I watched a cute little video about a small community in a dead MMO called Dark Ages:
I think the aspects of how the community works in this story is interesting (like the political systems and special powers of the ranger class) and I’m secretly hoping that we can build a community here that also feels something like home ^^
Thanks for plugging this video. This is what I expected to see. There are still MMOs that have comparatively low back-end requirements that were a lot for 25 years ago, so I guess the effort to keep this one online isn’t considered that big a burden. And, if Wikipedia is to be believed, they had a content update in 2020.
I have played Dark Ages, what an early experience for me in an MMO actually… I was really into RP then.
My first two MMOs were Runescape and then Maplestory, so Dark Ages was just a bit before my time I think. Of the MMOs I’ve played, my fondest memories are from the ones I roleplayed in like Mabinogi and Final Fantasy XIV. I think that’s one aspect of why this kind of video was touching for me; it’s nice to see a smaller community of people still engaging in that kind of play with each other.
I’ve recently acquired Neverwinter Nights, which I’ve heard has an active RP scene, so I’m looking forward to trying that out sometime.
What a beautiful video, it seems like they really did their best to experience the game as much as they could in a limited time and then try to give back. The statues and the ranger and the in-game community stuff they had sounds pretty darn cool, very immersive; they 100% understood the assignment.
I’m not a big multiplayer player, the two I spent the most time in is Team Fortress 2 and… Ragnarok Online haha. Tons of people set up custom servers for Ragnarok Online with super high experience rates and it was just magical. The communities were usually really chill and nice and small and everyone was just there to hang out and be friends. I even had set up a server for myself at some point, I should probably dig all that up and get it running if anyone wants to try…
There is also just a strange beauty to old mostly/entirely dead mmos. Just a massive world intended for huge crowds but no one is there… I enjoyed this video as well:
I showed the video in the original post to a friend, and they made me aware of another YouTube video that was released earlier (by about 6-7 weeks) which happens to have a pretty similar format. It’s about an MMO called There:
Got kinda emotional watching this tbh, brought back a ton of memories from my days spent playing Ultima Online with all my friends back in high school!
Also, for anyone interested, I just made a character and the game runs fine under wine it seems!
It is pretty great that many older MMOs should on the whole cost very little to run nowadays since I would imagine that their storage and networking costs would be considered relatively small. Keep the history alive!
oh no I played so much neverwinter nights rp back in the day, wooooah