Anarchy Online, A 25 Year Old MMORPG
MMORPGs have been un-curtailed. Because fuck it.
Anarchy Online is weird. People kind of get pissed off when you bring it up because Josh Strife Hayes reviewed it poorly, because he doesn’t understand that half the draw of MMORPGs of the era (2001. The game is older than most of his audience.) was the weird esoteric nature of them and needing to do the research and yes, we were reading a couple hundred page manual cover to cover while we waited for the games to install because part of the draw was how much work you had to put into making your character work.
I’m not specifically calling out Josh Strife Hayes with this video. After a single player MMORPG simulation called Erenshor came out, it became very clear that most MMORPG youtubers don’t actually play MMORPGs. But Josh Strife Hayes is responsible for perpetuating the idea that these games just no longer matter and were never more than “A chat room with a rudimentary game tacked on” in the same video he complains about the game being too complex in.
He’s not ‘the problem’ so much as a symptom of the problem.
But this is about Anarchy Online, not guys who are obsessed with Henry Cavill for some reason.
Gonna say right off the bat that it’s a lot more intuitive than a lot of people say it is. You raise a skill, the skill does better. The problem with Anarchy Online’s live retail version is complete publisher abandonment, with former devs playing the Live Retail version making jokes about Funcom likely just losing track of where the server was and not being able to unplug it to take the game offline. Genuinely grim jokes from the people kicked off the maintenance team of a game still making money because of how cheap it is to host... even if actually giving them money is unreliable. I wanted to subscribe to retail for this writeup to compare but I literally can’t. It won’t let me. The page times out trying to GET to the subscription page as of the time of writing so I have been unable to hand Funcom money.
Good, frankly. “Froob” experience is fucking horrible.
This is going to be a post about both how much I enjoy Anarchy Online and how much modern game review based content creation needs misdirection and misinformation on a basic level to function.
So... the vibes are immaculate? There’s not much actual call to interact with the lore. This kind of game from this era is very much a ‘story hands off’ kind of game. Here’s a world. Here’s opportunities to do things, get stronger, and make money. Go. Have fun.
Some classes have more weapon progression than others. If you want a satisfying weapon upgrade tree don’t play a martial artist! Some characters are more for Nanos (spells) than weapons. The Doctor is a great healer who can poison enemies, the Trader can siphon health and skills from enemies and give them to the party, the Martial Artist punches things...
And so you go. And you do. And you get stuff. To go and do and get more stuff.
There’s lore. The war between the Clans and Onmi-Tek is genuinely pretty complicated and less black and white than you’d expect. As in “The Clans aren’t actually morally pure” rather than “Omnitek has Secret Good”. They’re just people who want money, essentially, and The Clans are more interested in working safely and keeping their profits than some kind of cosmic moral crusade against Omni-Tek.
As far as I can tell at least. Another case of ‘The lore is poorly documented’.
Though the Discord server for Project Rubi Ka did link me a fucking NOVEL and lore database and it is a lot more complicated than you’d imagine just from playing it. That’s kind of the thing about this is that most people don’t roleplay and focus on the lore beyond memes and their favorite aesthetic. Back then we didn’t call them memes, though.
Which is why a lot of arguments about “Loss of immersion” weith “lore breaking” cosmetics baffles me. Even RP guilds in these games (Corporations in Anarchy Online, regardless of your Omnitek or Clan alliance) didn’t immerse themselves in the world. The culture of these games that modern reviewers fail to take into account is that it IS a game people played for the game. No “Rudimentary game bolted onto a chat room where people were just happy to be able to chat while plonking at monsters”.
Nobody was going to pay a subscription fee to watch numbers go up while chatting in 2001, you idiots. You’re watching people oversimplify everything for clicks because they genuinely need to to make rent and I actually don’t blame them, but we need to de-obfuscate how content creation actually works here for the sake of actually enjoying life again.
Yes, ‘timer’ based tab target combat started as a technical limitation based on synching thousands of clients on pre broadband internet. No, that does not make it a bad form of gameplay. If something that happened because of a technical limitation was inherently bad and we should leave it behind, first person shooters would be ‘outdated and bad design’. The first thing people jump to in the case of something being old and janky is to declare it was never good, and that’s kind of a huge mistake.
I hate to keep coming back to Josh Strife Hayes as an example of bad critique but he’s one of the few people doing MMORPG critique at all right now and one of the few I can stand listening to out of that dwindling number.
The big problem they tend to have is acting like anyone who even looks askance at such an old game is going to approach it like “Joe New Player”. There is no average new player to these games, especially not Anarchy Online. People who approach it or approach Project Rubi Ka likely played it “back in the day” or are approaching it like a museum. Which many reviewers insult it for being the same way they insult Everquest retail for being “a museum”.
I dunno if I’ll keep playing it, though. It’s genuinely nostalgic, I think it deserved a shoutout and a “Form your own opinion instead of listening to some youtuber tell you everything”.
FF11 will be the next MMO writeup probably!
For a single player game...dunno yet, I’ll keep you posted. Breaking kayfabe for a moment, the metafictional elements I shoved in the Sword Art Online writeup will probably return in their own category so people don’t have to engage with that if they don’t want.
Uhhh....
Byeeeeeee