lately I’ve had a slight urge to revisit an MMO, to level up a character and be part of a big stinky world filled with other players. But which one?

On the one hand, some of this has been decided for me, because the MMO is dead (Vanguard, Tabula Rasa) or because I have little interest in revisiting it (Champions).

But that still leaves more than a couple. I ponder.

• WoW: Safe, reliable, yet also annoying due to constant changes, which dampens the rush of nostalgia in returning.
• EQ2: I think without paying a sub, it would likely be a horrible experience and I’m not sure its charms would persist now.
• LOTRO: The UI was always an ugly mess and I suspect it hasn’t changed.
• FF14: No great yearning for this.
• Guild Wars 2: I didn’t give it much of a chance, maybe it would click now?
• SWTOR: I would probably spend a lot of time confused and then give up, but it’s not fantasy, so there is that.

I’ll probably just keep not playing any of them. Maybe I should dig up some old RPG from my Steam backlog and just pretend it’s massive.

1. Massively Multiplayer Online games, sometimes also known as Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games if you want a real mouthful. ↩︎