First impressions are something incredibly important. This applies not only to the first date, the first day of school, or the first pancake at grandma’s, but also to the first login in an MMO.
Every other game will inevitably be measured against our experiences and expectations that we gathered back then, regardless of whether it was in Aion, Silkroad, WoW, or TESO.
The Expectation: Final Fantasy 9 with other people!
I can’t really remember what I was expecting. But I do remember well that “Final Fantasy IX” had kept me glued to the Playstation for many nights in silent secrecy, and then I thought: “An online role-playing game will be similar to an offline role-playing game, just with more people.“
Wrong. No fixed storyline, no predetermined path, but a huge world that you could just wander into. I can only guess how many times the wolves of Duskwood ate me when I tried to cross the river at level 6 to finally face the “big challenges”.
Back then, I also thought it was a pretty clever idea to let an orc kill me in Redridge Mountains, so I could then wander as a ghost across the entire continent to get to the dwarf territory. Ha, take that, Blackrock wolves! You won’t eat me!
I realized my plan had a hole when, after several hours of wandering as a ghost, I was just asked in the general channel of Ironforge: “Where is the entrance to the Deeprun Tram to Stormwind?”
Okay, that may not have been the most efficient way, but at least the map was now somewhat uncovered!
The Unknown is What Excites
But what exactly made the first game so much better, the experience so much more intense than almost anything that comes after? It’s not what we know about a game, but what we do not know.
Back then, I didn’t hang out on gaming websites every day reading the latest patch notes. Instead, I came home from school, logged in, and just chatted a bit with the “guildies,” who operated very similarly.
To out myself as an official noob: My mage in World of Warcraft didn’t have a single talent point allocated until level 43 and not because I didn’t know it was possible, but because of the following thought: “If I get stronger with each level-up and each talent point, I’d rather save all talent points for later to have a greater effect!” When I finally could blast the first big ogre in Stromgarde Keep of the Arathi Highlands with a Pyroblast to the face – Ha! That was fun! Suddenly enemies fell over quickly!
But the embarrassments didn’t end there. I didn’t use “Polymorph,” commonly known as “Sheeping,” until level 60, except to turn a squirrel from Elwynn Forest into a sheep. Why should I?
It never made much sense to me to turn enemies into a sheep. That seemed pretty unheroic. I really have to thank the players from the “Eternal Watch” back then for their patience with me and for explaining the sense and nonsense of Polymorph and dispelling in countless visits to Scholomance (So, who remembers having to counter the spellcasters in the necromancer room and then pulling around the corner?).
The First Epic!
This is probably a memory that most of us can vividly remember. For me, it’s similar, but also a bit different.
I remember very well that I was happily and peacefully decimating the local satyr population in Felwood (today “Demon’s Forest”) to obtain larger supplies of Fel Cloth – back then, you needed that to craft the expensive “Moon Cloth.”
Sent another one of the red Hellcallers into the Nether. Ping. Purple item in the text log. “Band of Icy Cold.” That was a ring that made it so that you could unleash a Frost Nova on receiving a hit, freezing the enemy. Now it must be said that I was a fire mage and considered frost spells quite cowardly for role-playing reasons. And I was an enchanter, or disenchanter. You probably know how the scene ends.
Ten seconds later I was richer by 3 “small shimmering shards” and my first epic disappeared into the void. I didn’t think for a second that I could sell it…
Ashes to Ashes, Fire to Frost
But even at level 60, the boundless ignorance was not over. After all, the first raid instances were still waiting to be conquered by me and my fire mage! It’s actually a wonder that it was considered a smart idea back then to make me the “leader” of mages – that was done for every class in our raid because we had a pool of 80 players.
However, I soon faced the question of what Blizzard was thinking by filling the first two raid instances with fire monsters, where I, as a role-playing fanatic fire mage, was. Respecc? Never! My mage would rather be hit by Frostbolt! Thus, the first ten raid bosses for me consisted of choosing from my large repertoire of frost spells to properly freeze the enemies using my fire build.
Frostbolt, Frostbolt, Frostbolt. I felt dirty.
Nevertheless, this feeling of euphoria is indescribable when 40 people in TS cheer in satisfaction as Ragnaros is killed for the first time after 5 months of hard work. So nerdy as it sounds – those were some of the best moments of my life.
Together with 39 people, with whom you had fought piece by piece multiple times a week, to finally defeat one of the hardest opponents in the game in the 253rd attempt… fantastic!
No comparison to today’s “raid finder” where you give up after 2 failed attempts, leave the group of 40 nameless (and sometimes soulless) players, and never see each other again.
Big Talk Was Already There
Also unforgettable are the first evenings at the dragon lady Onyxia. At that time, we were just looking for reinforcements for our raid and had a new mage with us. While we were talking in our separate mage channel about the newcomer and their performance, we suddenly heard him scream in TS “Yeah! 6,000 Pyroblast crit!” and something must have broken in one of my mage colleagues. She was usually just a “quiet mouse” who never spoke in TeamSpeak, but now she whispered very softly “But Onyxia is fire immune…”.
This silence. It lasted only three seconds, but you could almost hear the clicking in the heads of all 40 before the laughter broke out. The respective mage was never seen again afterward.
There are many, many anecdotes I could tell from that time, but I don’t know if they would be interesting enough to read. These are the experiences that you only gather at the “first time” and during the first game in an online world.
With every new game, I already know what to expect because I research it so thoroughly that I no longer perceive new features as such, but rather condemn or nod in approval to them beforehand. It has been a long time since I wrote a text with tears in my eyes, but that time was wonderful; it also shaped me personally to a large extent.
I can only hope that future games will give me similar memories to look back on in 10 years like I do today on the first months in WoW.
Tell me, which MMO do you associate with the best memories?
