Revisiting my first MMO days in Anarchy Online

It's hard to imagine but back in the early 2000's people didn't really even know what a MMO even was, let alone that it would come to be one of the most popular and profitable game types in existence. Sure, there had been a few more that were released prior to my first involvement in the game type, but it wasn't until a regular at the college computer lab that I worked at walked in with a new game that I would become truly familiar with what an MMO really was, and later, how terribly addicting the concept actually is.

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It was 2001 and it just dawned on me that this was 20 years ago. I guess I'm getting old. Anyway, this guy that we were only friends with via the computer lab came in and said the game was great, but his internet connection back at his home was too unstable to play it and he wanted to know if it was ok if he installed it on one of our machines.

Universities at the time were known for having really fast internet connections known as T-1 systems and our connection was insanely fast for the time. Everything functioned very quickly but also we have to keep in mine that this was 20 years ago and probably wouldn't be impressive today. It was at the time though.

We installed Anarchy Online or "AO" as it became known as later and were absolutely blown away by this game.

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The world was massive, there were tons of classes to choose from each with varying abilities that mostly stuck to the "holy trinity" of Tank / DPS/ healer, which was all we really knew at the time and honestly, I still prefer to this day.

There were people all over the place and the truly crazy thing was that most of these other people were actually controlled by other actual living people around the world. I had never seen anything like this before.

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Looking back, combat in this game was pretty damn terrible as you would simply lock on to an enemy and fire or strike over and over again until you either killed it, or it killed you. You had some special skills with cooldowns that would do more damage than your main way of attacking but these cooldowns were really long and there was very little in the way of strategy for any of this. Basically, you needed to be a certain level to 1v1 an computer-controlled opponent, there wasn't really any skill involved.

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_{the world map was absolutely huge for the time}

Later in the game, there would be some level of skill involved but mostly this just consisted of having the correct gear and buffs in place before you ever began a section. The rest of the time it was just a the auto attacks going through the motions until you enemy eventually died.

When I think back about how absolutely awful the gameplay was in AO, I am alarmed that I spent $50 on the game and then $20 a month for probably 6 months on this game and so did a LOT of other people. The graphics and sound were pretty good given the time period, the story had a nice concept to it about how the players themselves would control the story via that power struggle between the "Empire" and the separatist clans. It was up to you which side of this struggle you were going to be on but as far as I knew when I was playing, once you chose a side that was it, you could never go back. You could also join a group that was neither of the major sides but this was a very flawed choice to make since it would make you "shoot on sight" in either one of the major cities and made for a really difficult way to play the game.

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The best part of the game was wandering around in a group and this could be pretty difficult to pull off. In the early stages of the game there was no LFG (looking for group) interface and you could only find a group by shouting from the chat windows or by standing outside of a dungeon occasionally shouting out your credentials until someone sent you a private message to join them. Then, you had to physically find them in order to join their group. It was more realistic in this sense but man oh man was it unnecessarily time consuming. I think there were many days that I would spend the first hour or so simply looking for a group and when I finally found one I didn't want to leave it because if it was a good group, it was gonna be a while before you found one of those again.

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I can still remember how you were forced to grind in a newbie area until level 5 and this was just painful. Watching videos of people doing it now makes me wonder what the hell we were thinking when we considered this to be entertainment. It had everything to do with not knowing any better and because for most of us, this was the first time an MMO had been a part of our lives.

Now if it wasn't for all the damn game ruining crashes.... which i'll get into later