This. There's an old flash browser game I used to play, Horse Isle, that still regularly gets about 30 players on one server (used to be normal to see around about that many on all of the servers when it was still new-ish, for reference). The people running it haven't shut down the servers despite discontinuing official support some time in 2020, so there are still workarounds that allow people to play it. Honestly, it's kind of better playing it now. It's less laggy and the people still there skew older, so there's less "I am 13 and everything is very serious" drama. With how the community around horse games is, it probably won't end up abandoned until the servers are shut down for good.
I'm gonna be showing my age.. Earth beyond mmo in 2003 and auto assault car combat mmo 2006, Loved them both, sure Earth beyond has a private server but it's not the same as before. but both have had no good alterntives to play
@@nikoto9481 Showing my age in no chronological order. Asheron's Call, Star Wars Galaxies, Earth and Beyond, Tabula Rasa, City of Heroes, Necocron, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. All games I played before they were shut down.
Playing games that are dead kind of sends a nostalgic feeling to you even if you never played it in the first place. You can hop into empty servers and think of the potential of it and how it was like for players who played it. It reminds me of the beauty of destruction. Everything around you is destroyed, sure there is nothing left but there is still a kind of peace that you can feel and the sense of there is nothing to look forward to gives you a feeling that honestly nothing else can replicate. Or maybe I am just yappin' too much.
it does. i recently went back and played all the 360 versions of halo and seeing the old classic graphics of halo 1 and 2 brought back memories of playing the games with my brother. i had so many forge maps i built on halo reach and i wasn't able to transfer any of them to Master Chief Collection...i was only able save 7 of them from 2 other games...i miss the racetrack i built spanning the entire forge world map...the fun infection maps i built. all the clan maps i built for a long disbanded halo clan...and in all that time i even lost a close online friend...
@@aiodensghost8645Do you know Jesus Christ can set you free from sins and save you from hell today Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell Come to Jesus Christ today Jesus Christ is only way to heaven Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today Romans 6.23 For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. John 3:16-21 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. Mark 1.15 15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Hebrews 11:6 6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Jesus
tbh I think the best feeling is when you go back to a game, get that sad feeling because its dead and then find out theres still a very passionate fanbase keeping it alive either on one official server or on a private server and you get riled up all over again
That's been happening a lot as of recently, and honestly, I want that to go further. Stuff like Quake 3 still being online and available on an old system like the Dreamcast is a good example.
Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell Come to Jesus Christ today Jesus Christ is only way to heaven Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today Holy Spirit Can give you peace guidance and purpose and the Lord will John 3:16-21 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. Mark 1.15 15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Hebrews 11:6 6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Jesus
"I was surrounded by idiots and i felt right at home" Never has a single sentence described my MMO experiences so well, sometimes i just want to go back to a time when the internet wasn't so serious, and sometimes some MMOs still provide this feeling.
... Do you know Jesus Christ can set you free from sins and save you from hell today Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell Come to Jesus Christ today Jesus Christ is only way to heaven Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today Romans 6.23 For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. John 3:16-21 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. Mark 1.15 15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Hebrews 11:6 6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Jesus
Yes. I have rarely played games with others, even MMOs, and don't feel as nostagic towards those. I cherish the experience I had back then rather than the community that used to exist. However undeniably changed myself as well and find it hard to recreate the feeling from the old days. Also growing up in a small town with nobody around who shared the same interest in gaming only increased the feeling of isolation and now looking back the feeling of to have missed out. Love to the introverts
Yep. I don't feel any need to show off my armor or fancy mount to anyone else. I don't think fun doesn't exist unless it's shared. I'm perfectly happy on my own.
Honestly, as an introvert... I am more than slightly tempted to explore these near dead games, now that I will not be ambushed by bullies and factions wanting wars over my small piece of land.
This is a super incorrect assumption, MMOs actually have many introvert players. You probably won't find them in endgame raids or pvp guilds, but you will find them gathering, crafting, exploring and questing. There's a particular appeal to being a lone adventurer in a world populated by other human players that you just don't get from a single player game like Skyrim where the world is a theme park full of robotic NPCs.
Empty, old, and/or forgotten games is a topic I love. There's just something about being the only person (or one of few) experiencing something like that that brings certain feelings. This video was a great watch diving into some of that.
What strikes me about the fall of Lotro as described from the eighth minute is that it mirrored how Tolkien described his phantastical world, the past is always more glorious, more noble, more pristine. The passage of time always comes with decay.
Man seeing Archeage cuts me deep man! My favorite memory was using the grappling hook from our ship and dragging it all the way to Marianople! We even had game devs come and chat with us about managing to get our ship inside the city and had it strung up from a arch in the city! It was wild! Breaks my heart to see what happened to that game!
Not much has happened is the problem. Ive played archage for 8 years, still have patron actually. It got bad when the old company sold to a new one a few years ago, and now in the last few months they had a merge combining Archeage and Archeage unchained into one big server. Still see a bunch of people on, you can tell by the houses placed... but it truly isn't what it used to be.
Archeage was a great game with so many options and things to do. I liked diving for treasures (though I was a Firran ^^)or just flying around with my glider. Ok, the grind was sometimes a pain but with the right people it was still fun. Sadly it ended for me, when it was sold to Kakao Games and I could not get their game launcher started, no matter what their support suggested me to do, it didn´t work
It’s always bittersweet playing these games and just as sad trying to find videos on them. The only ones left still making videos are new people finding them with 100s of views at most or the old videos from when they had many players
I spent upwards of 1,000 hours in Lord of the Rings Online over around 10 years. I remember playing on an RP server (with my only experience of RP until that point being Garry's Mod servers, and a few encounters in World of Warcraft), and loving the atmosphere and interactions with other players. Like you said in the video, listening to midi files of popular songs both old and new from various player bands in game, all syncing themselves to the same song, drinking beers and everything outside and in-between. Lotro was great. I remember the lifetime sub going half price before the free to play the transition, and I immediately bought it. Still reaped the benefits years after doing so, had every expansion for free, and was able to enjoy the game a lot more until I finally stopped properly. Have even logged in as recently as 2023 just to update my account with the latest expansions and purchase new cosmetics should I ever return.
I’m so envious of your lifetime sub! The game is in a great spot right now - it’ll be there waiting for you when you want to return. I’ve been enjoying the legendary servers lately, but Arkenstone has been my main live server for a while. Hope to see you around some time!
@@merakimerakimeraki I have lifetime, but I was on an EU server that got closed, and I've been waiting (intermittently) for years for server transfers from it to be fixed.
i always forget how well made youir videos are but im glad every time i see a new video of yours in my recommended. you are truly a master of putting nostalgia into words. also another childrens mmo that came back to life from the community is fusionfall. got the axe cartoon network just as club penguin and toon town did with disney. sometimes bringing these things back to life can feel a bit like resuscitating a corpse, as happened with archeage, but i love that a lot pf these old childhood mmos are still alive and well in some form
Bro, this video was immaculately executed. I was shocked to see you are still on the rise. Keep it up!! I've been working on a liminal games video (probably why I was shown this) and this was very inspiring. Can't wait to see what's next!
16:00 looking at those maps... i have memories from LAN parties in the late 2000s - was that the game where you can cheat your player profile to 50 or so to get all guns?
Similar to Club Penguin, another MMO called Clone Wars Adventures (CWA) was shut down back in 2014 - by Disney if I remember correctly. It had a very tight community that shared both a love for the game and the Star Wars The Clone Wars TV show that the game was basing itself on. It has now been revived and rebuilt as the “Clone Wars Adventures Emulator” with the old community slowly pouring back in as they become aware of it. They even have a very active Discord server for everyone. Some games don’t deserve to just die, and some communities are not willing to let go.
I had a friend when I was 7 years old and we played Minecraft together. He was 3 years older than me but him, me and my older brother had great times together. When a new year started and I sat in class, I realised my friend wasnt here anymore and I had no way to contact him or anything like that. I am now 16 years old and I miss those Minecraft times so much. I made great memories. But to this day, I never met my friend again...
"We are living in a long ago forgotten era. Time has moved on without us, like everyone else. Despite the fact the world you knew five, six or ten years ago are still intact. No further decayed or maintained than the day you and everyone else left it. Its still there...waiting for you." A quote i read from an old Call of duty 2 video discussing old abandoned maps. Sadly i dont remember the name of the author as he too, has been lost to time.
When you talked about MW3 it hit me in the chest. So many memories, such simple yet entertaining game play loop and modes... Hopefully one day people will get fed up with the new garbage coming out and go back to the classic CODs and BFs
I remembered when it happened, Advanced Warfare came out, players where there in droves on MW3 one moment, and gone the next. It was heartbreaking in a way, just to see a game die so quickly like that.
These empty multiplayer maps are always my argument for why bots should remain a part of shooters, multiplayer or not. It's nice to have something of an impression of what these maps looked like when they where alive. And growing up in your first MMO is one of the gaming experiences I'll always remember.
The way the WW1 Game Series handles bots is one of the reasons I like it so much. The games aren't very popular, so the bots are necessary. They fill up empty spots so the games are still full and fun.
Archeage was really something else. Most stressful MMO to play a healer in and that was sick. My favorite story from it was raiding an island owned by a french guild with my friends. After killing the farmers we found a tiny plot of purchasable land they had missed, bought it, planted a flag on it and uploaded an image of the american flag for it. Then we dragged our harpoon ship onto land and used poisonous cannonballs to gas the players forming up to resist us in their homes. One of those stories you can't really tell people offline.
Player: Yeah, so then we invaded their island, slew the working class, and blanketed the entire landmass in nerve gas. Citizen: [Gasps] You -- you monster! Player: No wait, you don't understand. The islanders were French. Citizen: [Sigh of relief] Well, why didn't you *say* so. You had me worried for a minute there.
From 2008 to 2010 I used to play FarCry 2 online on PS3 every day, it was amazing playing on player created maps or even having fun on the standard maps, helping my team carry the flag to our base. Today the servers are still online but it's a ghost town walking the maps alone, maybe getting 1 lobby going on a weekend and the player created maps hasn't been working for years and never been fixed as the developers abandoned the game years ago. I wonder what all those people who used to play are doing now. It feels like the end of an era lost to time, never to return.
The MMO that I played the most was FusionFall. I couldn’t tell you how many hours I spent on that game, Cartoon Network ended up shutting it down in 2013 though. MMO’s are sad because there’s no real way to preserve what they once were
This tugged on my heartstrings. Lotro i picked up but never even maxed. I just farmed. Man the memories of running around and seeking pipweed seeds just to smoke them in the shire as soon as i harvested. I never was good at fighting in Mmos. I left wow because i couldn't get anything right. So when i found out i could farm its all i did. But i left soon after i picked it up because of real life stuff. I miss that game. Thank you for making me remember.
Your description of the empty Lord of the Rings Online perfectly describes why I've felt depressed when considering trying the Pirates of the Caribbean Online and Lego Universe revival projects. I feel it'll just make me terribly sad to see either of those games so empty and devoid of others. All player creativity, interaction, and friendliness gone. Especially were I to revisit Port Royal in Pirates Online, where I remember every single player converging for the final davy jones battle event on the day of shutdown.. Never again will I see the folks who showed me ways out of bounds, or set sail to do ship combat, as all that will be left for me is roving bands of NPCs to board. PVP battle arenas will be entirely untouched, unplayable. Every story beat meaningless, as there will be not a soul to talk about it with. No more confusedly trying bane shot on dire wasps and no more feeling like I was really fighting off a spreading undead horde in port royal. As for Lego Universe, I got into it in the last few vibrant years of childhood wonder towards games. It was the last world that really felt alive to me, and I feel it would genuinely hurt me to see it empty and lonely. All the convincing landscape and world building reduced to nothing and many thousands of players' houses and hours of building removed eternally. No other games have carried these feelings on, no other world has so sucked me in. Because unfortunately, I am extremely technically minded. The type of person to figure out exploits for flying using janky physics engines without even thinking about rather or not it should work, only knowing that it will based on my feel of the game. Almost always being right.. Unfortunately. I can't be sucked into these worlds anymore, I can't feel that sense of wonder. I only see a designed space with hardcoded mechanics and can't grasp how it used to seem so magical, so real. I used to be the kid who thought there was so much more hidden behind the closed static doors in video games, now I can't help but break it all down in my mind. I'll always miss those days, but I can still try to turn my brain off and get lost in games again. It's getting easier with the more complex newer titles. But it'll never quite be the same again. I'll always see individual models and how they interact on a mechanical level. Maybe one day I'll be able to relax and get lost in a handcrafted world once more, maybe it'll be magical again. I don't think I'll ever stop trying. Thanks for making this video, it really helped me put my thoughts on this in order.
@@LegendaryTCLEMGaming I wound up trying it. It's definitely very active, but not alive in the same way. Still fun, still worth playing, nostalgia did not rose tint this game for me. It's actually just as good as I saw it as a child, and is still one of the only MMORPGs I don't hate! I'm happy to say that my wife enjoys it, as well as some of my friends. It takes the edge off of seeing so few players in the world. :)
@rainbowbunchie8237 I've thought about going back to it I know Free Realms was another childhood game that got a remake same with Need for Speed world and I play them both too
One of the causes of games being abandoned is the planned obsolescence by the studios. They throw massive support behind "the new multiplayer" and quickly phase out support for "the previous game(s)" to get players to play the new game. The other cause is that even if the studio keeps supporting the game, eventually players lose interest in a game that is no longer being developed and therefore you end of doing the same things over and over again.
Really good video man! Playing abandoned games that I used to love just fills me with the deepest sense of longing & nostalgia. Also, I could listen to you talk about these games for hours despite having not played most of them :)
I understand how you feel about the emptiness of what used to be once great games. For me, I grew up in a time where LAN parties existed in addition to online play. For me, the world I miss the most is Defiance (2013-2022). I was a fan of the game and show. Right now, the fans are trying to bring Defiance back, because the fanbase is still there, but the numbers got split between two different copies of the same game. We've managed to be able to access the world once again without NPCs, enemies, missions and other players. One user is using the game's assets (models, textures and sounds) to recreate the game so that players cna play again (it's still far away from being released, but they're doing their best). But all I can say is to not ever forget those memories. Hold onto those times you played.
Mabinogi: Released 2007, still played by thousands of people regularly. Maybe not _many_ thousands, but it's very much still an active game and active playerbase, especially in Korea. Even if parts of the game are abandoned, I'm glad it never quite died like these games did.
I just want to say thanks for mentioning Modern Warfare 3. To this day I can't understand why that game is so forgotten. I LOVED MW3 so much, everything about it was so good from the campaign to the addictive survival mode to multiplayer. I just can't let go of the old cods, a symptom of living in the past perpetually i guess
You'll have Deja-Vu later in life. The empty lost feeling. All your friends, family, entertainers, and people you use to know passed away.....that's lonely.
An old MMO I played back in high school I'm amazed is still going strong is RuneScape. The original Runescape as I understand isn't around anymore but an updated version is still thriving. I could be wrong on that.
I kept thing of Runescape when I saw lotro, talking about the dead friends list. I also played Lotro very briefly with a college friend, but WoW owned my soul at that point.
Having recently gotten back into gaming, after a long absence, I'm happy to be gaming with my old friends. That said, I've lost many along the way and I find myself longing for old MMOs I used to play such a LOTRO and SWG. But sometimes, even yearning for old shooters I used to play to pass the time, back in a time when the potential of the gaming industry seemed limitless. This was an amazing video essay and I'm glad to have gone along for the ride. Please keep up the good work...
i have been looking for this exact game for over 10 years. thank you. I played this as a kid and still remember the smell of the flowers that were on my mom’s desk while I played. Wow, I’m going to dive back in to videos now
@@merakimerakimeraki Free realms died so early on too. Even though it was beloved by players, I played it as a kid too, I remember a lot about glitching into the outside of the free realms map multiple times, Finding secret areas and being in awe of the things I would find, and having a blast at player homes, messing around. The developers unfairly shut down free realms and let down the community.
As a fan of niche franchises I can relate to this, thanks for sharing your experience with us it always nice to hear about others journeys in gaming Since this is the comment section though I do have one piece of advice, can you put the music used and games featured in the video as small text in the corner? Some of the music and footage is really familiar and I hate not knowing where its from 😅. Thanks and keep making great content!
I was never a fan of MMOs and thus never played them, but I still did get to experience the loneliness of abandoned servers that were once meant to hold thousands of people. When I was a kid, I played on various Minecraft servers with friends for hours upon hours every day. The maps were so full of people, you had to spam click to get into a round of SkyWars and even than you’d constantly get kicked off again for breaching the player limit. It was insanity with how overrun all the minigames were and how many players basically battled each other to even get the chance to actually play any of them. Unfortunately, since the Bedrock Edition of the game started gaining traction, the servers on the Java Edition started to die rather quickly, the player base dwindling year after year, until even the most famous of all Minecraft servers became a wasteland. Now don’t get me wrong, Minecraft still has millions of people playing it and some servers just moved over to Bedrock and only shut down their Java counterparts due to the lack of players. But it still hurts me to see the maps that I once encountered so many people in be so desolate and abandoned. Most minigames have become unplayable, as no players ever join and it feels so lonely to apparently be the only person left waiting. Some servers just outright don’t exist anymore, like Mineplex, which literally just disappeared over night with no explanation whatsoever, leaving the small player base it still had confused. And to think it was once the biggest and most beloved Minecraft server of all. Not being able to go back to even just look at the map anymore is heartbreaking. All we have now are our own screenshots and old UA-cam videos to remember it by.
I will never forget the day my dad and I could afford our first boat in Archeage. Seafaring in MMOs is an underutilized mechanic. I still play WoW to this day with him but I haven't touched Archeage since 2016~
How does a video like this only have 931 views. Like what @nikatname said, this is not the quality of work I expect from a small channel. Watching this reminds me of a few games I use to play. ASTA online was my first MMO I really got into. Sadly that game is now gone. Doesn't even have a steam store page. Though looking at the community tab, every now and then a new post will crop up about someone saying they miss the game. The game had its issues, but I enjoyed it. I played as a healer, despite playing solo for the later half of my experience there. Fights would take awhile since I didn't have much in the way of DPS compared to other classes, but I never worried about dying. I couldn't die.
thank you so much for the kind words! and ASTA… that’s a trip down memory lane. I’m not sure I ever played, but I’ve definitely watched videos about it before. Wow. Add it to the list of abandoned games!
LOTRO, and by studio association, D&DO, suffered a sad fate, which was Turbine's incompetence in how to run MMOs. With several server merges and splits and merge agains, they ripped guilds and friends apart, messed up transfers and told players to pay to have their characters restored or repaired. it was a total desaster. after having to rebuild our guild in D&DO for the third time and them announcing another server merge, we decided to say goodbye and split up in all kinds of directions. They were great games with an incredible story and quest writing, destroyed by bumbling fools of managers. Archeage was kinda sad too.. I was playing there with a handful of friends, and after a few weeks I couldn't log in anymore. Contacting support, I got told that an account with my name doesn't exist, and nobody could be bothered to actually find out what had happened.
5:53 "Born to early to play Star Citizen's Final Release.." If I ever have kids, then my great-grandkids will be born to early to play the final release.
It's crazy to me to listen to him talk about MW3 2011 like that, I remember having the same feelings about Halo 2....in 2010 when the servers were shutting down and being outright depressed.
this video is incredible. as someone who was there during CODs peak this video really brought some memories back. thank you for this. people always call me crazy for speaking so highly of a time i sat in a room playing a game but they just dont get it. the experience of those times are once in a life time and i wouldnt trade them for anything
Video actually starts at 6:02 You're welcome. Dude is long winded essentially doing a 4,000 word rant that could be summed up with "nostalgia is nostalgic."
This video made me sad because I've lived the exact same thing, but with different games. Hearing music from Final Fantasy XI Online really brings the feels. Same with Battlefield 2/1942 on the PC around the same time. *sigh* Time sure does fly...
this was a great video, despite me having not played majority of the games you mentioned i could understand everything you were describing, it's truly a shame for games that had so much going for them lose what made them so great or just be abandoned altogether
I love watching these kind of videos when it comes to abandoned games or even abandoned environments in real life. It’s a feeling of nostalgia, a place that used to be bustling with life. Even if it felt like home.
I had to laugh when Lotro was brought up, as I am playing the game right now. I am in an obscure corner of the gigantic land in sight of other players. I teleported back to Bree to find so many players that I received a notice that there are so many players in the area, that it has to be divided into instances. Lotro, over the last year, has a daily player count of 30,000 to 90,000 (don't look at the Steam numbers, 90% of players play through the Lotro launcher, the Steam launcher is borked). The perception that this is an empty game is perplexing at best.
Not sure if you finished that section, but I’m an active player and I’m well aware that it’s not dead! I was sharing my experience with my server dying back in the day
@@merakimerakimeraki Missed that part, just noticed the empty server with people leaving it to transfer. I remember that point and that even with the guild transferred to an agreed upon server there was a collapse due to people not being happy with the choice there. Oddly enough, a large chunk of it was due to housing issues since those didn't transfer
This vid just pop off on my feed. Is amazing. Great job and that nostalgia you made me feel. Damn. Im actually thinking on making a video myself about my exp with gaming. And doing research i feel the same as you rediscovering that games i grew up with. Great video my man. New sub
getting into MMOs as a kid is a next level experience. I wasn't new to gaming when I first played everquest in 2000 at 8 years old, but it made a bigger impact than anything ever had before and forged a lifelong obsession. i play project 1999 of course, but as an adult I now have probably one of the most extensive classic everquest (1999-2001) collections on earth, including custom things that nobody else (to my knowledge) has, like a custom-made neon sign styled after the old desktop icon. being a kid and discovering an entire, brand-new world to experience, chock full of surprises is entirely unlike anything else I've seen. Like finding a book you really like, but you can jump into its world when you get home from school. I also think that this early era compounded the mystery a bit, because the game wasn't extensively documented, and what was documented was often difficult to find. There weren't wikis full of information on how to get certain loot, how to make mobs spawn, how specific mechanics work -- you learned this stuff from other people, and as a result there was a lot of misinformation and superstition. You can make this mob spawn by running around this rock in a circle four times, but only between midnight and 3am! People's knowledge of how specific quests worked was incomplete, and anybody could be a pioneer and uncover how to complete a specific quest, get rewards nobody knew existed. Any experience like this would be magical for a kid just discovering their love of gaming. As a little boy I also played a girl character and discovered that if you married dudes ingame and had a ceremony, you could get attention from GMs and get lots of expensive wedding presents. A tactic I greedily employed on multiple occasions. When I finally convinced my best friend to try the game ca. 2004, one of the first things I said to him ingame was "let's get married!", foreshadowing what would happen with us in real life over a decade later. Funny how things work out, huh?
@@merakimerakimeraki at the time he refused and said everquest sucked and that I should play ffxi instead :] we had a fight that caused us to stop talking for a year because of this. kids are fuckin duuuumb To this day I haven't been able to convince him to play EQ with me, but I've played ffxi with him multiple times!
There's a weird bittersweet feeling thinking back to old guild mates and friends you had on old MMOs. We've all kind of moved on with life after spending damn near every day together for so long and it's sad that that disconnect happened, but at the same time those memories are still there and make you smile to remember. Same feeling as how you sometimes just lose touch with some school or work friends IRL. Sometimes life just moves you a part.
Geez I didn't think this video was gonna hit me this hard. I'm someone who always wants to go back to the great days of online gaming. For me it was between 2010-2015. Anything after that just doesn't have the same feeling, minus one or two hits. Somehow it's comforting to know many people miss it too.
It's so weird to hear MW3 as an "old fashioned" game as someone who grew up playing boomer shooters, since COD Modern Warfare was the start of the yearly releases for people wearing snap backs, even if the first few iterations still had soul. Also Toontown actually predates WoW. The "tuff badass" from South Park can't hold a candle to Toontown. That or he was playing EQ instead. Lol
holy cow, you’re right … I can’t believe toontown predates wow! I was looking at the dates while I wrote the script but I guess my brain just couldn’t believe it came first
Sucks being an MMO player and constantly wondering whether the game you put years into is going to die. While also wondering whether friends will still play together or split to different games.
This video essay moved me deeply to the point that I want to play these games on my channel, with my viewers playing beside me, in hopes to breathe live into the games that didn't deserve to become desolate wastelands.
It's interesting to hear someone from the newer generation go through the exact same steps I did 10-15 years prior. Older games, same experience. Every game is destined to be abandoned one day, but the memories made will not be forgotten.
i never played archeage but reviewing it’s systems i got really intrigued. now with ashes of creation being in open development i‘m looking forward to playing a game as open like archeage was in the future.
This video was amazing and really well made. Had me taking a trip down memory lane with all the games I grew up on and that are no more. Gaming truly isn’t what it used to be but I’m hopeful another golden age will come.
Him talking about fellow players who haven't been online in a long time hit me hard. I have had several friends who have left SWTOR, never to hear from them again
You, sir, are a poet. Fantastic video. This describes what we all feel about our first games and I was imagining EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and City of Heroes as you wandered through your favorites. Fortunately EQ and CoH are both thriving again from fan based servers. Watching your nostalgia triggered mine. Games truly are living worlds unto themselves and when we become part of them, the people we share them with are family. When that world dies it's like losing a loved one. Thanks for sharing this with us, very well done.
You know, I am truly alone in this world and yet I never felt lonely until I watched your video. The way you conveyed your feelings have struck something in me. I think I'm gonna call my friends even if they hate me now for abandoning them for years. Thank you.
I used to play RF Online, but one day there was a P2W item in the shop that let you kill players on your own team so players who weren't controlling the mine could just race swap, kill their own miners, and then control the mines after they were no longer occupied. I quickly abandoned the game and when I went back it was empty less than a month later, and then was shut down shortly after that. Looking back, the concept of having three different races compete over one area for resources was a brilliant game concept, but many poor decisions led to it being completely abandoned. I imagine an action game would be better for this formula if everyone has even stats. But who knows... The video game media is starting to feel as flooded as the movie media. So many formats, not enough time to view them all.
Bad Company 2 on PS3 kills me. It died completely in late 2015. I played it up until its death. Still the best Battlefield game and one of my favorite FPS games of all time. It had a small PC playerbase, but they were highly toxic and only had some limited servers. The Vietnam DLC was amazing, but short-lived.
Man, this really got me in the feels. I've been around long enough to have played on a number of MUCKS (online text-based roleplaying realms based on a variety of themes), and as time went on and other forms of computer gaming grew in sophistication, they also faded, with dusty laston lists and empty "rooms," perhaps including long-idle characters still logged in for YEARS. The feeling of wandering empty areas, recollections of better times haunting one's memory, can indeed be painful. As a longtime tabletop RPer, I also know what it is like to have friends, with whom I shared long years of adventures, pass away, their characters, or even their worlds, if they were the GM, silenced. There is a Welsh term, Hiraeth, described as "[A] homesickness tinged with grief and sadness over the lost or departed." That is an accurate description of these feelings, but it merely proves how deeply we felt these experiences in their vital prime. ='[.]'=
When you get that sudden feeling of tears forming in your eyes as you visit a world or server that you and your best friends used to play on Minecraft just to see yourself and the structures alone..
The worst thing to a game you love isn't if it is abandoned by the players, it is if it was shut down with no alteratives to play it at all.
Fuuuuck. I miss chromehounds.
This. There's an old flash browser game I used to play, Horse Isle, that still regularly gets about 30 players on one server (used to be normal to see around about that many on all of the servers when it was still new-ish, for reference). The people running it haven't shut down the servers despite discontinuing official support some time in 2020, so there are still workarounds that allow people to play it.
Honestly, it's kind of better playing it now. It's less laggy and the people still there skew older, so there's less "I am 13 and everything is very serious" drama. With how the community around horse games is, it probably won't end up abandoned until the servers are shut down for good.
I'm gonna be showing my age.. Earth beyond mmo in 2003 and auto assault car combat mmo 2006, Loved them both, sure Earth beyond has a private server but it's not the same as before. but both have had no good alterntives to play
@@nikoto9481 I used to LOVE a game called Earthseige 2...
@@nikoto9481 Showing my age in no chronological order. Asheron's Call, Star Wars Galaxies, Earth and Beyond, Tabula Rasa, City of Heroes, Necocron, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. All games I played before they were shut down.
Playing games that are dead kind of sends a nostalgic feeling to you even if you never played it in the first place. You can hop into empty servers and think of the potential of it and how it was like for players who played it. It reminds me of the beauty of destruction. Everything around you is destroyed, sure there is nothing left but there is still a kind of peace that you can feel and the sense of there is nothing to look forward to gives you a feeling that honestly nothing else can replicate.
Or maybe I am just yappin' too much.
Go play Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. Beauty in destruction indeed
its definitly something i eager to experience and have experienced. its a weirdly beautiful experience
it does. i recently went back and played all the 360 versions of halo and seeing the old classic graphics of halo 1 and 2 brought back memories of playing the games with my brother. i had so many forge maps i built on halo reach and i wasn't able to transfer any of them to Master Chief Collection...i was only able save 7 of them from 2 other games...i miss the racetrack i built spanning the entire forge world map...the fun infection maps i built. all the clan maps i built for a long disbanded halo clan...and in all that time i even lost a close online friend...
Yes you're definitely yapping too much.
@@aiodensghost8645Do you know Jesus Christ can set you free from sins and save you from hell today
Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven
There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today
Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell
Come to Jesus Christ today
Jesus Christ is only way to heaven
Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
Romans 6.23
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Jesus
tbh I think the best feeling is when you go back to a game, get that sad feeling because its dead and then find out theres still a very passionate fanbase keeping it alive either on one official server or on a private server and you get riled up all over again
I know right, this happens surprisingly often to me
That's been happening a lot as of recently, and honestly, I want that to go further. Stuff like Quake 3 still being online and available on an old system like the Dreamcast is a good example.
Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven
There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today
Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell
Come to Jesus Christ today
Jesus Christ is only way to heaven
Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
Holy Spirit Can give you peace guidance and purpose and the Lord will
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Jesus
This feels like a video from a 1+ million sub channel.
Which is what he should be. But unfortunately, UA-cam doesn't favor infrequent uploads. No matter the quality.
fr. He is a great editor.
Except for the 6 minute intro dissertation that really says nothing.
NakeyJakey really did inspire a lot of people.
Hey that means he will be huge when his channel pops off.
"I was surrounded by idiots and i felt right at home"
Never has a single sentence described my MMO experiences so well, sometimes i just want to go back to a time when the internet wasn't so serious, and sometimes some MMOs still provide this feeling.
...
Do you know Jesus Christ can set you free from sins and save you from hell today
Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven
There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today
Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell
Come to Jesus Christ today
Jesus Christ is only way to heaven
Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
Romans 6.23
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Jesus
"Born too early for Star Citizens final release" LOL.
I love Star Citizen, but gotta admit that was funny as hell :D
Take my up vote 😂
@@bftwdsj ♥
Sick Burn 😂
3.18......
*Shudders
well Star Citizen was built upon Chris's bullshit lies that is still kind of persist today, sort of🙄
Ah, an extrovert problem. All the games I feel nostalgic for from back in the day are single player and are just as lively today as they were then.
Yes.
I have rarely played games with others, even MMOs, and don't feel as nostagic towards those. I cherish the experience I had back then rather than the community that used to exist. However undeniably changed myself as well and find it hard to recreate the feeling from the old days.
Also growing up in a small town with nobody around who shared the same interest in gaming only increased the feeling of isolation and now looking back the feeling of to have missed out.
Love to the introverts
Yep. I don't feel any need to show off my armor or fancy mount to anyone else. I don't think fun doesn't exist unless it's shared. I'm perfectly happy on my own.
Honestly, as an introvert... I am more than slightly tempted to explore these near dead games, now that I will not be ambushed by bullies and factions wanting wars over my small piece of land.
This is a super incorrect assumption, MMOs actually have many introvert players. You probably won't find them in endgame raids or pvp guilds, but you will find them gathering, crafting, exploring and questing. There's a particular appeal to being a lone adventurer in a world populated by other human players that you just don't get from a single player game like Skyrim where the world is a theme park full of robotic NPCs.
Empty, old, and/or forgotten games is a topic I love. There's just something about being the only person (or one of few) experiencing something like that that brings certain feelings. This video was a great watch diving into some of that.
What strikes me about the fall of Lotro as described from the eighth minute is that it mirrored how Tolkien described his phantastical world, the past is always more glorious, more noble, more pristine. The passage of time always comes with decay.
and sadly its one of the truest things ever mentioned about our worlds that we create because its based in our reality
Man seeing Archeage cuts me deep man! My favorite memory was using the grappling hook from our ship and dragging it all the way to Marianople! We even had game devs come and chat with us about managing to get our ship inside the city and had it strung up from a arch in the city! It was wild! Breaks my heart to see what happened to that game!
I...think we were in the same guild actually. Or guilds with the same idea, I remember doing this VERY clearly.
Methinks everyone has done this at one point or another XD it's a rite of passage@@ThornAmidstRoses
Could never get archeage to run on my pc never did figure out why.
Not much has happened is the problem. Ive played archage for 8 years, still have patron actually. It got bad when the old company sold to a new one a few years ago, and now in the last few months they had a merge combining Archeage and Archeage unchained into one big server. Still see a bunch of people on, you can tell by the houses placed... but it truly isn't what it used to be.
Archeage was a great game with so many options and things to do. I liked diving for treasures (though I was a Firran ^^)or just flying around with my glider. Ok, the grind was sometimes a pain but with the right people it was still fun. Sadly it ended for me, when it was sold to Kakao Games and I could not get their game launcher started, no matter what their support suggested me to do, it didn´t work
It’s always bittersweet playing these games and just as sad trying to find videos on them. The only ones left still making videos are new people finding them with 100s of views at most or the old videos from when they had many players
Yeah, although sometimes you find great people in almost empty games, most of the time it's this feeling of bittersweet dread
I spent upwards of 1,000 hours in Lord of the Rings Online over around 10 years.
I remember playing on an RP server (with my only experience of RP until that point being Garry's Mod servers, and a few encounters in World of Warcraft), and loving the atmosphere and interactions with other players.
Like you said in the video, listening to midi files of popular songs both old and new from various player bands in game, all syncing themselves to the same song, drinking beers and everything outside and in-between. Lotro was great. I remember the lifetime sub going half price before the free to play the transition, and I immediately bought it.
Still reaped the benefits years after doing so, had every expansion for free, and was able to enjoy the game a lot more until I finally stopped properly. Have even logged in as recently as 2023 just to update my account with the latest expansions and purchase new cosmetics should I ever return.
I’m so envious of your lifetime sub! The game is in a great spot right now - it’ll be there waiting for you when you want to return. I’ve been enjoying the legendary servers lately, but Arkenstone has been my main live server for a while. Hope to see you around some time!
@@merakimerakimeraki I have lifetime, but I was on an EU server that got closed, and I've been waiting (intermittently) for years for server transfers from it to be fixed.
i always forget how well made youir videos are but im glad every time i see a new video of yours in my recommended. you are truly a master of putting nostalgia into words. also another childrens mmo that came back to life from the community is fusionfall. got the axe cartoon network just as club penguin and toon town did with disney. sometimes bringing these things back to life can feel a bit like resuscitating a corpse, as happened with archeage, but i love that a lot pf these old childhood mmos are still alive and well in some form
I’m really glad it resonated with you! I’m not familiar with fusionfall but it looks awesome. I’ll go watch some gameplay now 😎
Was genuinely sad when I realized the video was over. Nicely done!
that’s such a nice compliment:) thanks Mr oven
Bro, this video was immaculately executed. I was shocked to see you are still on the rise. Keep it up!! I've been working on a liminal games video (probably why I was shown this) and this was very inspiring. Can't wait to see what's next!
Thanks so so much! Best of luck on your video, that sounds like a great topic
16:00 looking at those maps... i have memories from LAN parties in the late 2000s - was that the game where you can cheat your player profile to 50 or so to get all guns?
Similar to Club Penguin, another MMO called Clone Wars Adventures (CWA) was shut down back in 2014 - by Disney if I remember correctly. It had a very tight community that shared both a love for the game and the Star Wars The Clone Wars TV show that the game was basing itself on.
It has now been revived and rebuilt as the “Clone Wars Adventures Emulator” with the old community slowly pouring back in as they become aware of it. They even have a very active Discord server for everyone. Some games don’t deserve to just die, and some communities are not willing to let go.
I had a friend when I was 7 years old and we played Minecraft together. He was 3 years older than me but him, me and my older brother had great times together. When a new year started and I sat in class, I realised my friend wasnt here anymore and I had no way to contact him or anything like that.
I am now 16 years old and I miss those Minecraft times so much. I made great memories. But to this day, I never met my friend again...
"We are living in a long ago forgotten era. Time has moved on without us, like everyone else. Despite the fact the world you knew five, six or ten years ago are still intact. No further decayed or maintained than the day you and everyone else left it.
Its still there...waiting for you."
A quote i read from an old Call of duty 2 video discussing old abandoned maps. Sadly i dont remember the name of the author as he too, has been lost to time.
It’s a natural part of life…as much as it hurts.
When you talked about MW3 it hit me in the chest. So many memories, such simple yet entertaining game play loop and modes... Hopefully one day people will get fed up with the new garbage coming out and go back to the classic CODs and BFs
I remembered when it happened, Advanced Warfare came out, players where there in droves on MW3 one moment, and gone the next. It was heartbreaking in a way, just to see a game die so quickly like that.
Still have a 360?
These empty multiplayer maps are always my argument for why bots should remain a part of shooters, multiplayer or not. It's nice to have something of an impression of what these maps looked like when they where alive.
And growing up in your first MMO is one of the gaming experiences I'll always remember.
I have no problem with that as long as its a toggle.
The way the WW1 Game Series handles bots is one of the reasons I like it so much.
The games aren't very popular, so the bots are necessary. They fill up empty spots so the games are still full and fun.
Archeage was really something else. Most stressful MMO to play a healer in and that was sick.
My favorite story from it was raiding an island owned by a french guild with my friends. After killing the farmers we found a tiny plot of purchasable land they had missed, bought it, planted a flag on it and uploaded an image of the american flag for it. Then we dragged our harpoon ship onto land and used poisonous cannonballs to gas the players forming up to resist us in their homes.
One of those stories you can't really tell people offline.
Player: Yeah, so then we invaded their island, slew the working class, and blanketed the entire landmass in nerve gas.
Citizen: [Gasps] You -- you monster!
Player: No wait, you don't understand. The islanders were French.
Citizen: [Sigh of relief] Well, why didn't you *say* so. You had me worried for a minute there.
From 2008 to 2010 I used to play FarCry 2 online on PS3 every day, it was amazing playing on player created maps or even having fun on the standard maps, helping my team carry the flag to our base.
Today the servers are still online but it's a ghost town walking the maps alone, maybe getting 1 lobby going on a weekend and the player created maps hasn't been working for years and never been fixed as the developers abandoned the game years ago.
I wonder what all those people who used to play are doing now.
It feels like the end of an era lost to time, never to return.
Loved the map maker
The MMO that I played the most was FusionFall. I couldn’t tell you how many hours I spent on that game, Cartoon Network ended up shutting it down in 2013 though. MMO’s are sad because there’s no real way to preserve what they once were
This tugged on my heartstrings.
Lotro i picked up but never even maxed. I just farmed. Man the memories of running around and seeking pipweed seeds just to smoke them in the shire as soon as i harvested.
I never was good at fighting in Mmos. I left wow because i couldn't get anything right. So when i found out i could farm its all i did. But i left soon after i picked it up because of real life stuff. I miss that game. Thank you for making me remember.
LOTRO just released a expansion , in Nov, I doubt it's actually dead , the High end players are probably all raiding dungeons .
Your description of the empty Lord of the Rings Online perfectly describes why I've felt depressed when considering trying the Pirates of the Caribbean Online and Lego Universe revival projects.
I feel it'll just make me terribly sad to see either of those games so empty and devoid of others.
All player creativity, interaction, and friendliness gone.
Especially were I to revisit Port Royal in Pirates Online, where I remember every single player converging for the final davy jones battle event on the day of shutdown..
Never again will I see the folks who showed me ways out of bounds, or set sail to do ship combat, as all that will be left for me is roving bands of NPCs to board.
PVP battle arenas will be entirely untouched, unplayable. Every story beat meaningless, as there will be not a soul to talk about it with.
No more confusedly trying bane shot on dire wasps and no more feeling like I was really fighting off a spreading undead horde in port royal.
As for Lego Universe, I got into it in the last few vibrant years of childhood wonder towards games.
It was the last world that really felt alive to me, and I feel it would genuinely hurt me to see it empty and lonely.
All the convincing landscape and world building reduced to nothing and many thousands of players' houses and hours of building removed eternally.
No other games have carried these feelings on, no other world has so sucked me in.
Because unfortunately, I am extremely technically minded. The type of person to figure out exploits for flying using janky physics engines without even thinking about rather or not it should work, only knowing that it will based on my feel of the game. Almost always being right.. Unfortunately.
I can't be sucked into these worlds anymore, I can't feel that sense of wonder. I only see a designed space with hardcoded mechanics and can't grasp how it used to seem so magical, so real.
I used to be the kid who thought there was so much more hidden behind the closed static doors in video games, now I can't help but break it all down in my mind.
I'll always miss those days, but I can still try to turn my brain off and get lost in games again. It's getting easier with the more complex newer titles.
But it'll never quite be the same again. I'll always see individual models and how they interact on a mechanical level.
Maybe one day I'll be able to relax and get lost in a handcrafted world once more, maybe it'll be magical again.
I don't think I'll ever stop trying. Thanks for making this video, it really helped me put my thoughts on this in order.
I used to play POTCO it was fun it's back and active that I know of should go back to it
@@LegendaryTCLEMGaming I wound up trying it.
It's definitely very active, but not alive in the same way. Still fun, still worth playing, nostalgia did not rose tint this game for me.
It's actually just as good as I saw it as a child, and is still one of the only MMORPGs I don't hate!
I'm happy to say that my wife enjoys it, as well as some of my friends. It takes the edge off of seeing so few players in the world. :)
@rainbowbunchie8237 I've thought about going back to it I know Free Realms was another childhood game that got a remake same with Need for Speed world and I play them both too
They need to make a wreck it Ralph 3 where this is shown as the reality
One of the causes of games being abandoned is the planned obsolescence by the studios. They throw massive support behind "the new multiplayer" and quickly phase out support for "the previous game(s)" to get players to play the new game.
The other cause is that even if the studio keeps supporting the game, eventually players lose interest in a game that is no longer being developed and therefore you end of doing the same things over and over again.
This video hit me with bittersweet emotions. Honestly... thanks.
Really good video man! Playing abandoned games that I used to love just fills me with the deepest sense of longing & nostalgia.
Also, I could listen to you talk about these games for hours despite having not played most of them :)
glad you enjoyed, thanks apu! and thanks for the kind words :) more of me talking about games you don’t know soon!
I understand how you feel about the emptiness of what used to be once great games. For me, I grew up in a time where LAN parties existed in addition to online play. For me, the world I miss the most is Defiance (2013-2022). I was a fan of the game and show. Right now, the fans are trying to bring Defiance back, because the fanbase is still there, but the numbers got split between two different copies of the same game. We've managed to be able to access the world once again without NPCs, enemies, missions and other players. One user is using the game's assets (models, textures and sounds) to recreate the game so that players cna play again (it's still far away from being released, but they're doing their best). But all I can say is to not ever forget those memories. Hold onto those times you played.
Another beautiful video. Feels like this should have a million views!
fascinating video. but the whole time i was thinking "wait LOTRO is on steam" but guess you were just unlocky to always be online when noone else was.
Mabinogi: Released 2007, still played by thousands of people regularly. Maybe not _many_ thousands, but it's very much still an active game and active playerbase, especially in Korea.
Even if parts of the game are abandoned, I'm glad it never quite died like these games did.
I just want to say thanks for mentioning Modern Warfare 3. To this day I can't understand why that game is so forgotten. I LOVED MW3 so much, everything about it was so good from the campaign to the addictive survival mode to multiplayer. I just can't let go of the old cods, a symptom of living in the past perpetually i guess
I sometimes still play survival mode with my GF, it's just too fun, it also had a great ending to TF141's story
cod 2 and 4 are the best cod games to this day, so i get what you mean.
MW 3 was the last call of duty I sank hours into.
The MW2 and BO ones get to me. the rooftop one was amazing. One of my favorite levels and crazy to see it empty.
This is a masterpiece, it’s engaging all the way through and just really well made in general. This is awesome!
thank you!
You'll have Deja-Vu later in life. The empty lost feeling.
All your friends, family, entertainers, and people you use to know passed away.....that's lonely.
An old MMO I played back in high school I'm amazed is still going strong is RuneScape. The original Runescape as I understand isn't around anymore but an updated version is still thriving. I could be wrong on that.
There’s actually Old School RuneScape, which saved the original and you can play it. It’s actually still active! There’s even a mobile app.
I kept thing of Runescape when I saw lotro, talking about the dead friends list. I also played Lotro very briefly with a college friend, but WoW owned my soul at that point.
RuneScape currently has two versions. OldSchool RuneScape is a re-released 2007 RuneScape 2. Then RuneScape 3 is the other one.
Having recently gotten back into gaming, after a long absence, I'm happy to be gaming with my old friends. That said, I've lost many along the way and I find myself longing for old MMOs I used to play such a LOTRO and SWG. But sometimes, even yearning for old shooters I used to play to pass the time, back in a time when the potential of the gaming industry seemed limitless.
This was an amazing video essay and I'm glad to have gone along for the ride. Please keep up the good work...
Free Realms was also a game that was murdered. It could've lasted another 20 years.
i have been looking for this exact game for over 10 years. thank you. I played this as a kid and still remember the smell of the flowers that were on my mom’s desk while I played. Wow, I’m going to dive back in to videos now
@@merakimerakimeraki Free realms died so early on too. Even though it was beloved by players, I played it as a kid too, I remember a lot about glitching into the outside of the free realms map multiple times, Finding secret areas and being in awe of the things I would find, and having a blast at player homes, messing around. The developers unfairly shut down free realms and let down the community.
@@MrJoeBlaze ugh, sounds like a sad story. I’m going to need to watch the nerdslayer video on it :)
Liminal space in gaming, no other people in a multiplayer game world is haunting
As a fan of niche franchises I can relate to this, thanks for sharing your experience with us it always nice to hear about others journeys in gaming
Since this is the comment section though I do have one piece of advice, can you put the music used and games featured in the video as small text in the corner? Some of the music and footage is really familiar and I hate not knowing where its from 😅. Thanks and keep making great content!
This might've been the fastest I've subscribed to someone, it's really well made, keep it up!
So glad you liked it! Thanks for subscribing :)
Such an amazing concept for a video pulled off beautifully. Nice job man!
Thanks so much, it really means a lot
I very rarely comment to appreciate a video but this is an exception. I can't wait for your channel to get the attention it deserves
thanks so much, I appreciate the kind words
I was never a fan of MMOs and thus never played them, but I still did get to experience the loneliness of abandoned servers that were once meant to hold thousands of people. When I was a kid, I played on various Minecraft servers with friends for hours upon hours every day. The maps were so full of people, you had to spam click to get into a round of SkyWars and even than you’d constantly get kicked off again for breaching the player limit. It was insanity with how overrun all the minigames were and how many players basically battled each other to even get the chance to actually play any of them.
Unfortunately, since the Bedrock Edition of the game started gaining traction, the servers on the Java Edition started to die rather quickly, the player base dwindling year after year, until even the most famous of all Minecraft servers became a wasteland. Now don’t get me wrong, Minecraft still has millions of people playing it and some servers just moved over to Bedrock and only shut down their Java counterparts due to the lack of players. But it still hurts me to see the maps that I once encountered so many people in be so desolate and abandoned. Most minigames have become unplayable, as no players ever join and it feels so lonely to apparently be the only person left waiting.
Some servers just outright don’t exist anymore, like Mineplex, which literally just disappeared over night with no explanation whatsoever, leaving the small player base it still had confused. And to think it was once the biggest and most beloved Minecraft server of all. Not being able to go back to even just look at the map anymore is heartbreaking. All we have now are our own screenshots and old UA-cam videos to remember it by.
That’s so sad to hear - thank you for sharing. I would love to have included that in the video.
I will never forget the day my dad and I could afford our first boat in Archeage. Seafaring in MMOs is an underutilized mechanic. I still play WoW to this day with him but I haven't touched Archeage since 2016~
How does a video like this only have 931 views. Like what @nikatname said, this is not the quality of work I expect from a small channel.
Watching this reminds me of a few games I use to play.
ASTA online was my first MMO I really got into. Sadly that game is now gone. Doesn't even have a steam store page. Though looking at the community tab, every now and then a new post will crop up about someone saying they miss the game. The game had its issues, but I enjoyed it. I played as a healer, despite playing solo for the later half of my experience there. Fights would take awhile since I didn't have much in the way of DPS compared to other classes, but I never worried about dying. I couldn't die.
thank you so much for the kind words! and ASTA… that’s a trip down memory lane. I’m not sure I ever played, but I’ve definitely watched videos about it before. Wow. Add it to the list of abandoned games!
LOTRO, and by studio association, D&DO, suffered a sad fate, which was Turbine's incompetence in how to run MMOs. With several server merges and splits and merge agains, they ripped guilds and friends apart, messed up transfers and told players to pay to have their characters restored or repaired. it was a total desaster. after having to rebuild our guild in D&DO for the third time and them announcing another server merge, we decided to say goodbye and split up in all kinds of directions. They were great games with an incredible story and quest writing, destroyed by bumbling fools of managers.
Archeage was kinda sad too.. I was playing there with a handful of friends, and after a few weeks I couldn't log in anymore. Contacting support, I got told that an account with my name doesn't exist, and nobody could be bothered to actually find out what had happened.
Every gangsta till he puts a quickscope montage on a video about abandoned online games
That was genuinely beautiful, I look forward to checking out more of your videos
Absolutely beautiful script. 1000% poetic. Best way to start the new year, thanks Meraki!
thanks so much :)
yeah this is wildly high quality i’m subbing!! awesome work
Thanks so much! More to come
Your channel reminds me of Internet Pitshop, I like these kinda videos. Keep up, subbed.
Thanks so much! Good to have you here :)
Rip halo reach and club penguin and Lego universe 😢I hope in another world I can enjoy these games once again 🥲
5:53
"Born to early to play Star Citizen's Final Release.."
If I ever have kids, then my great-grandkids will be born to early to play the final release.
It's crazy to me to listen to him talk about MW3 2011 like that, I remember having the same feelings about Halo 2....in 2010 when the servers were shutting down and being outright depressed.
All cods on Xbox always have full lobbies and theres a big community revolved around them its almost like they have always been the most recent cod
That makes me happy :)
this video is incredible. as someone who was there during CODs peak this video really brought some memories back. thank you for this. people always call me crazy for speaking so highly of a time i sat in a room playing a game but they just dont get it. the experience of those times are once in a life time and i wouldnt trade them for anything
I have played MW3 for so much time as a kid/teen, I know *perfectly* what you talked about the game!
What a great video! 👏👏👏
Thanks so much!!
Video actually starts at 6:02 You're welcome. Dude is long winded essentially doing a 4,000 word rant that could be summed up with "nostalgia is nostalgic."
Never heard of most of these, but damn they all looked so beautiful
Criminals use online games chats for disguised communication. Maybe they were not there for the game but for communication.
I’d have given some gold to your tractor in a heartbeat
This video made me sad because I've lived the exact same thing, but with different games. Hearing music from Final Fantasy XI Online really brings the feels. Same with Battlefield 2/1942 on the PC around the same time. *sigh* Time sure does fly...
woke up to this absolute banger of a video and did not disappoint!! can always count on meraki to make absolutely incredible vids :D
Thanks so much :) glad you liked it
this was a great video, despite me having not played majority of the games you mentioned i could understand everything you were describing, it's truly a shame for games that had so much going for them lose what made them so great or just be abandoned altogether
I’m Glad that TitanFall 2 isn’t Abandoned
bro same its my main game rn
But it is alot smaller than it was and it hurts a bit lol
I love watching these kind of videos when it comes to abandoned games or even abandoned environments in real life. It’s a feeling of nostalgia, a place that used to be bustling with life. Even if it felt like home.
I had to laugh when Lotro was brought up, as I am playing the game right now. I am in an obscure corner of the gigantic land in sight of other players. I teleported back to Bree to find so many players that I received a notice that there are so many players in the area, that it has to be divided into instances. Lotro, over the last year, has a daily player count of 30,000 to 90,000 (don't look at the Steam numbers, 90% of players play through the Lotro launcher, the Steam launcher is borked). The perception that this is an empty game is perplexing at best.
Not sure if you finished that section, but I’m an active player and I’m well aware that it’s not dead! I was sharing my experience with my server dying back in the day
Yeah there a Expansion for LOTRO, so my guess is the hardcore players are doing end game content.. LOTRO definitely in my top 10 😅
@@merakimerakimeraki I'm also assuming it was shortly before the big server merger they did...
@@AzraelThanatos yes! I mention in this video 😁
@@merakimerakimeraki Missed that part, just noticed the empty server with people leaving it to transfer. I remember that point and that even with the guild transferred to an agreed upon server there was a collapse due to people not being happy with the choice there.
Oddly enough, a large chunk of it was due to housing issues since those didn't transfer
This vid just pop off on my feed. Is amazing. Great job and that nostalgia you made me feel. Damn. Im actually thinking on making a video myself about my exp with gaming. And doing research i feel the same as you rediscovering that games i grew up with. Great video my man. New sub
getting into MMOs as a kid is a next level experience. I wasn't new to gaming when I first played everquest in 2000 at 8 years old, but it made a bigger impact than anything ever had before and forged a lifelong obsession. i play project 1999 of course, but as an adult I now have probably one of the most extensive classic everquest (1999-2001) collections on earth, including custom things that nobody else (to my knowledge) has, like a custom-made neon sign styled after the old desktop icon.
being a kid and discovering an entire, brand-new world to experience, chock full of surprises is entirely unlike anything else I've seen. Like finding a book you really like, but you can jump into its world when you get home from school. I also think that this early era compounded the mystery a bit, because the game wasn't extensively documented, and what was documented was often difficult to find. There weren't wikis full of information on how to get certain loot, how to make mobs spawn, how specific mechanics work -- you learned this stuff from other people, and as a result there was a lot of misinformation and superstition. You can make this mob spawn by running around this rock in a circle four times, but only between midnight and 3am! People's knowledge of how specific quests worked was incomplete, and anybody could be a pioneer and uncover how to complete a specific quest, get rewards nobody knew existed.
Any experience like this would be magical for a kid just discovering their love of gaming. As a little boy I also played a girl character and discovered that if you married dudes ingame and had a ceremony, you could get attention from GMs and get lots of expensive wedding presents. A tactic I greedily employed on multiple occasions. When I finally convinced my best friend to try the game ca. 2004, one of the first things I said to him ingame was "let's get married!", foreshadowing what would happen with us in real life over a decade later. Funny how things work out, huh?
that’s a beautiful story! thank you for sharing
@@merakimerakimeraki at the time he refused and said everquest sucked and that I should play ffxi instead :] we had a fight that caused us to stop talking for a year because of this. kids are fuckin duuuumb
To this day I haven't been able to convince him to play EQ with me, but I've played ffxi with him multiple times!
I appreciate all that went into this man, good on you
hey i found ur channel like a year ago and this video just reminded me that i really enjoyed ur content, keep it up!
Thanks so much! I’m glad you like it, thanks for watching :)
There's a weird bittersweet feeling thinking back to old guild mates and friends you had on old MMOs. We've all kind of moved on with life after spending damn near every day together for so long and it's sad that that disconnect happened, but at the same time those memories are still there and make you smile to remember.
Same feeling as how you sometimes just lose touch with some school or work friends IRL. Sometimes life just moves you a part.
meraki upload 🙏 2024 is saved 🙏🙏
I love the idea of conflicts in game being solved in court by the players
man is trying so hard to be other channels
Geez I didn't think this video was gonna hit me this hard. I'm someone who always wants to go back to the great days of online gaming. For me it was between 2010-2015. Anything after that just doesn't have the same feeling, minus one or two hits. Somehow it's comforting to know many people miss it too.
It's so weird to hear MW3 as an "old fashioned" game as someone who grew up playing boomer shooters, since COD Modern Warfare was the start of the yearly releases for people wearing snap backs, even if the first few iterations still had soul. Also Toontown actually predates WoW. The "tuff badass" from South Park can't hold a candle to Toontown. That or he was playing EQ instead. Lol
holy cow, you’re right … I can’t believe toontown predates wow! I was looking at the dates while I wrote the script but I guess my brain just couldn’t believe it came first
Sucks being an MMO player and constantly wondering whether the game you put years into is going to die. While also wondering whether friends will still play together or split to different games.
I enjoyed your calm well placed narrative.I looking forward your other content as well.
This video essay moved me deeply to the point that I want to play these games on my channel, with my viewers playing beside me, in hopes to breathe live into the games that didn't deserve to become desolate wastelands.
It's interesting to hear someone from the newer generation go through the exact same steps I did 10-15 years prior. Older games, same experience. Every game is destined to be abandoned one day, but the memories made will not be forgotten.
3:27 Painfully toxic? Cross the border with your boyfriend.
we really need bots in games that are indistinguishable from people, to make them live forever, and only use them if there is not enough people
i never played archeage but reviewing it’s systems i got really intrigued. now with ashes of creation being in open development i‘m looking forward to playing a game as open like archeage was in the future.
This video was amazing and really well made. Had me taking a trip down memory lane with all the games I grew up on and that are no more. Gaming truly isn’t what it used to be but I’m hopeful another golden age will come.
Thank you for taking your time to make this! Great video to have on the background while gaming.
Him talking about fellow players who haven't been online in a long time hit me hard. I have had several friends who have left SWTOR, never to hear from them again
You, sir, are a poet. Fantastic video. This describes what we all feel about our first games and I was imagining EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and City of Heroes as you wandered through your favorites. Fortunately EQ and CoH are both thriving again from fan based servers. Watching your nostalgia triggered mine. Games truly are living worlds unto themselves and when we become part of them, the people we share them with are family. When that world dies it's like losing a loved one. Thanks for sharing this with us, very well done.
You know, I am truly alone in this world and yet I never felt lonely until I watched your video. The way you conveyed your feelings have struck something in me. I think I'm gonna call my friends even if they hate me now for abandoning them for years. Thank you.
"As soon as the game becomes pay to win, the community abandons it"
War Thunder would like to speak with you.
I used to play RF Online, but one day there was a P2W item in the shop that let you kill players on your own team so players who weren't controlling the mine could just race swap, kill their own miners, and then control the mines after they were no longer occupied. I quickly abandoned the game and when I went back it was empty less than a month later, and then was shut down shortly after that. Looking back, the concept of having three different races compete over one area for resources was a brilliant game concept, but many poor decisions led to it being completely abandoned. I imagine an action game would be better for this formula if everyone has even stats. But who knows... The video game media is starting to feel as flooded as the movie media. So many formats, not enough time to view them all.
Bad Company 2 on PS3 kills me. It died completely in late 2015. I played it up until its death. Still the best Battlefield game and one of my favorite FPS games of all time. It had a small PC playerbase, but they were highly toxic and only had some limited servers. The Vietnam DLC was amazing, but short-lived.
Man, this really got me in the feels. I've been around long enough to have played on a number of MUCKS (online text-based roleplaying realms based on a variety of themes), and as time went on and other forms of computer gaming grew in sophistication, they also faded, with dusty laston lists and empty "rooms," perhaps including long-idle characters still logged in for YEARS. The feeling of wandering empty areas, recollections of better times haunting one's memory, can indeed be painful. As a longtime tabletop RPer, I also know what it is like to have friends, with whom I shared long years of adventures, pass away, their characters, or even their worlds, if they were the GM, silenced. There is a Welsh term, Hiraeth, described as "[A] homesickness tinged with grief and sadness over the lost or departed." That is an accurate description of these feelings, but it merely proves how deeply we felt these experiences in their vital prime. ='[.]'=
You know it was a great game when you shut it down for the last time, and feel like you lost a good friend.
When you get that sudden feeling of tears forming in your eyes as you visit a world or server that you and your best friends used to play on Minecraft just to see yourself and the structures alone..
a 14 year old says "it made me feel like a kid again"........