Quake III, king among arena shooters! So many hours of playtime on The Longest Yard (dm17) alone! My first real exposure to sustained online gaming as well…
Other mentions: Master of Orion 2 and Blue Byte’s Settlers II.
System Shock 2
And such a fantastic soundtrack!
I remember liking the ending though… but I don’t remember what it was!
It’s tragic, but not 100% tragic. The one line that always stuck with me for that story and therefore the ending kind of stuck too is “What did you get?”
I share that sentiment. From EQ, I learned much about what I want (or don’t want) in a game/MMO.
This is a surprisingly hard question for me to answer. I’m not sure how that realization makes me feel. I could answer this by genre or platform, but overall? It’s hard.
I’m going to go with Civilization II. IV was the best in the series–and it’d probably be my favorite of games I still play–but II just completely enthralled me when I got it. I had really liked the first Civilization, but II was a huge improvement to me. It felt revolutionary despite being a sequel to a great game.
series != game
hmph
Closely matches my sentiment, except I no longer play Civ and for me EU has eclipsed it in the strategy genre, but CIV II is when I began PC gaming in earnest (for good or ill.) It’s pretty close between that, Daggerfall and HoMM II I think.
Thief II
Though I go back and forth on which of the first two Thief games is my favourite.
Planes of Power era Everquest 1.
I too am going to pick Everquest. There was something magical about that game. Brutal, frustrating but yet so rewarding. Loved my Enchanter and Thief and the names I picked for them continue to all mages and thieves in all other games.
Moo1 is a damn good choice. Such a simple design, so clean.
I gotta go with MULE, I know it is dated now, but between my 6 buds that I used to play with, nothing gave more “gathering” time. Most other games were solo or on-line.
If it were a series, then CIV, but as a game gotta go with MULE.
My son gave me Super Mario World when I asked him.
It’s pretty much the same as me hiking to the top of Half Dome and staying up there a few nights. It was amazing, but not sure I could do it again, but very glad I did. EQ at release, and for the first 6 months or so, was just brutally hard and I loved it lol.
It’s one of those things about gaming, players say they hate a bunch of things that actually ultimately make games more memorable and engaging. I get why people don’t like a lot of this stuff, but there is this weird balance where you are cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I never loved corpse rot. I think it was horrible mechanic that punished people with responsibilities. I would not go back to vanilla EQ for anything.
I do think the penalty for death should be challenging enough so people don’t just suicide off cliffs rather than walk the path and god don’t get me started with the rangers and hybrids sucking up all the XP… and you put one point in this other attribute so now you’re ruined at level 50 or whatever it is vanilla EQ wasn’t just brutal, it was unfair… but during the days before wikia and phones and heavy social media… a lot of people still on modem, it wasn’t just the game itself, which as magically and not streamed or record so a lot of what you saw early on was new for everyone, it was also like opening the door to the gaming world. You could play with people you didn’t know, from different countries, different sexes and different ideas all through typing and realizing you’re constantly playing at the same time as they are… then there were guilds and planning and despite the bickering, one guild has a total wipeout, theyr’e the biggest on the server, everyone knows who they are, and suddenly a couple of tiny guild and just random people in the area are getting together to try and save them. We had a Norwegian guild and a Japanese guild on our server, if I recall correctly, despite the language barrier, they were also part of rotations and helped with wipe-outs and big raids.
but corpse rot… no. punishing other players for having specific classes in their group, also no. You might as well just put a target on their back.
Probably original XCom.
Last five years is Subnautica - play it if you haven’t.
Yeah I think you hit on a key point for me. A lot of what made the game great is when it came out and how people approached the game. It felt to me that people played more “seriously” as in there was far less trolling and dare I say the general IQ of the population was much higher.
I played on the pvp server - and it was nothing like today’s pvp mmorpgs. Random PVP was rare at high level, it almost always involved some sort of guild politics or history. At that time it was all so interesting and new.
It’s been close to 20 years and I still remember so much of it.