games you were most addicted to pt. 1 (DAOC)

I realize that this could apply to multiple periods of time and a lot of it has much to do with how old you are. But I am talking about how much a game totally occupied your time and when I say this i mean how much not just the time it took when you were playing it but how much it occupied your mind when you were not playing it.

Dark Age of Camelot

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This was not the first MMO i ever played but it was the first semi-stable MMO that I played and it was also the first one that had a feature that is still used at least in some capacity to this day where you have realms versus realms. They called it that actually, RvR - and even thought it didn't work at all based on the severe limitations of the servers that the company actually had... it was a brilliant idea

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Midgard, Hibernia, and Albion were all absurdly shaped countries that all resembled the UK in some capacity and Midgard was just too cold for most of it to be inhabited. It should come as no surprise that if you chose to be a part of the Midgardians that you were going to be dealing with snowy-bits and this traditions carries on to this day in other games.

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Ok, so lets get into how this game addicted me like a mofo and why it worked

• It was one of the first ever functioning (kinda) MMO's in existence
• It pitted 3 "realms" against one another in sorta PvP that went on 24 hours a day
• It was a grind-fest that we didn't seem to mind at all at the time

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And that is all there was to it essentially and looking back on it I can't believe that I threw away at least one super-hot girlfriend because I wanted to play this instead of....well, you know.

Leveling up was stupid and it took ages, the graphics by today's standards were awful, the dynamics of PvP were ENTIRELY highest level is OP and there was essentially no single player story.

Yet, I loved this game and would play it for hours and hours and hours on end, sometimes fighting the same strangely higher-level than me worm for 30 times in a row just to get some xp
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I think the best part about this game was the fact that for the first time ever you could guild up and join about with a bunch of people and mostly all that we ever did was try to achieve highest level so that we could head out into the RvR (realm vs realm) world and provided we were with a friend or two take a few hits before we got killed.

The game was stupid when I look back on it but at the time it was out it was everything and I can still hear the loading screen because it crashed out so frequently (because the internet was incredibly unreliable in the mid 90's) that trying to stay involved in a game as an exercise in futility.

Yet we ALL STILL DID IT. We were pioneers, I was a pioneer. And if you were one of the people that ever fought through this absolute horse-shit of a mess that was the MMO called Dark Ago of Camelot.... well, I commend you sir or madam.... because I was in the same place and looking back I feel like a bit of a dickhead for being so.