Oh wow yeah! Neverwinter Nights and then Shadow of Yserbius really got the imagination rolling, but it was EQ that really sunk it’s teeth in. Haven’t thought about those two games in years.
Faery Tale adventure and Dungeon Master on the Amiga, my virginial RPG experiences. I even made a map of the complete Faery Tale world about 3 by 4 meters, consisting of a lot of A4 print paper sheets taped together. Also Ultima 7: The Black Gate during my University days: much sleep lost.
I don’t think I will easily forget a game I used to pay by the hour, well only because Internet was by the hour. (Neverwinter).
And then there was the ship to Kunark, pretty sure it was that ship, where you prayed every time you loaded the zone the ship would still be under you. Heh, good times. It really felt like exploring though, with a ton of people just figuring out where everything was and, of course, where to run when you lost control.
Yeah, the old disappearing ship trick was pretty depressing.
I was fortunate to have @home internet cable by the time EQ came out and had 2 ISPs and phone lines for games like UO and Diablo.
A friend of mine and I started a business in 1995 and I had a second phone line installed in the house for it. Each day before I would log into UO, I would check each ISP and see which one had the best stats with UOMon and use that for the night. If one phone line or ISP had problems, I would immediately switch lines and dial back up and get online. It also helped keep the main line open so the family would actually know we were okay from time to time :).
I’m old, so like a few others, this breaks down in broad chunks.
In high school, I had an Apple II on which my friends and I mainlined Sir-Tech’s Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Like, we spent hours playing, those of us who weren’t running their party sitting around talking trash and making suggestions. It was like Twitch, but in the basement and featuring an audience of 3-4 painfully nerdy Wisconsin teenagers. It drove my parents insane. What the hell were we doing? Why didn’t we act like other teenagers? None of it mattered, only the pure joy of walking square-by-square through those crude wireframe corridors.
After college when I was working my first real job, I remember getting the demo of Doom from somewhere. A game magazine CD? AOL or Compuserve or something? I don’t know, I only remember starting it up at like 10Pm after getting home from work and not moving from my chair until my landlord called at 2 or 3 in the morning to complain that the sound of my chainsawing demons was keeping him and his wife awake: “Are you playing some kind of game up there?” I turned down the volume and kept going. The apartment building could have burned down around me and I wouldn’t have noticed, I was so entranced by my first 3D shooter exposure.
I don’t know that anything comes close after that. Marriage, kids, graduate school and whatnot all make that kind of deep immersion almost impossible. I guess I’d say Witcher 3, maybe, just because after it dropped me into White Orchard and I realized how big and full of secrets and monsters the world was I felt that familiar longing to lose myself in the world? I actually just started it up again - having never finished the 1st go round for all the usual reasons - and it’s as compelling as ever.
Ultima 6, Ultima Underworld, Asheron’s Call and WoW 1.x.
EverQuest.
Man looking back on it, did we like to pay to suffer.
Corpse rot anyone, or total wipe raids… haha or my favorite the constant whining of Rangers and Shamans sucking up too much XP (at least they fixed that one I think).
Fear corpse runs… 14 hours of corpse runs.
Plus the Troll SK penalty.
Quick call the other Guild we don’t hate yet due to loot rotation mess-up. Umm, they wiped too and it’s 12AM, some of us have to work… umm is the Norwegian guild on yet?
How much gold do we have, and is that monk we actually trust still on?
And Gordon “Alchemey is working as intended” Wrinn.
Thief: The Dark Project
Thief 2: The Metal Age
T2X: Shadows Of The Metal Age
Here’s a good summary of T2X from thief-thecircle.com.
T2X Official Site.
The first game hit me hard, and I transcended into another world.
The second game couldn’t possibly top that, I thought. But it did. “Life Of The Party” gets my vote for best level in any game ever.
Years later, the fan project T2X was released, and I was sucked into that world nearly as hard as the pro-made games.
I wrote a lengthy review over at Amazon many years ago. It’s embarrassing to read it now, because I wasn’t very objective, and just gushed about it, and told a long story about one of my many adventures in Thief Gold. Nothing before or since has grabbed me as tightly as those games did. My longest gaming sessions were with those games.
I never tried Deadly Shadows or the new reboot. Probably nothing wrong with them overall, but I’d have been upset with any changes at all I think. Hell, I was upset when they left the Dark Engine behind. It wasn’t a pretty engine, but it nailed the atmosphere, and everything worked like it was supposed to. I was kind of in love with it, and yet only 3 full retail games were ever made with it.
I remember wiping once on a dragon in Western Wastes and since I was our leader/tank/puller, I dragged everyone’s corpses back. I think I died like 10 times, but for some reason it didn’t bother me as long as I got them all back (I was a ranger).
One other time we had a really good friend and dear guildmate lose her corpse by falling in the Lava in Sol A. Unfortunately, she panicked and swam under the lava up in the worst possible place you could die most likely. The highest level people on the server were barely in their 40s then and the highest in our guild was probably 30 or so. Me and a buddy stayed up for 2-3 hours til past 3am trying over and over to try to swim in the lava far enough in hopefully the proper direction to drag the corpse out. Sooo many deaths with no res, but my buddy finally got it! We would tell that story for ages and I will never forget it.
Fortunately, I was never involved in any Fear wipeouts and was normally over careful in where I would take people.
As much of an amazing pain as this was, It was one of the reasons the game was so engaging. Your actions had real consequences, that could cost you hours of time to fix if you screwed up. It’s still the only game I’ve ever played where I’ve been legitimately frightened when exploring a new place, or doing tough content that was difficult to get to.
I think it’s one of the reasons modern games don’t mean much to me, there aren’t really any consequences for screwing up. Rez, run back, lose a little gold and 5 minutes maybe.
Were you an elf ranger, what server or guild?
Not sure this will work from my phone, but yes a wood elf. We were on Povar in The Covenant guild. I was Kaelan there, I believe I got the spelling right, lol.
I remember we had an incident similar to that but my sister tells me we were on the Torvonnilous server and the guild was Blades of Wrath (BOW). I never really joined because of the time commitment, was a tag along, but she and her guy were regular members for some time.
I could list a number of games that sucked me, but if I am honest, nothing was close to EQ.
And not only that, you could get into situations that you just couldn’t fix by yourself, so you actually had to care about your reputation on the server and what friends you could call in an emergency. And before the era of smartphones or even of alt-tabbing out of game (at least as I recall it), when you were medding up for a big fight or waiting for a corpse recovery, you could either go make a sandwich or chitchat with other people, so you actually made friends.
- Jaya, enchanter, Letalis Ericius, E’ci