I wouldn't say that my life in gaming right now is at all addictive. As I have gotten older gaming definitely takes a back seat to many other things in my life. I am definitely a "filthy casual" right now and I am perfectly happy to remain that way.
However, there was a time many years ago that I definitely was addicted to gaming and this was right at the start of MMO's becoming a thing. I was there Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago.
While MMO's did exist before the one that got me hooked, the one that really started to occupy an unhealthy amount of my time was a game called Anarchy Online
It was the late 90's I think - I'm not going to look these things up to be 100% factual - and this game arrived in a box with a CD that had the complete game already on it. Many of you are probably too young to know a time like this but in the university computer lab I worked in, not all of the computers even had CD drives and we were dealing with 3.5 inch floppies that held a meg and a half. So yeah, it was a while ago.
Looking back it is really difficult for me to imagine that anyone could get addicted to this game because especially by today's standards and even in the standards that existed at the time, the game was F**King stupid. You had a basic lock on attack and some extra attacks that were on cooldowns and the amount of damage that it did was extremely minimal and it took absolute ages to level up.
I recall this starter area that you would be in depending on which class you chose to be and honestly, you would be taking on these lowest level enemies called "leets" over and over again, for like hours before you were even allowed to leave that area.
You didn't aim, where you were standing was irrelevant, and the only thing you really did was wait for the cooldowns on your extra skills and especially at the start of the game, you didn't even have very many of those.
Once you got out of the starter area almost anywhere that you traveled towards would result in instant death because no areas in the game scaled towards your level. If you wandered into an area with much higher level enemies it wasn't marked or anything, you would just get one-shotted.
When you died in AO, you lost quite a lot of XP so this was extremely annoying because you might fight yourself in a situation where you had to go back and kill 70 leets to gain that xp back.
You would later go to these mission terminals and take on EXTREMELY repetitive missions that would have you walking to some random door of a building that normally didn't open but would if you had a mission there. Then, once inside, you would repeat your exceptionally boring targeting of one enemy waiting for your extra skills to cooldown yet again.
These missions were mostly designed to be something that was somewhat challenging but unless you really screwed up there wasn't much chance of death. Then at the end of it you got an XP bonus and some sort of item that was mostly useless.
Sounds awesome so far right?
Well we stayed addicted to it because at the time the world that they had created was absolutely massive and something of this sort had never existed in my life before. There were certain dungeons that were more complicated and you would stand outside shouting LFG! and then telling what sort of toon you were. Tanks and Healers got picked up quick and those poor DPS fuckers, they had to wait a long time normally.
I can only presume that they streamlined this process later on because I can't imagine that business model working for long.
To add to the woes as far as playing this game was concerned, not just everyone had fiber fast as shit internet connections and this is why I played in the university computer lab. They had what at that time was referred to as a T-1 connection, which back then was ludicrously expensive and not something that anyone would ever have at home.
So if you were playing on a team with people that WERE playing at home, they would lag and rubber band and just go LD (link dead) on a regular basis. This made missions extra dangerous because you would choose the difficulty based on a team of 3 or 5 teammates and when 2 of them suddenly stop responding, the rest of the group was screwed.
Later we would find places next to a "zone," which was an area near a spot that once you crossed it would load up a new area and whatever battles you were in once you zoned would conclude and the thing you were fighting wouldn't be able to follow you.
me and a group of pals or just random people would stand at this spot for hours trying to gain levels so that we would become more powerful, be able to get higher level weapons equipped and deal more damage. And we did this just so that we could go and do more of the same crap again and again.
it seems ridiculous to me now that this was ever something that I wanted to do but man oh man did I want to do it. If I ended up with a good group I would blow off everything in my life to continue on with the good group just so I could "DING" and go up a level or two in a night. I skipped classes, I ditched social outings, I would lie to my gorgeous girlfriend about why I couldn't meet up with her.. all so that I could sit there and continue the grind to gain a few levels and feel that dopamine rush when I can finally upgrade to a better rifle and do something stupid like 10% more damage.
I played this game for the better part of a year before another MMO that was more my speed (fantasy instead of Sci-Fi) was released and jumped at the chance to get involved in it because it was new. At that point in time AO had started to become stale in the gaming community that existed at the time so I was eager to move on.
The next game, the one that truly proved my addiction to me was called Dark Age of Camelot and that was a much better game than Anarchy Online but still really crap by today's standards.
This next game is where things got really bad for me, and we'll talk about that in the next episode.
If you ever suffered through Anarchy Online I would like to hear your experience.