The first MMORPG certainly has some memories for everyone. MeinMMO author Linda also associates some beautiful and formative moments with her first MMORPG, which she tells you about in this article.
What is Guild Wars?
I got to know this beautiful fantasy world through my father
How I got into Guild Wars is one of the fondest memories of my youth and I look back on that time fondly. I must have been around 12 years old at the time and video games had been part of my life for a while by then.
At the time, my mother was working night shifts, and on the evenings when she went to work, my father would turn on the family computer and log into Guild Wars.
I was incredibly excited and fascinated by this fantasy world. In my opinion at the time, everything looked so realistic and beautiful that I just wanted to see more.
Fantasy worlds have always fascinated me in films and books and being able to actually immerse myself in one with the computer was the ultimate in possibilities for me.
And so it almost became a little ritual that on our two evenings together, my father would play Guild Wars, I would push the living room chair next to his office chair and snuggle up in it to watch him play. Already in my pajamas, of course, because at some point I had to go to bed because of school.
I spent many lovely evenings like this. I kept saying how much I would like to have a character, what class I would take and so on. I don’t know if I was just listening to him enough or if he thought I was old enough to play myself.
But I still remember the day my father came into my childhood room and told me that I could create my own character using his account. I was so happy about it that I couldn’t wait for our next time on the computer.
My journey into Guild Wars and my entry into the online gaming world began on the same day.
Even back then I had to start playing games like this several times
My first character was a ranger. The fact that this character class fights with a bow and arrow and can have an animal companion convinced me at the time.
Because that’s basically exactly what the heroes that I had previously imagined in my childhood role-playing games looked like. And now I had these heroes standing figuratively in front of me. So the decision for the first character was relatively easy.
What wasn’t so easy was the character position. And this has actually not changed to this day. I worked on the perfect character for a small eternity, even though character customization was much simpler back then than it is today.
Nevertheless, I took my time and restarted the game at least five times because something wasn’t right in the game. To this day this is a peculiarity of mine, except that in today’s games it is a much longer process. But when you throw yourself into a new world, you also want to find yourself in it somehow.
I also explored the world of Guild Wars as a ranger for a while, was happy with my black cat as a companion and spent several hours a day facing the challenges the game presented to me.
There were problems when I found out what a necromancer was. I just found the picture in the character selection so beautiful and appealing that I wanted to find out more about this class. Everything that has anything to do with dark magic and is mysterious has fascinated me ever since.
This started a battle in my head between the two coolest character classes.
I restarted the game a few times and switched back and forth between the two classes. Because I just couldn’t decide which I liked better. The bow and my big cat or the possibility of controlling the dead with magic.
To this day I am conflicted when faced with these two options in a game.
Ultimately, the urge to move forward in the story and explore the world further forced me to make a decision. And so I went back to the roots and played as a ranger for a long time.
Guild Wars took away my fear of online contacts
The reason for my choice of character was relatively simple. For a long time I refused to play with other players and as a ranger I at least had one animal companion.
At that time, the adults around me often warned me not to talk to strangers on the Internet because you never know who is behind it. Internet in every household was still relatively new at the time and many adults saw it as a rather strange and dangerous place.
At the time, very few people were aware of how exactly you can protect yourself and, above all, your children.
Since I’ve always been rather anxious, I imagined that everyone I contacted online could somehow find me in real life, and that idea scared me.
At some point, however, the game took me to a snow-covered area where I simply couldn’t do anything against the opponents on my own. It took me several attempts before I realized that it wouldn’t work.
Because, if I’m being honest, I wasn’t a great fighter. The concept of “leveling up” was hardly familiar to me at the time and therefore I was certainly in no way able to master this area.
In a city I saw another player who was writing about the same area and the same problems and so I had the courage to write to him and offer him to go together.
This experience influenced me so much that I found myself playing more online games afterwards. In addition to Guild Wars, I was also able to play WoW or S4 League for hours at some point and really enjoyed the contact with other players.
It was probably because I met a really nice player and we worked really well as a team. I was so fascinated by how different it is when you play with someone who also thinks and reacts to my actions that I regularly teamed up with other players after that.
The two of us cleared the area after two or three attempts and completed the appropriate mission together.
It just opened up a whole other world for me. Because still below the required level (to my shame, I really didn’t understand the concept of levels for a long time), many areas were a big challenge for me. Seeking help in the cities made things a lot easier for me and I was finally able to enjoy the game even more.
I actually don’t have many memories of the gameplay anymore. Here and there I have snippets of images of different areas and enemies in my head, but I can’t really put them together anymore.
However, the memory of my first fight together remains very vivid in my mind.
But above all, what I associate with the memories of my first MMORPG is the realization that video games can bring people together and create shared moments in many different ways.
Do you still have memories of your first MMORPG and your first contact with other players? Feel free to write us your experiences in the comments.
MeinMMO demon Cortyn was also influenced by the first MMORPG:
My 1st MMORPG Silkroad Online turned me into a cringe thief and led me to hentai