The most engrossing game you've ever played in your life

Games
101

My earliest EQ memory was playing in a later beta. I was in the residential computer lab at my University, where we often gamed for long hours. I was one of the few people in the beta along with a few friends from my hometown.

We were low level dark elves in the Nektulos Forest. A friend was a Troll who marched all of the way up from their starting zone. He and I were talking via speaker phone. A dozen people had gathered in the lab to watch me play.

He walked over to my character and waved hello while he said “hello” over the phone. A dozen people went “ohhh” and “ahhhh”. Minds blown, circa 1999.

EQ was the most engrossing game I ever played. Dark Ages of Camelot was a close second. Skyrim is a modern but distant third.

102

Outcast by Appeal. At the time of release, I had just gotten a new PC (PIII 500, if I recall correctly) that gave me good performance for their state of the art voxel engine. The world building and voice acting was fantastic and I really had trouble putting it down!

Omikron: The Nomad Soul. This is a flawed gem, but a gem nonetheless. It really was one of the first games I played that gave me the sense of a living, breathing world. Sucked me up good!

The Settlers II. I remember getting up at the break of dawn together with a friend - on Saturdays - so that we could get as much playtime as possible before my brother got up and reclaimed his PC. Time playing that game just disappeared…

Privateer. As somebody else mentioned upthread, somehow this felt much more immersive than Wing Commander. I guess because it’s less railroady and gives you more agency.

103

Dominions 4, nothing else comes close. It’s as if Illwinter designed the game just for me.

104

I never did play Thief Gold, and T2X was one I checked out but never stuck with. Damn, I can feel its pull again and I’d happily return to it too.

I loved the Dark Engine for its lighting, its sound propagation and the way it handled the physicality and movement of your avatar so you felt connected to it. Running, sneaking, mantling, leaning (left, right, forwards and around corners), crouching and dropping quietly to the ground, climbing ladders and ropes, the specific --and perfect-- height and bob of your view-- it all felt so right.

105

This x 1000000000000.

106

I have similar feelings about HOMMII and HOMMIII.

Mine would probably be Final Fantasy Tactics, though. I don’t think there are many 40-80 hour RPGs I’ve played multiple times,but FFT is the exception. I’ve found every single-stupid Move-Find Item in the Deep Dungeon, learned Zodiac from Elidibs, you name it. I don’t use any of the super-powered special characters (gosh, there’s more than a dozen of them). I like keeping my regular guys: the hero and 2 men and 2 women, one of each who goes the path of might, the other magic.

I playedthe PSP remake too. I liked the new translation: it’s obvious they added a ton of stuff that wasn’t in the original and some people thought the faux-Elizabethan flourish too pompous, but I found it very entertaining. Anyway, how many games dare try any language register other than colloquial English? Not many. It’s a shame the new gameplay elements sucked: the new classes required absurd amounts of grinding and the new items (recolors) came from multiplayer matches… come on, who can play multiplayer on PSP???

I should get around to trying the fan remake “version1.3”, but it seemed kind of a hassle to get working.

107

This was how a few of the guilds were formed. You realize that the same people were in the same area at the same time of day leveling at the same rate you were. These days… I only play games with people I know, and most the time if I am on a PUG type game, I am turning the voice chat off within minutes because it’s so vile.

108

Awesome thread! While lots of games had the “where did the time go effect?” for me across the various epochs, starting for me with the TI99-4A and then the SSI- and Origin-rich Apple IIe era (I must have owned SSI’s whole catalog and all the Ultima’s especially III) , to the burgeoning PC world of late 80’s early 90’s, (Sid Meier owned a huge block of my life with Railroad Tycoon and Civilization 1 and 2; also anything else he stuck his name to, I would buy sight unseen) to DOOM (I will never forget the first time seeing that run on a 486) , to the opening to Mechwarrior 2, to the first time see Quake with a 3dfx card: All spell binding moments, along with the games mentioned here in true spirit of jpinard.

I would have to echo others, though, to say the most immersive game it would have to be EQ, really. I got sucked right after launch and then spent almost every waking moment playing for 6 months. Among the well-trod ground that made the game the addicting thing that it was ,it was the persistence of the world that really got me: the idea that the world carried on after I logged off. The store was always open, and had an existence outside of my play kept dragging me back hours after I should have been doing other things. It didn’t keep me for the years it kept other people, I moved on to dabble in other MMOs but never mainlined anything like I did the first time purity of Everquest.

109

Also, without EQ, I probably never would have become a freelance writer. I ended up becoming “the MMO guy” at worthplaying.com. I didn’t get paid, but it was truly a case where the “exposure” paid off. When I sent my clips to PC Gamer and Computer Games magazine they had heard of me. I had a good run until the bottom fell out of the print industry.

I don’t look back on the EQ days fondly, though. While I appreciate your server rep mattered (and it did), and that the game was hard, I think they are also a good example of how to not to treat your customers. The community reps were condescending at best, and outright mean at the worst. By the time Alan Crosby and Alan Vancouvering came on board they tried to change it, but a lot of the damage had been done. I gladly ran to DAoC when it launched.

110

I alt-tabbed into this thread from this…

EQ000264.jpg1920×1200 781 KB

which also answers the original question.

Whilst I know a few who never stopped playing, I’ve only been logging in again for the last few years. I can’t imagine anything will recreate that 1999 feeling and just how much it impacted my life.

111

I’ll hop on the EQ bandwagon.

Another huge factor was that it predated omnipresent wikis.While there were sites like Allakhazam, it was far from the complete day 0 spoiler fest that modern games have. There was actual discovery involved!

112

There needs to be dedicated “EverQuest changed my life” topic based on these responses ;)

113

The first 6 months of EQ were amazing in that regard. We were the first group on our server to discover lower guk. For 2 weeks, we were the only people in there, and the GMs would routinely sit in and watch us try to progress. That was probably the single most engaging thing I’ve ever done in a video game. As we inched forward every night, trying to go deeper into lower guk, the tension was just off the charts. If we wiped, it was incredibly difficult to get back to our stuff. There was no one to help us, as we were the highest level on the server, and it was before the days of summon corpse etc. Add to that, we had a really weird group…we had no warrior, as I’m not sure we had figured out just how important that was yet lol. We had 2 monks, a clerc, a shaman, and me (a wizard). The endless ping pong of agro made things really insane, every fight lol.

But yah…no auto map, no wiki, no walkthrough. There was zero information on the internet about lower guk, so trying to find our way through that place was really a nightmare, especially with our weird, under-geared group. Trying to “break” the bedroom for the first couple days…jesus…talk about corpse runs, and trying to go fast before respawns etc… the sound of those frogs hopping still gives me nightmares.

Lower guk, in noob gear, with no chanter, no tank, and no snare. Not for the feint of heart.

114

Yeah, some of those discoveries and experiences made it magical. It wasn’t until level 29 that I realized how nice a cleric was to have and probably well into our 40s before we ever played with an enchanter that tried crowd control, heh.

115

Team Fortress Classic

I played it from release in 1999 till 2007 or so basically every day. I can’t tell you how many times I’d load it up before the sun went down and wouldn’t stop until it came back up without thinking anything of it. It’s still installed on my hard drive and I play it every now and then, though there aren’t really any good servers left. It’s actually the only online game I’ve ever really played (apart from a bit of HLDM and some beta builds of Counter-Strike).

The games listed below all stole many nights from me as well.

Diablo 2

Another mainstay on my hard drive since its release, and almost certainly my most played single player game of all time. It is just ridiculously entertaining, and incredibly immersive with its amazing soundtrack and artwork / graphical style.

Stalker: SoC & CoP

Janky, but probably the most immersive FPS games ever made. I make sure to play through both of them at least once a year, though I never could get into Clear Sky.

Fallout 1 and 2

I enjoyed New Vegas a lot, and I even enjoyed Fallout 3, but the first two are my favorites. Apart from being my favorite game world, they also have incredible soundtracks. Even when I put them up against the beautiful compositions in something like Witcher 3 I find that Mark Morgan’s work added more, or at least meant more to these games.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines

One of my favorite, and also one of my most disappointing games of all time. The super ultra mega fan patch 10.0 is nice and all, but it really doesn’t do much to fix the actual problems the game shipped with (like the fact that the engine is pure garbage, the levels are small and barren, the animation is a mess, et cetera). But even with those problems, I play through it every year because I love the game world and the characters so much. If Activision hadn’t fucked the release up so much maybe it would have sold enough to warrant a sequel.

Morrowind

My first open world RPG, and my absolute favorite up until I played Witcher 3. Having said that—and maybe it’s because I played Morrowind at a much earlier age—I was far more engrossed in the third Elder Scrolls game. After one botched attempt at a character, I hit my stride with the second and I just lived him for a year or so, trying to collect every decent item and complete every quest I could.

Oblivion didn’t do anything for me, and I didn’t even buy Skyrim until recently, and have yet to put much effort into it. What I’ve seen of Skyrim I’ve liked though, so it’s definitely something I want to get into.

Dwarf Fortress

If anybody ever tells you that you need great sound and graphics to be immersive, this is the game you point to. The night I downloaded it (back in the 2D build days when it was just starting to get press) I spent all night playing it. Then I spent the night after, and the night after doing the same. I got away from it after 40.xx came out, but whenever I play it again it always brings me in the way few other games do.

I don’t know if it’s age or what, but these days it’s extremely rare for me to find a game that just sinks its teeth into me and causes me to lose hours on end without realizing it like the games above did. With the hundreds of new games I have on Steam, Humble, et cetera, what games am I playing right now? X-Wing / TIE Fighter, and Age of Empires 1 and 2.

116

I was probably level 20 or so before I discovered that I could do things other than summoning a floating sword and shield and then nuke stuff. And root, I got that one early. But mez took a long time to figure out.

We made an explicit effort to avoid spoilers, but it was a lot easier back then too. I definitely discovered what things were possible to charm solo on my own.

@playingwithknives that UI is insane. I didn’t have ten percent of that.

Other fond memories:

I had a bunch of equipment that looked like leather armor and a thin sword and I would cast Illusion: Wood Elf and stand around and wait for someone to ask for SoW and I would cast Clarity instead.

When the Bazaar existed, sometimes people would try to run gambling games there using /random. I found someone who had fucked up their math and took them for a lot of plat except that they didn’t actually pay out, but it was still satisfying.

Our guild was very small but competent by raiding-guild standards, and it was always satisfying when one of the server uberguilds asked us for help. On the other hand, occasionally one of them would show up with twenty people to do something we were doing with six, and they’d watch for a bit in hopes that we would fail and then leave, and that was even more satisfying.

The Trials in the Plane of Justice.

117

Remember Thottbot for WoW?

119

No shame here, WoW 1.x was magical.

120

I’m level 86, very casual solo player and am probably even missing icons for some AA skills buried in the AA UI. I don’t even know what half mine do. I just click them on tougher mobs as I solo my way through old content.

A 105 who is raiding with probably have double the windows I do, the group, raid and pet interfaces are just as complex.

121

Some or possibly all of the Mass Effect trilogy. I played all day until they were beat.

I never got into any MMOs. Maybe for the better, but I like reading about people spending years playing a single game.