Some of my fondest gaming memories are from this game. There was nothing ever quite like it, and the allegiance system created a special type of community bond that I haven’t seen repeated.
At one point I had 10 “vassals” sworn to me, and in our allegiance that came with the expectation that you assist and mentor those under you. Stakes were higher when our allegiance committed to being red dot PKs on a white server with a few other stronger groups in play.
The server emulation scene has come a long way since retail shut down, but even the most populous servers are a pale shade of this game in its hey day.
MMOs are just so expensive to develop now that innovation is almost dead. You either make a WoW-like or you die (and many times you die anyway). They really don’t make MMOs like they used to.
Social media has taken a significant bite out of what I would consider the more important parts of the older MMOs, especially when it comes to apps like Discord. Not enough people want to interact in games anymore outside of specific gameplay scenarios.
That's because AC started development before even Ultima Online launched. It was started by a bunch of college students that loved MUDs and had no idea what they were actually doing.
It was such a special thing before it was hit with a lot of road grading over the 15+ years of monthly patching that smoothed a lot of the rough edges that made it really unique.
> MMOs are just so expensive to develop now that innovation is almost dead.
I look at this differently. I think the extreme cost of an MMO should force innovation. Take the constraints for what they are and run with them. Accepting that you can't do it the "traditional" way is the first step to figuring out a better way.
There is nothing that says a high-quality WoW killer absolutely must cost 10 figures to produce.
It does though, MMO are very complicated to do and there is a lot of tech to build by specialized people. The content is an other issue. You won't build anythinng close to wow bellow 100M.
At one point I had 10 “vassals” sworn to me, and in our allegiance that came with the expectation that you assist and mentor those under you. Stakes were higher when our allegiance committed to being red dot PKs on a white server with a few other stronger groups in play.
The server emulation scene has come a long way since retail shut down, but even the most populous servers are a pale shade of this game in its hey day.