I've played about 18 MMOs. Never found my ideal one, always hoped the next one would be it. But I intentionally avoided WoW because based on player feedback I knew it wasn't the kind of game I was looking for.
The ones I liked the best were Eve Online (no other game has been able to replicate the complex and deep PvP this game has) and Vanguard Saga of Heroes (just because I found great friends there)
I played these: DikuMUD, GemStone IV, Achaea, Ultima Online, EverQuest, Eve Online, EverQuest II, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings Online, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Darkfall, Mortal Online, Rift, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Guild Wars 2, Black Desert Online, Elder Scrolls Online, Crowfall, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen (in alpha)
I've heard good things about Dark Age of Camelot and Runescape and I kinda wish I had played them. Maybe I will.
How was eso ?
Not memorable enough for me to say. I think I remember it, but nothing about it stood out to me as a feature I liked.
Wow. I've only ever played WoW. I tried Final Fantasy but after a week I said this is dumb I just should go back to what I know 😂
Very few people know about DikuMUD. 🎉😁
It might have been CircleMUD now that I do some research. I remember beastly fido, the janitor, Midgaard, shireiffs, colored stones that if you picked up they negatively impacted your max health or max carrying capacity (they didn't explicitly say they were cursed). Grouping with people for the first time in my life and going into high level places where I would easily die if I were alone.
In 1992 me and 3 other students tried to build a graphical MUD we called Iliad in our professors parallel language called SR for college credit as an advanced special projects class. We never achieved anything playable. I remember Ultima Underworld was released during that time and we were drooling over it.
GemStone was a commercial MUD that I played with the zMUD client (I think, could be confusing this with Achaea). It had a cool experience absorption mechanic. You absorbed experience slower than you received it, and if your short-term experience buffer filled up it overflowed and was wasted. So you had incentive to do things other than fighting. You could be injured (lose an eye, an arm, etc) and need a healer or by from a food vendor a special herbal remedy, it wouldn't just recover on it's own.
I also remember making nice friends on Ultima Online. There's now an open source client
I remember putting a battery on the F4 key and going to sleep, and waking up with max strength. I also remember not being able to leave my starting city without being insta-killed. After trying a lot of ways to make it out of the starting city alive and failing every time, I gave up and stopped playing UO.
I played it just now and indeed didn't look interesting.
Maybe I was either different back then or the game was better, or all games were bad so UO looked good