Dead and Forgotten Online Games - Gamer depression.

[The Backwards Man]

Don't know if it counts since it's completely dead and buried but MCO was one of the first games on PC that I bought. I don't believe there's any way to properly access all the features it once had anymore. In fact, you could take any online EA game from the early 2000's and just put it in this thread.

 

[How do I log in?]

This one's a bit weird, but Nosgoth was insanely fun. It took place in the Legacy of Kain universe during a war between humans and vampires, and it was a 5v5 Team Deathmatch. You'd randomly start as either humans or vampires, fight for a time limit (or to 30 kills), then switch sides and do it again until one side had a total of 31 kills.

Humans fought with ranged weapons and had classes like the Scout with its long-range sniper bow, Alchemist for short-range flamethrowers and grenades, Witch Doctor for healing, Vampires fought purely with their melee bodies (except the one magic vampire) and had the Tyrant for being a tank, there was a flying vampire (I forget) and all their races were the clans from the LoK series. And it worked like TF2, so you could swap items with side-grades, like the Hunter could swap the bolas that ties up a vampire (preventing climbing and abilities) for a shorter-duration poison bolas for some damage or even forgoing crowd-control for throwing knives. Or the Alchemist could swap the flame wall for a healing field.

It was a small niche game and it was a victim of Squeenix which forced it to go into the Esports cancer. But you cannot force Esports on tiny games and since it didn't take off they killed it. And even though the original version is dead, fans actually re-made the game themselves using Unity so it can still be played, just not on Steam where it was originally.

When it first came out there were some hilarious balance issues where humans were almost completely helpless against the vampires, so since you were guaranteed to die 30 times as humans the goal became "who could score more kills as humans". Also they had a mode called "move the body" or something where the goal was for the vampires to move a body loaded with cursed blood or something to a circle on the field and the humans had to prevent them and my friends and I would just all pick Tyrant for their massive HP pool and then the other three would body-block while activating the damage-reduction ability and we'd just yell "TOUCHDOWN!" every time we got the body to the goal.

 

[thejackal2]

Blackwake. Oh, what could have been.

PC Gamer writeup.

This game was deathmatch pirate crack for a year, before it died in some of the most autistic stupid, hard to believe it was that retarded how it went down ways ever, even for a gaming community.

Basically you had 10-20 players on each ship, and three roles on each ship, or 4 maybe: captain, gunner, fixer, spotter. If you were really fucking good, you could do all 4 at once and do the job of 5 medium skilled players or 10 noobs. The skill cap was that high right off the bat. One good gunner and one good captain could often beat 5x numbers if they played it right.

The gameplay was fast placed and immersive as hell but all had all the faggotry and gay ops you'd expect from an early access pirate deathmatch with no moderated servers and vote bans and votekick on automatically.

At times when shit clicked, man one of those games were an hour turns into 5 easily and you weren't even worried about anything but the next match. I used to go to bed rolling when I closed my eyes just like when you'd be out on the water all day on a real life boat. There was nothing like perfectly landing a broadside and seeing your enemy sinking to the bottom, or even better lighting their sales on fire, rendering them dead in the water, and then raping and pillaging their boat as you boarded and they scattered like cockroaches just to die a cockroach like death.

At peak game would have 5K concurrent, sometimes even 10K when they'd do a sale. That is a healthy pop, and cliques could form but good servers would exist. Well, soon what happened is after about 8 months with no real updates (it was EA forever) or sales, it went down to like 200-300 usually at peak, which was after work on east coast for a few hours, then it would just die. There were two main servers, I forget the name of the faggot ass one but what happened was they ended up DDOSing the other main server so that the remaining 1000 or so active players were all forced into the faggot ass server that was just a clique of kick banning spamming troll captains at that point. Unless you were in with the "cool kids" you couldn't play basically. If you ran a renegade crew against them and won, they'd just kick you, or do faggotry like switch you off captain even when your crew was voting you captain.


The server that was being DDOS'd found chat logs from the faggot server implicating then in the thing and then the devs did absolutely nothing and the game lost half its existing tiny playerbase.


From that point on it was just a deathmarch towards whatever the fuck they released from teh bones of the engine a few years ago as a completely rebranded single player pirate game of the same name.

I hope one day a dev picks up the concept of this game when it was first in early access and does it up better. It was one of the best multiplayer games I've ever played, pirate or otherwise. It had some of the best elements of emergent gameplay and tried and true tactics ever. People would actively try new strategies with the various boats and you could try them all out over the course of a good session. The faster boats would be for raiding crews, the slower ones for the big gunners and the cocky captains that could line all those guns up and then turn away from the counter battery...man I miss it!

 

[WonderWino]

Not dead but definitely forgotten by most people is 1996's meridian 59

There isn't a whole lot to do really, pve exists to build you up for pvp. Quests are almost non existent, the world is fairly small and server populations aren't much anymore. Back in the day 150 on at a time was considered packed. But its a skill based system with very punishing deaths that can set you back days or more, you drop your inventory but on the plus side you also generate a revenant if you aren't a pker yourself that hunts your murderer. But yeah its free to play these days, easy to find on steam (but don't expect more than 10 people on at a time for the most part and the community can be pretty toxic) and its also entirely open sourced. So you can download the source from github and run your own server (which incidentally will run on damn near anything) though I would recommend you have at least some programming knowledge to get things up and running if you are interested in running a server. It can be complicated trying to compile it for the first time

Town combat in a nutshell:

But yeah its not a hold your hand game at all. Hit 30hp and you're on your own and a valid target. Can be fun to sneak up on someone while invisible and hold/blind and kill them in 3 seconds flat cause they weren't paying attention though

If you're interested in its development background:

and yes, you can thank this game for the existence of subscription charges becoming a thing

 

[I'm Really Feeling It]

Is Tibia a forgotten enough game to make it in the list?

 

[Scale Smerch]

First one coming to mind (and very surprisingly not yet fully dead) is Star Kingdoms. Whole thing was text and browser based: you create an account which is tied to a group of other players in a sector. The game itself comprises a "round" lasting a few months where the goal is to conquer land from players in other sectors and top the ranking board. The game mechanics were basically the forerunner to the likes of Farmville, with all actions gated by real-world time. You're making a building? That takes a few hours. Sending troops out to conquer? There's a time delay both getting to the target and returning.

The community nature of it effectively made the game since there was a lot of wheeling and dealing happening in between game actions. You could team up with your sector-mates to bash another sector, arrange a backstab, or simply shoot the shit thanks to the built in message boards (both sector-specific and game-wide). Also probably one of the reasons it faded away over time given the tranny infection and post-2016 chaos (besides the rampant botting which emerged as the meta strategy).

Honestly miss it, my friends and I played it a lot in middle school and it made for some fun times in computer class sneaking in moves in between typing exercises. There's just no market for such games anymore.

 

[Ed Special]

I wonder if OG Ragnarok private servers are still around. I used to play until like 2015-16.
I also wondered what happened to TERA.

There's a few still around, both vanilla and modded, if you know where to look.

 

[latinlover]

I guess DDO (Dungeons and Dragons Online) is still technically alive, but I'd imagine it's on life support kept afloat by a couple whales and it's nothing like the way I remembered it.

I think it's still one of the best MMO formulas that a more talented studio could capitalise on- instead of every quest being a permutation of find 25 boar testicles and then deliver it to Elder Jim, all the quests are fleshed out dungeons (not necessarily always the stereotypical indoors one, lots of outdoors areas aswell) with really nice voice acting (some by pseudo-celebrities eg. Gary Gygax), with traps (that are semi-randomized in most places), secrets, side objectives, etc. Some are quest arcs tied together with a narrative, it really was quite nice.

I think one if its main issues was that Turbine is fucking retarded, and the other one was that it wasn't all that accessible due to it being based on I think dnd 3.5? It was super easy to make your character completely dogshit by not looking up a build beforehand. Oh yeah, and the netcode was horrid, made the combat a bit janky.

 

[M3xus]

There was a free2play mech game called Exteel that I sunk too many hours into in college. You'd head out and play either Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, CTF, or the Horde mode for credits to get better mech parts and color schemes to paint it with. It was a grind, and part balance wasn't great, but parts had niches they filled well and were visually distinctive enough you knew what to expect at a glance. Then the developers started making questionable balancing decisions while releasing parts that were just flat out better than existing ones. It did go on to suffer the fate of all non-Lineage NCSoft titles and shut down, but I hear private servers are up for it.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Dawngate, EA's moba. Lots of time spent on that with friends.

 

[Tenshi Eating A Corn Dog!]

There was a free2play mech game called Exteel that I sunk too many hours into in college. You'd head out and play either Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, CTF, or the Horde mode for credits to get better mech parts and color schemes to paint it with. It was a grind, and part balance wasn't great, but parts had niches they filled well and were visually distinctive enough you knew what to expect at a glance. Then the developers started making questionable balancing decisions while releasing parts that were just flat out better than existing ones. It did go on to suffer the fate of all non-Lineage NCSoft titles and shut down, but I hear private servers are up for it.

Speaking of f2p mech games, I played a fair amount of Hawken.

I honestly don't remember much other than the Reaper light mech being incredibly strong with the minigun.

 

[nickcarkiller]

There was a zombie survival server that had customizable weapons. It was really fun and populated, but the server owner shut it down for some reason. It was called Quackity Zombie Survival or something.

Another game that is basically dead is The Ship: Murder Party. It’s basically Among Us on a cruise ship. It’s so fun, but there are no online servers anymore.

 

[castleface]

My introduction to gaming was watching my pops play Asheron's Call, which inevitably sucked me in too. Really miss that game was very unique compared to the MMOs of today.

 

[Joe Dough 68]

Oh man, there has been so many.

• Guns of Icarus (Alliance) - an airship vs airship steampunk combat game with 4 people per crew, 3-4 ships per team. technically still playable on Steam, but the playerbase is negligible. After 1 big "expansion" called Alliance (was supposed to be a full-fledged airship mmo but the Kickstarter failed), which added a few more vessels and a For Honour style map jpeg with progress bars, development stopped soon after due to lack of interest/funding. The saddest part is the devs have only been making cozy-cutesy slop ever since then;
  
  
• Wizardry Online - If Dark Souls was a Japanese dungeon crawler mmo, with permadeath, player killing and a crime system. To my knowledge has nothing to do with the Wizardry series except the name. Died in 2013-ish first in Europe, later in Japan due to lack if interest, if it were to release today probably could've been a smash hit with the dodge-rollers ironically enough. There's a small community of weebs trying to reverse engineer the Japanese version (as it's the most developed) with slow progress;
  
  
• Defiance (2050) - An Xbox360-era open world third person shooter scaled up into an mmo. And was really fun to play due to that. Most notable achievements were randomly generated weapons ala-Borderlands, fully voiced quests and mocaped story cutscenes, 3 seasons of a tv show by the same name with some game/show tie-ins while it still ran, and an attempt at "rebooting" the game with "Defiance: 2050", which featured zero new content, was very buggy and wasn't well received in general, due to for some reason being run in parallel with the original game. Both were shut down in April 29th 2021. Some French guy is now trying to remake the entire game in Unity instead of fixing the original, afaik very little progress is being made;
  
  
• FireFall - oh where do I even begin? I suppose with a mention that the main guy behind it has a thread here, and what the development was indeed an absolute mess. Would you believe me that this game had 3 gameplay and plot redesigns through it entire life, with 2 of those having nothing but game assets carrying over from previous ones?
  • If my memory serves me, at first playable stage (closed beta period) the game was in a way similar to Far Cry/Stalker, where you'd fight against the ai for bases and towns in open world filled with smaller events and light questing, as well as players "thumping" (orbital dropping and defending a large drill, literally called a "thumper") for resources to craft and maintain their gear, plus some coop dungeons.
  • First redesign happens around this time (late 2012), levelling system the game had is dropped in favour of a gear rating, Medic class is renamed to "Biotech", losing the TF2 medibeam due to obvious comparisons in the process, and the "Dreadnaught" minigun class loses it's midriff on the female player model (lol). Development also shifts heavily towards e-sports and pvp modes at this time I believe, slowing down work on the open world content as a result.
    
    
  • Fast forward to 2013, the game releases on Steam, with Mark Kern gone, and a gameplay loop much closer resembling that of the contemporary mmos. Levelling system is brought back, level-gated zones are introduced, crafting is gutted, ai taking over bases is cut altogether (there are now only specific places where ai would "attack" either temporarily destroying them or getting pushed back), and traditional questing is now the only way to progress through the game. Pvp also gets axed.
    
    
  • A few content updates later (2015-2016) Red5, the dev team, announces a Chinese release, and yet another major redesign. In summary, entire open world gets filled with throwaway locations meant for unrepeatable quests, making the world even more cramped than it already was, aforementioned content updates with entire zones were cut to "rework them" (they were never implemented again), all class weapons and abilities were changed in some way, an entire "Arsenal" tank subclass gets cut for reasons I can't remember, and all quests what were there before were also removed and replaced with new ones (notably being released with placeholder voice acting still present in places instead of professional), pvp gets reintroduced, both instanced and a brand new open world zone ala-Planetside with no gear balancing in it whatsoever, dev team misses it's Christmas payroll, gets fired entirely minus the one support guy, the game shuts down on 07.07.2017, cut to Grummz grifting his mmo/coop whatever the hell project, the End.

 

[HahaYes]

I remember briefly playing an MMO called Heavenly Maiden RO shortly after I finished high school, remember fuck all about it other than I had a decently fun time with the mates I was playing it with and it looked like this:


The other game that died because of MCC coming to PC was the beloved Eldorito/Eldewrito. Customs on Eldewrito were some of the best shit, I still miss it bros...

 

[Joe Dough 68]

the game shuts down on 07.07.2017, cut to Grummz grifting his mmo/coop whatever the hell project, the End.

One small addendum and hopefully I won't shit up this thread again, because reading about Godot and it's forks reminded me about it.

FireFall also has a small group trying to revive it, but considering that it's the only game to be made on a proprietary Offset Engine, which was famously smothered in it's crib by Intel back in 2010's, the chances of it happening are slim. But they seem to be working on it still, though I can't tell how many and on what exactly because their GitHub is partially privated.

 

[gay]

GunZ is apparently coming back to Steam and under new management, hopefully they'll add English language support. i actually played the shit out of this game back in the late 2000s.

i'll develop some carpal tunnel for old time's sake, perhaps even larp as some private server faggot if my muscle memory holds up.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I remember wanting to play LEGO Universe as a kid but it wasn't available in my country, although there are few online games that I wish to play back then was Darkspore and this one Nickelodeon game that I never got it to work, both games are currently dead now.

A game that I had the most fortunate of playing is old Java web browser Minecraft that they used to had on the official website, there were numerous servers that I joined and there was one zombie mode that was basically a game of tag and had to hop around cobblestone blocks while avoiding players. I only remembered that mode because the game was very limited on what you have, such as no health and hunger bar, just placing and removing blocks as I recall.

I have a vague memory, that has long perplexed me, of grade school friends playing Minecraft but just sort of soaring through landscapes with no point. That had to have been it.

 

[Hiphopopotamus]

Marvel Heroes, the MMO/Diablo game that got killed for "Marvel's Avengers" which is also rightfully dead.
Granted it wasn't a great game but I had fun going into Midtown Madness on Mondays and just blasting tons bosses with swarms of other people.

 

[Titanium_Piston]

Every few years I reinstall FFXI and play on a private server for some months.

Until recently, I was playing on Nocturnal Souls that was using an older reverse enginered backend called Darkstar or something like that.

A couple of weeks ago I got the need to play it again and found the servers were shut down, so I found a new home at omicron private server.

It is an old MMORPG game but it is relaxing to do some grinding while watching a 2-6 hour video on youtube.

I have tried FFXIV but for some reason it just doesn't have the same appeal as the old one.