This is a great conversation and I have really enjoyed reading all of your histories with computer games. Hopefully, my own history will be an interesting addition.
I was already an avid gamer before computer games were even a thing. In high school, I was in a community chess club and founded my school’s chess club. I was also really into war games from companies like Avalon Hill and SSI. But a seminal moment for me came during my freshman year in college when I discovered tabletop RPGs. My college buddies and I played countless hours of D&D and Boot Hill.
When PCs came along, I was happy to dive into PC gaming. My first taste of computer-based RPG-ing was the Ultima series. But, while the computer RPGs of the time were okay, they lacked (for me) the immersion of table-top social games like D&D, so I stuck mostly to non-RPGs on the PC and continued playing D&D into the late-1980s.
From about 1987, and onward through the entirety of the 1990s, I was laser-focused on building my career and I drifted away from tabletop gaming. I played computer games throughout the '90s, but they were strategy games like Civilization, flight sims like Red Baron and Aces of the Pacific, or war games like Gary Grigsby’s Second Front and Pacific War. It was all good stuff, but it was a decade and a half during which I could only look back with fond memories at my earlier life as a player of RPGs.
All of that changed in 2002 with my discovery of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I had come back to role-playing, and it was great! I played the heck out of that game, learning the mechanics inside out, to the point that I ended up as one of the “experts” answering questions for other players on Neoseeker. I have continued with the Elder Scrolls and Skyrim was almost as influential for me as Morrowind had been. I am still a Skyrim player in 2023.
I also discovered MMORPGs in the 2000s. I first got into EVE Online and Pirates of the Burning Sea. (To this day it frustrates me that there is no good, current-technology, pirate-themed MMORPG.) I also played a good bit of Lord of the Rings Online. Then came Rift. I loved Rift in that first year or two after it went live. The unpredictable chaos of the zone events, and the ad hoc grouping feature that joined you with other payers on the fly to battle against the extraplanar invaders, created a dynamic gaming experience that has never been matched in any game I have played since then. I sure miss that!
I also discovered co-op gaming. I have played a lot of co-op games with a couple of my closest gamer friends, like Left for Dead/Left for Dead 2, The Forest, ARK, the Sniper Elite series, the Divinity Original Sin and Baldur’s Gate series, and all five games of the Borderlands series.
As far as MMORPGS, I have bumped around between a bunch of games, including Runesape, Guild Wars 2, Secret World, Black Desert Online, DC Universe Online, and Final Fantasy XIV. I have enjoyed all of those, and I have gone back from time to time to revisit old favorites like EVE, Rift, Pirates of the Burning Sea and Lord of the Rings Online. But the MMOs that have gotten most of my playing time over the last few years have been World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls Online. I have 19 characters that are level 50 or higher in WoW, and three level 50s in ESO.
With that said, however, my enthusiasm for current MMOs has waned a bit. I started a new character for the Dragonflight expansion in WoW, but quickly lost intertest. I also started a new character for the Telvanni Peninsula expansion in ESO but have stayed only mildly interested in that campaign. I would love to feel the same excitement I felt when I first played Pirates of the Burning Sea, Lord of the Rings Online and Rift back in the day, but right now what I feel like I’m getting is a whole lot of more-of-the-same, along with a healthy dose of monetization, in place of innovation. There is hope, I think. Baldur’s Gate 3 has really raised the bar in terms of game depth and storytelling (not to mention quality assurance). At the same time, big AAA studios Blizzard and Bethesda have gotten a lot of criticism for their very ho-hum new releases, Diablo IV and Starfield. Hopefully that will all meld into a serious wake-up call for the game studios and they will stop being so formulaic and start taking a few more chances in evolving gameplay, while, at the same time, building new games around great stories instead of around monetization schemes. I really need something new and exciting to come along in the MMORPG space. Please give me some new games I can really get excited about!
