Anybody here into MMORPGs?

[MikeWalsh]

I simply ask this out of curiosity.

I've only recently "re-discovered" the series of games in this genre from the French game studio Ankama.....including Dofus, Waven, and Wakfu!

I first ran into this last one more than a decade ago, shortly after joining the 'Puppy' community. I was intrigued; downloaded the Ankama Launcher, and installed the game. In those days, it was a .deb package.....you ran the launcher, and it then downloaded and installed the game, with files scattered all over your system.

I messed around with it for a bit, then got side-tracked by other projects and never got back into it again. I'm astounded it's still going after all these years!

Nowadays, it comes as an AppImage, though installation is STILL a 'local' download/install. I thought they might have had a purely online version by now, but no; still the same routine. Not that I mind; with developing the Puppy-'portable' eco-system, I now know how to keep everything self-contained within a single directory.

I'm more into gaming these days, due to change of circumstances as the years have passed. I've actually started running the game proper now, which I never got as far as last time.

I have to say I'm quite enjoying it!

I've put together a quick demo of how this thing functions:-

I'm still a full-time carer.....but these days, some days I'm rushed off my feet, whereas other days I'm twiddling my thumbs for extended periods. So.....

(shrug...)


Mike.

 

[kibasnowpaw]

If you hit roadblocks give me a call i play games dayly on Linux so maybe I know how to get around it

 

[Mineru]

I am presently playing Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted, an old-school MMORPG with very intricate crafting, character build and housing (both biped and dragon lairs), and I am really enjoying my time back on it so far (I left it 13 years ago, and bounced between MMO's in the meantime).

You can play as a fully-fledged Dragon (you start out as a Hatchling though).

 

[CaffeineAddict]

Path of Exile was the only MMORPG I ever played, but sadly it's too much about micro transaction.

 

[MikeWalsh]

@kibasnowpaw :-

I did have one small glitch the day before yesterday. For some inexplicable reason, the installer mechanism "messed up", and hadn't downloaded the most recent build when I was setting this up around 10 days ago.

Last night it simply froze up on me, at the same time giving me a warning triangle in 'Settings'. So I re-downloaded the current, up-to-date build, let it install itself, and everything's behaving itself now.

The "current" version was released around 2 1/2 months back. Turns out that the version that WAS installed, the weekend before last, was released nearly 15 months ago! God above knows what happened there....

....but anyway, all's well that ends well.


Mike.

 

[NicWelds]

I used to be into MMORPGs but I don't have any on the go at the moment. The last one I was really playing was Black Desert.

 

[MikeWalsh]

@Mineru :-

Hmm.... You know, the more I read about Istaria, the more I'm reminded of "The Hobbit".....and especially a host of back-references to "The Silmarillion".

I've been well into Tolkien's stuff for more than 60 years now! Started reading "The Hobbit" my first year at secondary school - it was on our English class's "required reading list". I soon progressed to "Lord Of The Rings", which I must have re-read more than 30 times over all those years.....it's one of those massive tomes which NEEDS multiple re-reads to fully figure out what IS going on half the time.

When I laid my hands on a copy of "The Silmarillion" in my mid-to-late 20s, it filled in a ton of 'gaps' for me (to do with the 'early years'), while at the same time posing a whole host of new questions!

I think true devotees never really tire of the ins-and-outs of Tolkien's entire 'invented' mythos....


Mike.

 

[tinfoil-hat]

I'm a long time WoW player. I started 2004 and have found an old screenshot from my GamingVM I setup around ~2017

I still play WoW today, but my passion is over. I've got also around 1000 hours on Elderscrolls Online, which I played from day 1 on Linux. That's about it when it comes to MMORPGs

 

[craigevil]

Only a couple of people play online, but you can play on your local network as well.
Crossfire - The Multiplayer Adventure Game
It is old old school graphics. The open world is huge.

 

[kibasnowpaw]

@kibasnowpaw :-

I did have one small glitch the day before yesterday. For some inexplicable reason, the installer mechanism "messed up", and hadn't downloaded the most recent build when I was setting this up around 10 days ago.

Last night it simply froze up on me, at the same time giving me a warning triangle in 'Settings'. So I re-downloaded the current, up-to-date build, let it install itself, and everything's behaving itself now.

The "current" version was released around 2 1/2 months back. Turns out that the version that WAS installed, the weekend before last, was released nearly 15 months ago! God above knows what happened there....

....but anyway, all's well that ends well.


Mike.

That sounds like the installer or launcher may have reused some old cached files instead of pulling the newest build properly.

I have seen that kind of thing before with launchers, especially when they handle the download and update process themselves. The launcher can look new, but the game files or local install data can still be old if something goes wrong during setup.

So it makes sense that re-downloading the current build and letting it install cleanly fixed it. Most likely it was not the game itself being broken, just the install/update mechanism getting confused and leaving you with an outdated build.

Glad it is working properly now.

 

[kibasnowpaw]

I have always had a strange relationship with MMORPGs.

I love the idea of them. I love the worlds, the lore, the races, the classes, the feeling that you are stepping into a living place with history behind it. That part has always appealed to me a lot. I can sit and listen to audiobooks, stories, and worldbuilding for hours, and I often enjoy the fantasy around an MMO more than actually playing the MMO itself.

My problem is usually the mechanics.

A lot of MMORPGs start to feel grindy after a while. It becomes less about exploring a world and more about repeating tasks, farming numbers, doing daily routines, chasing gear, or being pushed toward dungeon runs and group content. That is where I tend to lose interest. I like the idea of a big online world, but I do not always like how those worlds are designed to be played.

I played World of Warcraft around the time Mists of Pandaria came out, and I have returned to it here and there over the years. I have also played games like ArcheAge, TERA, Path of Exile, and RIFT. In RIFT I even ended up as the leader of a dead clan, if my account still exists. Everyone else left, and for some reason the leadership passed to me, so I basically became the boss of an empty guild. That is both funny and a bit sad, but it also says a lot about my MMO history.

I have seen some funny glitches in MMOs too, and I do understand why people enjoy them. There is something special about seeing other players running around in the same world, doing their own thing. It can make the game feel alive in a way single-player games usually do not.

But MMORPGs are not really “me” as a player.

I am more of a gamer who likes atmosphere, story, ownership, old games, physical media, and being able to play at my own pace. I do not like feeling forced into a schedule, a party, a raid group, or an endless grind just to keep up. I like fantasy worlds, but I do not always like when the game turns those worlds into chores.

That is probably why I can be very interested in something like Wakfu, Dofus, Waven, or other MMORPG-style worlds from the outside, while still knowing that I may not stay with them for long as actual games.

For me, the world and idea are often better than the MMO structure around it.

 

[MikeWalsh]

@kibasnowpaw :-

That sounds like the installer or launcher may have reused some old cached files instead of pulling the newest build properly.

I have seen that kind of thing before with launchers, especially when they handle the download and update process themselves. The launcher can look new, but the game files or local install data can still be old if something goes wrong during setup.

You may well be right; I'll happily defer to your greater experience here. It sounds about right.

As I said, it just froze solid on me the other night. I shut down, and logged-out. I then re-started it, logged back in, annnd.....well; you could see it was trying to download updates, but my God! it was slowwww...

Since I'd yet barely got into things to any extent, I figured a re-install was probably in order. And with it being 'online', even though the software was sitting locally, I guessed I should return to the point I'd reached in the tutorial. So it proved.

To make sure things went smoothly, I re-downloaded the launcher, and then deleted all config/cache stuff from within the 'portable' directory. This let me start again from a blank slate.

After that, aside from the time it took to re-download the 3+ GB of game files - our internet plan ain't the fastest! - everything behaved itself impeccably. These all sit within the .config directory; by using a combination of the 'readlink' trick, together with use of the XDG 'base directory' protocol, I'm able to con whatever I'm 'portabilizing' into believing that its self-contained directory is in fact the user's $HOME directory. This is what keeps everything together in one place; to date, it works very well.



As for the game itself, time will tell. Really & truly, this is my first proper foray into MMORPGs. The last time around, I was using a relatively ancient, first-gen 64-bit system from 2005.....a dual-core Athlon64 X2, along with 3 GB of DDR1.....and onboard, integrated graphics. It really struggled with downloading and trying to set-up the game, and this, more than anything else, contributed to a feeling of "Will it? Won't it?" It's not surprising I lost interest fairly quickly.

This time around, everything's different. Far more modern, powerful and much more capable hardware - including a discrete GPU - and a LOT more in the way of resources to play with. This time, I'm actually getting somewhere AND beginning to enjoy it!

Whether MMORPGs will prove to be my "cup o'tea", I have absolutely NO idea. We shall see.


Mike.