MeinMMO demon Cortyn talks about the first MMORPG. In Silkroad Online, the world was still in order – or so to speak. Because the first guild wanted a lot and could do nothing.
The first great love of MMORPGs is something very special – even for me. Even if many memories have become a bit blurred by now, I still remember very well how I logged in every day back then to grind and cause mischief with my guild. Even though we never really “pulled anything off”, the feelings from back then are still there.
We’re talking about the first “Silkroad Online”.
So let me tell you about Silkroad. A more than classic MMORPG that today (rightly) hardly anyone knows. But it was my first excursion into the world of MMORPGs and therefore has a very special place in my memories forever.
It’s important to know that Silkroad still had all those annoying mechanics that (thankfully) did not appear in later MMORPGs. A few examples:
- Quests wanted you to gather 30 cores from stone elementals. But these only drop from very special, rare elementals, which have a 1:5 chance of appearing. And then they have another 50% chance of actually dropping. On average, you had to defeat 300 elementals here.
- Death had consequences. Anyone who died lost a large amount of experience points. A single death could completely undo 3 to 4 hours of grinding. Multiple deaths in a row could wipe out weeks of work.
I want to be honest with you, I didn’t have many memories of the gameplay of Silkroad Online. It was a blur of healing potion spamming and pressing the same 5 skills over and over. When I looked at screenshots from back then on the internet, I furrowed my brow in confusion and wondered: “Did I really play that?”
But then one clue led to another and the memories came back piece by piece.
A simple profession system that was just cool
In addition to the typical Asia-game classes, there was also a “job” system that was probably the most important aspect of the game: There were three different “professions” you could commit to starting from level 20:
As a thief, it was your job to ambush merchants and take their goods to sell them for a big profit. Merchants (“Traders”) were mostly protected by hunters (“Hunters”), who in turn hunted thieves.
Theoretically, this was a cool mix of three different factions:
- Traders try to transport goods from A to B to make a profit.
- Hunters protect the traders from thieves and get paid for it.
- Thieves ambush the traders and sell the loot themselves.
Because I was already as edgy as the horns on my head back then, there was of course only one role to choose: thief.
Back then, I played with a schoolmate and we agreed that we wanted to build the largest and most dangerous thief guild the server had ever seen.
Of course, the guild had to have a particularly “cool” name, so we chose “black plague” – because thieves always wore black clothing in the game. But since it was a multilingual server, the name had to be in English: Black Blight.
Theoretically, we had it all magnificently pictured. We would ambush some merchants, quickly run into the bushes to put on our thief clothes (only then do you really take part in this “profession war”) and then rob the merchant.
The three biggest MMORPGs in Germany are here:
My guild was “Team Rocket” for the very poor
Back then, we had no idea that even in the starter area, the merchants were already protected by max-level hunters. Because if a server had been active for a while, merchants always had high-level hunters with them. Trying to attack before reaching the maximum level as a thief was completely crazy – but we didn’t know that back then.
We planned many attacks. We strategized a lot. We waited for a world boss to spawn in an area because that usually attracts all players. We saw that as our opportunity to attack merchants who could not break off their journey and – hopefully – stood there without protection.
Spoiler: That was absolutely never the case.
In the roughly 3 months of gameplay, there was not a single successful attack from the Black Blight guild on any merchants.
But that didn’t bother us so much. In true “Team Rocket” fashion, we thought every time: “Maybe next time!” Somehow, I was also much more tolerant of frustration back then than I am today. Today, I lose interest after 3 lost Overwatch matches in a row.
Much more than the game itself, I remember the conversations in my guild.
Because often we just sat by the roadside, by the shore of a lake, and engaged in a bit of “pseudo-RP.” These were just a few figments of our imagination on how our next attack would go and that soon – very, very soon! – the server would tremble before Black Blight.
Spontaneous hentai and the beginning of the end
Little by little we recruited more and more people who either played a thief or “thought the guild name was cool.” Yes, those were our selection criteria back then.
Since Silkroad only had international servers, we had to communicate in English – something I wasn’t particularly good at back then. I was constantly looking up vocabulary when we talked in the guild chat.
Anime was still a niche hobby back then, and the only legal and accessible consumption was through RTL2 – Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Inuyasha, and Dragon Ball. One of my guildmates got me hooked on the idea of watching “Bleach” – that was quite popular in Japan back then.
To make matters worse, we only had “DSL 1000” back then, because everything else, to quote my mother’s husband, was “money thrown away that you will never need.”
Downloading anime illegally over torrent platforms with the absolute cheap connection, only to find out after hours that someone had named the file “Bleach Episode 73” but then received an episode of “Bible Black” was then disturbing at a completely different level.
To summarize the guild: Yes, that was a bunch of nerds with an anime fetish who wanted to be particularly “edgy” and ambush defenseless traders as thieves. Not a single heist in the short history of the guild was successful. We lived the absolute cliché – and loved it.
Even if Silkroad was certainly not the best game, it set me on my path. It indirectly ensured that I learned the English language and also rekindled my love for anime, which persists to this day.
Eventually, another school friend led me away from Silkroad, claiming he had a “friend code” that would let me try out this “World of Warcraft”. That ultimately cemented my fate.
