I'm not sure how this appeared on my YouTube feed, but this relatively short video is worth a watch:
Back in 2009, I think my "aha" moment was questing through The Ghostlands on Quintalan, my Paladin, and finally building up to Deathholme. I happened upon another player struggling through that place, and we teamed up to finish off Dark'Khan Drathir. Neither of us had played before, so it took us a try or two, but we figured it out and defeated the traitor. Coming back from that part of the zone forever changed the game for me, because I finally began to understand the story and what had happened there.
For Vanilla Classic in 2019, being the first time I'd ever played the "original" version of WoW, it was a different moment. It was exploring my way through Wetlands to the Arathi Highlands, to Hillsbrad Foothills. Up north I went, and I found myself quite by accident in the Western Plaguelands. I had... experiences... with doing this before, but while I was stealthed and kept to the mountains, I found I was able to sneak all the way up to the entrance to Scholomance. I had absolutely no business being where I was, as a L28 Rogue, but sneaking there and into other places just whetted my appetite for more.
In LOTRO, I know where my aha moment was: reaching Evendim and looking up at night and discovering The Pleiades in the sky. SWTOR was a bit different; I think it was when I arrived on my Smuggler at Coruscant and there was a custom cutscene of me slicing a terminal to get into the spaceport unnoticed. It wasn't much, but it was a helluva touch, given that I was trying to get my starship back.
What about you? What was your 'aha' moment in an MMORPG?
It was my third character, my Night Elf hunter that had that aha! moment for me in Wow. I had leveled a Human paladin and a Human mage to 20, but neither quite clicked. The Human starter zones just felt too much like rehashed pseudo-medieval fantasy to grab me.
ReplyDeleteSo on New Years day I started a new character, my hunter. I worked my ways up to Darnassus. For whatever reason entering that city just grabbed me and never let go. From there I was a hunter main (late Classic) until well into Wrath when I switched to my Draenei paladin (Pallais).
In Swtor, it was playing my Sith warrior. My friends and son had decided to start on that side so that's what we were playing. We all leveled separately, but were in voice / text chat with each other talking about the game. As I worked through the first quests up to the Academy I suddenly realized that I had more character development and choices in those few quests than in years of playing Wow. I wanted more to see the journey of my characters. When our group wasn't playing, I played a Jedi Knight by myself. It was interesting to see two stories side by side. All of that combined to completely hook me. I still will just level a random class to revisit the stories because it is so much fun to see what will happen if you try different options.
You know, I'd almost forgotten this, but there was another 'aha' moment for me in SWTOR, and one that I can laugh about now. It was on that first Smuggler, and I was riding a speeder bike heading out from the government building in Coruscant toward the spaceport. I wasn't paying attention, and I thought was was riding at the center when I simply drove off the edge of the platform and into oblivion. After having run through the Wrath of the Lich King instances --with their invisible barriers on the high places with cliffs-- I'd completely forgotten that maybe not all MMOs do that. I sat there stunned for a few minutes and then busted a gut laughing at myself.
DeleteDont remember the invisible barriers that much, I know when I was 40ish I rode into ungoro crater, not quite making it to the bottom, to recover my body I had to jump again clicking the corpse button as I fell, Also I dont know If they later changed physics but the first day of outlands I jumped my mount on the crest of a very small hill then kept gliding down the other side never quite touching the ground til I went splat at the bottom.
DeleteAhha moment was probably in public beta when we where doing the elite ogre quests in wetlands and just the difficulty of doing so and working together to defeat them hooked me.
At least I'm not the only one who had that "fall" from a middling hill that had exactly the wrong angle on the other side!
DeleteDepends on how exactly you define an aha moment. The guy in the video was amazed by how smoothly he transitioned from playing solo and exploring to finding himself drawn into a dungeon full of wonders. I know that's a thing that happened to me too back in Vanilla, but I'd never played another MMO before so I had no references to compare that experience to.
ReplyDeleteI do remember being in absolute awe of the size of the world though. Previously, my only experience moving an avatar around in a 3D environment had been running laps around a small first-person-shooter map (and being very bad at it). I remember Northshire Valley alone seemed quite big in comparison. Then I zoomed out the map and was amazed that all this was only a tiny part of the greater zone of Elwnn Forest. And of course, then I zoomed out again...