what are your favorite features from the various MMO's you've played?

[nageov3t]

just something I was thinking about today... I'm trying to decide on which MMO to play this summer (because my home office is significantly easier/cheaper to cool than my living room, I tend to PC game during the summer months instead of playing my xbox) and I've been bouncing between a Rift trial, LotRO, and DDO (which I hate, but a bunch of my friends play it)

since it seems like basically every MMO just builds on the features of every other previous MMO, it got me thinking about what my favorite features from each of the different games were.

EQ -- the size of the world. not just in terms of physical size, but how long it takes to get from one end to the other. obviously it's not ideal to have to block out an entire weekend to corpse run from Qeynos to Freeport at level 1, but there's got to be a happy medium between that and being able to run from Darnassus to Stormwind in about 20 minutes.

FF Online -- multiclassing. I love the idea of being able to only invest in one character but still experience all the different classes that the game has to offer. TBH, I'd probably still be playing World of Warcraft is switching to a new class didn't mean losing all of my achievements, rare mounts, titles, reputations, legendaries, etc.

World of Warcraft -- UI customization. this has become a must-have feature in MMO's to me. I'm a clicker. I've tried to break the habit and failed. with a fully customizable UI, though, it's really not an issue. I can move all of my frequently-used abilities into a 3x3 block or something and click on them without even having to look. Rift is kinda killing me in this regard.

World of Warcraft -- character customization. I almost take it for granted that you'll be able to change some of the cosmetic looks of your character whenever you want to. it's a bit dumb, but it would have been cool if WoW kept the ball rolling and occasionally released new hair styles/colors just to keep you from getting bored of looking at your character.

LotRO -- player housing. it's just a cool feature and a great gold sink. I love the idea of being able to loot a dragon's head and then mount it on your mantle.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

Yea, Everquest. I like the size of the world, the fact that you can run along in dead quiet and be surprised at any given moment(when you are low of course, at higher levels not really), and yet you can find plenty of monsters when you want them.

I haven't played WoW but I did do the Rift trial and it's like...the world graphically looks great but once you step off the road, you can't move 2 feet without having to kill a monster, and even when you're on the road you can see the monsters nearby. There is thus no peace and quiet while traveling like from Qeynos to Freeport. There is just no space between one combat heavy area and the next. And things like Levitation in EQ enhance the travel experience too.

And there's something about the trial city of Sanctum in Rift...it looks great but somehow doesn't feel right. City doesn't feel alive like an EQ city does even though EQ has old ass graphics.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

SWG -- I loved the concept and complexity of the game, but I didn't like how SOE ended up executing many things. Back in the day, I loved crafting, the player economy, and the fact it was a sandbox environment. Space was a great addition as well. I'd probably still be playing if not for the NGE. I hope the emulator project completes soon.

WoW -- I played for maybe 2 months total. I could just never get into it. I did like how polished it was.

AoC -- The game has stunning environments and was really fun when it was populated. When it goes F2P later this year, I hope to jump back in.

LotRO -- This was the last MMO I played and I like it because it is polished, has a decent storyline, and was fun to play with my brothers. The thing I don't like is that combat is slow and tedious.

 

[imaheadcase]

Dark Age of camelot. RvR combat, no MMO has ever replicated that, not even close.

Actually DAOC itself, the classes were just awesome from the start, the PvE was awesome to. Many people spend hours on catacombs.com confgiuring configs for certain classes/groups for rvr. hehe

Animist for the win!

Lots of the stuff you see in DAOC other mmo tried to make work but never did, including wow.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

AOC how your character looked bad ass and you fought bad ass creatures. I also agree with the seemingly huge EQ1 world.

 

[shortylickens]

Guild Wars was nice cuz it discourages grinding. Theres a real story and proper quests which is where you get most of your XP. Of course, I still got bored with it and quit, but at least it didnt bleed me dry.

 

[pathos]

Everquest - I'd agree that EQ's worldsize was a major draw. Even early on, before the expansions, running from Qeynos to Freeport at a low level was a major feat.

And, although I doubt I'd still like it, since I'm a pretty casual mmo player now, back when I was playing, the fact that it had consequences for being stupid (or unlucky), in the form of corpse runs, xp loss, unleveling, etc etc. Who played the game early on and didn't have multiple corpses in Fear, wondering how you were ever gonna get them out?

Warhammer - Those public quests, where massive amounts of people would join in, and everyone would get quest rewards, no matter how big or small your contribution was, as long as you took part.

Also, this is probably the only mmo that I actually liked the pvp. I'm not exactly a pvp expert though.

Aion - the amount and extensiveness of the character customization

Runes of Magic - having a primary class, a secondary class, and having to level them up separately. And, having dual areas to level up in, for your primary and secondary classes. At least at low levels.

Atlantica Online - only mmo I ever played that had turned based content. Plus, through level 95, there was 0 level grinding. You level'd up doing quests for the most part (after that, the grind got nasty though).

Final Fantasy 14 - Ok, this is the only good thing I could think of for this game, but being able to switch classes just by equipping different weapons was pretty cool. To bad the rest of the game sucked pretty hard.

Sword of the New World (Sword 2) - Controlling 3 characters at the same time. Also, the setting of the game itself I found pretty interesting.

 

[spaceman]

the uninstaller

 

[Zanovar]

the uninstaller

hahaha

 

[Skott]

RvR (Realm vs Realm)

No one did it as well as Dark Age of Camelot. Unfortunately they screwed it up after a while.

 

[gothamhunter]

Public quests. If more modern mmos had this, I would be more interested in them. Looking forward to GW2 for sure.

I want better crafting in mmos.

 

[Anteaus]

Aggro detachment radius. I have to admit I miss hearing the panic in the voice of someone yelling about the group mobs that are chasing them, just praying someone will pick them off before they killed them lol

 

[Nik]

I hope the emulator project completes soon.

They've been working on it ever since NGE. It'll be another 5 years at least before the game is anywhere near the pre-NGE SWG was, and they STILL won't be able to make everything work right. They're basically building the back-end from nothing but looking at the front-end. Good luck, but fat chance.

BTW, I still play on Chilastra and StarSider.

 

[Elcs]

Final Fantasy 11

One character, every single class. Just visit the required NPC and switch between classes. No need for Alts or transferring stuff from max level character to newbie character.

Dual class system. It might have been in a few games before it but this one worked beautifully simply and didn't cloud issues. Many combinations were effective so you didn't have everyone picking the same class/subclass combinations.

Aggro and linking system. This is THE BEST feature EVER in an MMO without a shadow of a doubt. Monsters could aggro on sight, on smell, on sound or on magic. Some monsters such as Ghouls were blind and had no sense of smell so would only aggro you if you attacked or they heard you moving around them. Certain monsters would 'link' and support someone who had aggroed you and your group.

Shame the game was sorta awful overall. It had the best features of an MMO, ever.

 

[skace]

ok I'm bored.

Ultima Online:
- Best housing, could choose your house design by price and space available and then you could decorate all the rooms. Such a powerful system never came to 3d games.
- Ability to stack items within your house to create unique items that didn't really exist in the game, such as fish-tanks made out of colored cloth.
- Player run vendors
- Private / Communal items. You could play items in your house and then specify who could use them.
- Dye tubs, it took some work, but once you had a dye tub full of a color you liked, you could dye just about anything that color. Made things very easily and logical, people could work together to acquire all the colors they wanted.
- Teleportation runes. Once created they could be traded, duplicated or setup and used publically. Very teamwork oriented.
- A skill system based on ~700 points that allowed you to learn and atrophy skills. You could learn by observation, training, practice and experience. Classless!
- Amazing treasure hunting mechanics. Every item removed from a treasure chest (once you found it) would spawn a new monster to fight. Robbing a treasure chest meant you'd probably die if you weren't slow and careful.

Everquest:
- Best faction system ever created. You were realistically hated and liked by many with many shades of gray. It was easier to be hated than liked and balancing factions were nearly impossible. The factions played a realistic role in every area of the world.
- Best world exploration. The world was not only huge, but strange and dangerous. You never knew when you'd walk through the wall of an inn and end up in a back passage of a sewer system full of shadow knights that would kill you on sight. Exploration simply wasn't safe but was often fun. Because of dangers, most people did not know most of the game, which is a very interesting paradigm from games these days. Certain people became skilled in the art of exploration.
- Best Agro system. This includes mobs that would chase you all the way to the end of their zone, to mobs that would run when low on health and shout for help, mobs that would assist. And other things such as sitting in battle instantly increasing your agro status on a given mob. Things that made mobs appear to have more intelligence than they often do in these types of games.
- Favorite particle effects for spells. This is more of a personal taste issue, but I really enjoyed how particle effects in EQ tended to float around a bit after a spell was cast. I recently went back to EQ and the effect immediately jumped out again to me. The particle effects of various spell lines would grow as a player leveled up.
- Favorite spells. Everquest, to me, had some of the most fun and interesting spells. Illusions, floating spells, teleportation spells, night vision spells (ultravision was the best nightvision ever created in any game), spells that made you spin around, gravity flux, etc.
- Best death mechanism. Death is an unmemorable event in other MMOs compared to EQ (and UO for that matter). In EQ you really had to work to recover from a death. And your style of play would often change on a corpse recovery, you actually had to shift gears and play your character differently until you could get back to your corpse.

Everquest 2:
- Heritage (or whatever they were called) items from EQ1 had incredible and fun quests.
- Best (I believe) housing system in a 3d game, but not nearly as good as UOs.
- Very cool built in card game, robust and enjoyable for downtime.
- Very cool level-adoption system, where higher level players could downlevel themselves to help out lower leveled friends and get items from a lower level dungeon.

Shadowbane:
- Cool fort building system but never really as interesting as anyone would want it to be. Bases ultimately felt very sparse and unpopulated.
- Class upgrade system was based on rare items. Made certain classes feel more special.

Final Fantasy 11:
- One of the best combat and combo systems ever. Very timing intensive for an MMO, made good groups feel very special. Rewarded skill.
- Very cool job based skill system, not as good as a classless system, but incredibly fun and dynamic, allowing the player to swap in sub-classes after leveling them up from scratch.
- Funny fishing mechanics, where a player could fish up monsters (UO had something similar, but FF felt more dangerous to me).
- Impressive art direction on many outfits, especially class specialty outfits.
- One of the few trade skill systems that I was actually interested in and also difficult.

World of Warcraft:
- Best UI ever made with massive community backing.
- Extremely fluid use of questing to move the character around the world. While arguably overused, it has to be acknowledged as an impressive questing system with much less filler than most MMOs. (They worked hard to make quests seem relevant and or funny.)
- Best and most interesting lore (although dungeons are not the best, the stories that create the world are hugely indepth)
- Timeless art style

EVE Online:
- Coolest economy system ever.
- Best PVP dynamics.

Aion:
- Some of the best character artwork and armor designs I've seen.
- Amazing flight mechanics and combat while in flight mechanics.
- Enjoyable tradeskill system.
- One of the best PVP invasion systems with the rifts that would form

Rift:
- Best public quest system I've ever seen, including automated world events.
- Excellent automatic grouping/lfg system for dungeon runs.
- Incredibly unique and enjoyable, multi-class system. I'd put it under both UO and FF11 though.

Lord of the Rings:
- The first and coolest deed system, which is sort of like achievements.
- Excellent engine
- Interesting morale dynamic to battles
- Some of the most fun low-party (~3 person) dungeons ever.

 

[Genx87]

Ultima Online:Love the sandbox approach. Outside of the cities it was anarchy and required players control the game world.

DAOC: RVR was epic. The three realm's and the grind to lvl 50(at first) made me feel like I was part of a nation. And the other two realms were foreign

EVE:The open ended nature of this game coupled with the vastness of space. Liked it but dont have enough time to get into it

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

Something I've wondered but since I only played EQ for so long:

Do guilds in all MMOs have a complicated process whereby you have to apply, brown-nose for 30-45 days and all other kinds of junk? Do any games have communities where you just say LF Guild and you get one or at least get to raid without sucking up?

 

[nageov3t]

^ the only situations in which I've found that were:

-disorganized guilds or guilds just starting out/desperate for members
-games that have no endgame content that requires mass organization

 

[darkxshade]

I believe DAoC had the trophy mounted in houses before LotRO.

That said, DAoC was the only MMO I'm nostalgic about wishing I could go back in time and experience it from the beginning. RvR was truely epic, especially when raids are organized to take relics. Darkness Falls was an awesome dungeon.

 

[zinfamous]

Guild Wars was nice cuz it discourages grinding. Theres a real story and proper quests which is where you get most of your XP. Of course, I still got bored with it and quit, but at least it didnt bleed me dry.

well, I feel that they failed to discourage it because most people still do it. That's what I enjoyed about it, anyway. As I like to collect rare drops.

half the fun though is designing unique, highly-specific builds to go on certain runs to solo certain bosses. You're essentially doing the same thing over and over (Farming), but in many different ways.

I barely noticed the story or, halfway through my first play-through in prophecies, really didn't see it as incentive for keeping me going.

I think Nightfall has the most engaging story of them all, though.

 

[mizzou]

Ultima Online:
A. Chat feature: Having comic book style text above your head was annoying while in a crowded environment, but when in a reasonable location it made the game far more easily to socialize with those around you then in any other game. Seriously, in pretty much every other I feel like I'm making contact with the third kind. You have to wait either minutes or give up speaking to anyone. UO Made this much more straight forward and user friendly. --having global chat and other levels of chatting discourages socialization IMO (A'la everquest) Having to be face to face to someone to yak it up, and maybe going to a private location like a locked house or far out of town to discuss business adds to that social aspect immensely.

B. Player housing: As soon as housing was drying up, (well before 2nd age version of UO where land values plummeted), nothing could have made you richer then by plotting a house down as early as possible and pimping it out.

C. PVP (early days) Before 2nd age killed the environment, the limitless amount of possible PVP really added to roleplaying. Imagine being at a bank, a naked person just ressurected pleads for help to kill some murderers hanging out at the crossroads. A few good men rally together and head off for glorious combat. All this done, without a stupid quest or fake PVP zone. Done because in real life, a murderous gang was preying on the innocent and it took real people who cared to do something about it.

D. Rune/moongate use: A great concept and a great tool for traveling

E. Player based economy: Nothing like going shopping in a merchant district, looking for a special deal on your new favorite color of full plate.
----------------------------------

WWIIOL:
A. ONE Persistent game world that ebbs and flows with the actions of yourself, and also your side. Epic combat where every day, hour, and minute matters.

---------------------------------
WOW:
A. Questing/leveling/traveling: So buttery smooth, Oh how I miss it!

B. Boss/dungeon combat.: It really made sense and was fun, not a huge chore to get to.

C. Graphics : Clean cut and timeless in my opinion
---------------------------------
EVE:
A. Pretty much just one of its own here
---------------------------------

 

[shortylickens]

well, I feel that they failed to discourage it because most people still do it. That's what I enjoyed about it, anyway. As I like to collect rare drops.

half the fun though is designing unique, highly-specific builds to go on certain runs to solo certain bosses. You're essentially doing the same thing over and over (Farming), but in many different ways.

I barely noticed the story or, halfway through my first play-through in prophecies, really didn't see it as incentive for keeping me going.

I think Nightfall has the most engaging story of them all, though.

Yeah but you dont have to grind if you dont feel like it, and you wont lose anything for choosing to not grind.

Whereas WoW is based entirely on grinding. In order to build up a character and party powerful enough to take down a dragon you have to work for better part of a year to be strong enough.

 

[RaistlinZ]

DAOC - Sense of community, Realm vs. Realm combat. Haven't found anything to match what it was able to do on those two fronts.

AOC - Gorgeous graphics, still tops IMO. Excellent melee combat system.

Rift - Just started playing. Excellent landscapes, distinct zones, not too hard to learn how to play right away.

 

[Chiropteran]

Was just talking about this subject with my friend at work over lunch.

Perfect MMO for me would be something like this.

Graphic engine/UI- WoW's, or basically a clone of WoW's. It's solid, it does what it needs to do. I do not want super fancy graphics, I just want something that looks good enough but can also run on nearly any computer even mini netbooks without being too slow.

Difficulty- ArcticMUD- probably a game none of you have heard of. A text MUD I started playing some 15 years ago. There are different ways of measuring difficulty and different ways of creating it. WoW focuses on making fights really really hard such that it takes hundreds of attempts some times, while the penalty for failure is very very small or even non-existent. I hate that system, as it really puts the focus on time and number of attempts. Arctic, on the other hand, focused on making fights mostly easy, some a bit harder but nothing as hard as WoW. However, failure had a cost. You lost xp, you dropped your items (sometimes could be recovered, sometimes not), and all in all it was almost never worth dying to kill some hard boss, no matter what the reward. This made people fear new bosses and fights, because death hurt, but because most of the fights were ultimatly designed to be beaten fairly easily (compared to WoW balance) if you did have a good strong group you could do a lot without ever wiping.

Character creation- Shadowbane. For all it's flaws, I loved the character creation of shadowbane. The combination of very meaningful/strong races, runes, customizable abilities, and the multiple discipline system made for endless character combinations.

PvP- Hybrid of ultima online, shadowbane. Faction based pvp, with various npc town factions and player guild factions. In ultima online, if you killed someone you lost notoriety. Kill a few people, you become "red" and you can be killed without penalty by others. It was a very basic system, but it worked on some level. Problems arose because of abuse of spells that didn't flag you as an attacker, non-combat griefing to try to force you to attack someone, and lack of meaningful pvp goals. Shadowbane's system took 1 step forwards and 2 steps back. The guild system and the castle building and bane system was awesome, but lack of any notoriety system meant you could grief newbies without any penalty. Lack of equipment loss on death (you dropped your inventory, but not stuff you had equipped) meant you could go out to pkill and if you died you lost nothing, but if you killed people you could walk away with whatever they had in inventory was a flawed system. Combine these two systems so that you lose reputation with the powerful NPC based towns if you aggressively kill or steal from neutral players, but you can still live as an outlaw in a player guild based town- however the town can be attacked "baned" and destroyed, so if a group of players just wants to grief all day they risk pissing off too many enemies and losing everything.

PVE- difficulty similar to arctic, as described above, balanced for smaller groups not huge raids. Zones are all open world, no instances, and pvp can occur in zones. Some popular bosses might be seemingly "too easy" for the loot they drop, these bosses would be hot targets for pvp battles because multiple groups all trying to kill the boss for their own would ambush each other to have a clear shot at it.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

PvP- Hybrid of ultima online, shadowbane. Faction based pvp, with various npc town factions and player guild factions. In ultima online, if you killed someone you lost notoriety. Kill a few people, you become "red" and you can be killed without penalty by others. It was a very basic system, but it worked on some level. Problems arose because of abuse of spells that didn't flag you as an attacker, non-combat griefing to try to force you to attack someone, and lack of meaningful pvp goals. Shadowbane's system took 1 step forwards and 2 steps back. The guild system and the castle building and bane system was awesome, but lack of any notoriety system meant you could grief newbies without any penalty. Lack of equipment loss on death (you dropped your inventory, but not stuff you had equipped) meant you could go out to pkill and if you died you lost nothing, but if you killed people you could walk away with whatever they had in inventory was a flawed system. Combine these two systems so that you lose reputation with the powerful NPC based towns if you aggressively kill or steal from neutral players, but you can still live as an outlaw in a player guild based town- however the town can be attacked "baned" and destroyed, so if a group of players just wants to grief all day they risk pissing off too many enemies and losing everything.

You've reminded me. It seems like most games have team vs team PvP, are there any games out there where you can simply PK anyone and everyone? Like EQ Rallos Zek of blessed memory.