What multiplayer games have you played that successfully made you feel like you were in a living world, i.e., you knew about the other players and what they were up to before they showed up in your town with a massive army to crush you with? How did they pull it off?
EVE Online - the obvious... Because it is a living world.
Minecraft MP - I played a server with a group of people, and logging on each night was one of the most amazing experiences where you'd see huge structures built overnight.
Dark Souls - everything in this game's world is dead and decaying. But then you glimpse the ghost of a player passing you by, see their shade by a bonfire, see their bloodstain, get invaded or summon someone... and it is all supported by the lore, really making you feel that this place is real and alive as much as it is desolate and oppressive.
I'm sure others will name Day Z as well, but I have not played that one... Yet.
steam
http://dailycelluloid.blogspot.com/- where I write about movies.
Ooh, yeah...good one. You're right, that was a cool feeling. Probably one of the more unique multiplayer experiences out there too.Originally Posted by ado
What specifically about Eve though? The knowledge of the completely player built economy, word of mouth about the large scale politics, seeing other players around you, what? Maybe just that there are so many other players and that they can impact so much about the game that every time you log in something is different?
It's everything. The mining runs, where huge mining barges mine asteroid fields while being protected by squads of fighters. Then there's the pirates who kamikaze run these guys for anything and everything they can scrap. Then feeding these precious resources in to huge factories that produce goods that will buy you a Titan so you can go help your alliance conquer the opposition in what is sure to be a 1000+ player battle.
It is the 1st game where that dread of war is palpable. Where an enemy alliance is warring just a few jumps away from your tiny corp's system. And you don't know which turn they will make next. Towards you or away. And you and your friends are nothing to them, just another dot on the maps of their warpath... But for you this system is the product of a year of work and play and it is all at risk, right now. Today you have a place in the space you call your own. Tomorrow you might be in back in 1.0, or even worse stuck in null... Alone.
steam
http://dailycelluloid.blogspot.com/- where I write about movies.
Good old PreCU Star Wars Galaxies.
Hanging out in Mos Eisley cantina, after a hard day surveying and harvesting, and running from the occasional Krayt. Listening to the band, chatting with the friends and that hot twi'lek dancer... man, the memories....
Go, SWGemu, go!!
Last edited by makute; 19-02-2013 at 12:43 PM.
DayZ
I didn't play it for long but five or six hours in it provided me with lots of memorable situations.
On Skype with a friend: "Hey, I think I see you, crowch so I'm sure it's you, now get up, lie on the ground, get up, salute! Salute again. Wait, why are you not saluting again? You say you do? No. Yes. Yes, a shotgun. Ok, I'm running away as afast as possible and someone is shooting at me".
Hey I was going to post SWG! The player built and governed cities really set this one apart from other MMOs. The player base also did their part (usually) to make it all feel very real and star warsy.
Obligatory nostalgia repost:
http://www.swgemu.com/archive/scrapb...0070206035422/
That post dates from a million years ago (year 2006 in fact), it was salvaged from the now extinct official SWG forums and reposted in every SWG fan forum on the internet. It resumes, in a very moving way, the awesomeness of such a great game, and the sadness of the players when it all crumbled down.
Last edited by makute; 20-02-2013 at 01:02 PM.
You can get nice moments of this in Planetside 2, if you play alone or in a tiny group that isn't out to do the obvious things. I've sat and watched a very distant firefight between two enemy factions while reinforcements from one flew overhead, and occasional troops scattered about looking for stragglers or rearming. Those moments when you happen to bump into two or three friendlies and/or enemies on their way to something, or doing the same exploratory wandering as you, can be quite pleasing.
Doesn't really hold a candle to something like Wurm Online or Minecraft though, with their more complex interactions and permanent changes to the world.
This is probably gonna sound ridiculous, but Runescape. Some randomer took me and my friend out to the wilderness for our first excursion when we'd just started, in search of sapphires. We were very conscious of the fact that where we were headed, this guy could kill us... but more to the point we learned while we were headed out from random people running that there was a band of people hunting down everyone. We were so petrified of running into them, our guide included, that we took some ridiculous paths and discovered all sorts of different places we wouldn't have seen otherwise.
Perhaps it was because I was 11 at the time, but the tension was palpable.
mickygor, Battlefield 3
Otmer, League of Legends EUW
Bastiat, Planetside 2, Miller NC
world of warcraft, eve online - eve being possibly the best example of such a thing to date, shame its mostly boring (but when it gets exciting, there is nothing that can match it)
Any MMO with an active server community.
WoW, AoC, WAR, Rift, etc, despite being "theme park" MMOs by design, were quite engaging in terms of dealing with other players, provided you played it with the personal goal of engaging other players. General Fuckery, meet Private Dick.
WoW was rather living in vanilla and Burning Crusade. Not as much anymore.
Dungeon finder was the first step to kill it. Then their persistence to hang on low population servers to keep what little community alive (which some people like low population) instead of merging it with other low population servers. The world has grown so much that the leveling process is so spread out. Cross Realm zones help but the people in your zone are people you will never see in your capital city or pandaria unless you invite them to a group.
Battlegrounds were Realm only originally. You got to know your friends and enemies well. Alterac battles would last for hours and possibly days. Southshore vs Tarren Mill. City Invasions. World Bosses(tho reintroduced in Pandaria). City Invasions. The big thing was getting to know people on your faction and the opposing faction well. Now so many convenient and time saver tools have be introduced at the expensive of having a living world. Its turned to a D3/Guild Wars instances other than new expansion content and your Auction House.
I'd have to agree that, for all this talk about the "larger community" and "playing with your friends" that shard guesting and dungeon finders and all that shit offer, they really just turn the entire game into an anonymous mishmash where everything descends to the lowest common denominator.
It's sorta like the difference between going to a sports bar where you always see the same ten douchebags, and going to a sports bar where you never know anybody ever. Yeah, sure, Fred's kinda racist and Mary hits on dudes half her age and George gets a bit loud when he's drunk, but they're known entities and, put together, you kinda know where you stand. The other pub's just filled with college kids that can't hold their liquor and go WOOOOOOOOOO a lot and Jesus fuck I just want a pint and a moment to think!
I still keep in touch with people I played with in WoW. I followed the people I played with in WAR and AoC through two other games. But there will be no new memories from GW2.
10six. The first MMO I ever played, though at the time I had no idea what an MMO was. Ridiculously ahead of its time Third Person Shooter/base builder/RTS (it was originally on Heat.net!) where losing your stuff really mattered like in EVE. It boasted the ability to have one million players on at a time because the planet could theoretically go up to one million plots of land, but it always had a fairly small and close knit player base. Four factions permanently at war, but it boiled down to clan warfare. Your MDN (clan) had a maximum of 20 players, and they were your best line of defense for when one of your mining camps was attacked, which could happen when you were offline. It had a nice big UN trade hub where all of the factions could get together and trade anything with each other; if you played for any decent length of time you could easily make a name for yourself among the entire player base.
It was sadly cancelled by Sega but resurrected in one of the dev's garage as Project Visitor. It's great that it exists unlike so many other cancelled MMOs, unfortunately there are probably about 30 or 40 active users today and it will never be the same :(
Last edited by Fiatil; 21-02-2013 at 06:03 PM.
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