Summary
The MMO is one of the oldest and most revered subgenres in gaming, with its biggest hits living on for decades, and each new entry requiring an incredible amount of resources with no guarantee of a reward. That’s why it’s important tocelebrate the history of MMOsand some of the most important mechanics they popularized or introduced way ahead of their time.
Whether it’s the first popular use of instanced environments — or 3D environments themselves — these MMOs (in chronological order) deserve their laurels for being way ahead of their time.
Released in 1996 for PC,Meridian 59may be a relatively obscure game these days, but when it released, it was actually the very first MMO to ever integrate 3D graphics, which was a massive technical undertaking for the time, particularly as the game allowed first and third person play.
To this day, a small but dedicated community remains committed to keeping an open source version of the game alive. MMO fans may not have played it before, but it’s treated with a lot of deserving respect for its graphical innovations.
First released in 1997,Ultima Onlinebecame one of the greatest PVP MMO games of all time, earning itself a long-lasting set of fans who play the game to this day on a new and upgraded game engine with improved visuals launched in 2007. In fact, it’s got a good claim to being one ofthe very best older MMORPGs ever made.
Ultima Onlinecan be credited with being one of the first MMOs to embrace a totally player-driven economy, meaning player to player trading was absolutely central to gameplay and was boosted by a robust crafting system. Player-driven economies would come to be a defining feature of many MMOs, andUltima Onlineis the game that popularized it before all of them.
Released in 1999 on PC,Everquestmay be relatively abandoned these days after a sequel and increasing difficulty to play, but many hold fond memories for the MMO that was folded into the Sony brand and remains relatively dormant to this day, despite being one ofthe best MMOs to predate its bigger brothers likeWorld of Warcraft.
WhileMeridian 59was the first MMO to introduce 3D graphics into an MMO,Everquestwas the first MMO to take place in an entirely 3D game engine, revolutionizing the MMO space as players know it — and directly inspiring the visual style of industry titans likeWorld of Warcraft.
5Dark Age Of Camelot
Arthurian Legend
Considering that the late 1990s and early 2000s were a heyday of new MMO releases, it’s not surprising that some got left in the cultural dust, andDark Age of Camelotis undoubtedly one of the discarded MMOs that deserves to be better remembered.
That’s becauseDark Age Of Camelotpioneered the concept of realm versus realm combat where entire player factions are placed into combat with each other, with a lot of the narrative detailing what would happen when the realms of Hibernia, Albion, and Midgard would go to war. It was novel for its time and let players pledge their allegiance to different factions, long predating the Alliance/Horde dynamic ofWorld of Warcraft. The fact that it offered three-way faction conflicts made for a dynamic system that few MMOs have emulated since.
Now over 21 years old,EVE Onlineremains one of the most feared and titanic games in the MMO market, known for its fearsome player-driven economy and real-time galaxy domination mechanics, demanding a sincerely massive amount of time, and often derided for requiring spreadsheets to play properly.
Regardless of the criticisms,EVE Onlineis wholly unique for introducing an entire galaxy for players to naturally try to conquer, pirate, trade, and war over. That means all wars are purely organic, with the developers only stepping into introduce constant new content. The players define the narrative of the game, and new stories still break when a particularly massive battle occurs.
These days, players are completely familiar with the idea of metaverses and living out alternate realities in digital spaces, but while it was imagined in fiction for a long time, no game embraced and embodied this idea quite as much asSecond Life, released in 2003.
InSecond Life, players create an avatar and interact with user-created content in an entirely virtual space, with the developers often refusing to categorize the game as a game at all. This hyper-social reality is a direct precedent for games likeVR Chat, and it most readily embodied the fantasy of MMOs becomingentirely new worlds where players could construct a new life.
It was only a matter of time until a definitive Star Wars-based MMO arrived in the heyday of early 2000s MMOs, andStar Wars Galaxiesdelivered in spades, allowing fans to genuinely explore the Star Wars galaxy in an entirely fresh way.
It’s not only novel for bringing a popular sci-fi world to life (Star Trek Onlinewould follow in 2010), but it also allowed players to erect their own buildings across the world, including homes, eventually coalescing into cities with entirely dynamic and organic virtual economies where players could create the items that made credits go around. It’s a great system that might not have been topped since.
WhileGuild Warsand its sequels are often overlooked in comparison to its bigger brothers in the form ofWorld of WarcraftandFinal Fantasy 14, it’s worth highlighting how pioneering the originalGuild Warswas, preceding its competition by many years.
Guild Warsis beloved for its world and tight RPG mechanics, but it was also one of the first games to introduce instanced scenarios, meaning parties could enter specific versions of the world where they wouldn’t affect other players. That was a revolutionary idea that vastly opened up the doors for what MMO quest design could be, and it directly affected some of the greatest MMO quests to exist thereafter.
