Second Life, Ultima Online, VRchat, countless others. In UO people used to just hang out near the banks and talk to each other for hours as people came and went to deposit items or retrieve things. It was a very social experience, people would chill with their friends, roleplay, talk about life. All they really needed was cool clothes, ridable llamas, a neat environment, and an excuse.
Halo 2 and especially Halo 3 multiplayer saw thousands of game styles spawned outside what the devs at Bungie initially thought (griffball anyone?), give the tools and a good gameplay loop to gamers and a community will likely spawn around it very easily. Compare that to the hollow shitfest of the "metaverse" trying to commodify everything (cuss tech capital is running out of monetization pathways) and it's really clear you can't just artificially astroturf a community that wouldn't naturally form.
Star wars galaxies had a great mechanic where bard players would play music to heal accumulated damage of other players. As a result, cantinas became the place all players would gather and it became a real social experience. Also I think you healed faster if you were unencumbered by clothing, so a lot of people were neckid.
Yeah, that was really cool. I never played it but I heard it was really something before that NGE update.
First mmo I ever played and I never felt that kind of magic in an mmo since.
Hanging out in cities and chatting in WoW was what I did while doing my homework
Yes, people did that because social media didn't exist. If you want to chat there are a million other platforms that are infinitely more popular than any in game chat.
Yeah but they were fun and pro-social. There were/are no skinner box machinations, no mtx, no advertising, no attention economy.
Any platforms you'd reccomend? I'm not familiar with anything like the old AOL IM chatrooms. It's just reddit, facebook, twitter, and various other hellsites.
Is IRC still around? It must be. Hmm.
The most insane marketing for the metaverse was how it was going to replace every aspect of socializing, and that’s a good thing! Most traditional games don’t do that weird shit. They say “hey our game is fun and immersive. You’ll feel like a cowboy! But that’s all.”
The only thing I can think about when I hear the name Elder Scrolls Online is this interview question from back when the game was first revealed that tells you all you need to know about the game and its complete lack of inspiration and spark:
"Q: Will we see the buildings of Alinor that look like they are “made from glass or insect wings?” And will we see the Crystal Tower for that matter?
A: When The Elder Scrolls Online launches, the playable part of the Summerset Isles will be Auridon, the big island between Summerset and the continent that includes the cities of Firsthold and Skywatch. The architecture of the High Elves is fanciful, certainly, but it’s also practical, constructed of real-world materials. Architects can’t make buildings out of poetry"
Architects can’t make buildings out of poetry
Things said by people who absolutely do not understand the Elder Scrolls.
My brother in Chim a bunch of monkeys dancing on a tower once fundamentally changed the nature of god going backwards and forwards in time. Adlmer battlemages are fighting an eternal war at all points in time with a big stompy robot. Sometimes the Dragon God of Time just forgets to do causality for a while. Some dude was so arrogant that he transcended the already flimsy reality of Nirn. The Thalmor are working on believing reality isn't real so hard it isn't. Something happened to the Dwemer and no one knows what, but it may have involved weaponized atheism in a world where the gods will just show up and fuck with your for fun. There are like 16 different kinds of sentient cats and which kind of cat you get is based on the phases of the moons, which are the rotting corpses of the god of corporeal reality, who is dead but probably isn't dead. Sometimes the god of madness rains cheese on people for fun.
I really have to get into TES at some point bc holy shit what is this lore lmfao
Go hang out at /r/TESLore for a bit. A lot of this stuff is hidden in game books, or it's in the game proper but you need to read dusty tomes and talk to weird mystics and gods to get the context to understand what you're seeing. The seemingly mundane world is paper thing.
Completely irrelevant to the gameplay and stored away in books, mainly. Not a single thing there substantially applies to gameplay other than the very last one (kind of).
yeah we are too boneheaded to consider anything not "real world based" in this fantasy world with entirely different physics and cosmology then anything based in "reality" as well as having literal magic being the main science and technological base of everything
god i miss the early, gonzo elder scrolls lore
Right? The stars and sun are literal holes in reality leading to a higher plane of existence from when a bunch of gods got cold feet about the whole "Creating the world" thing and ripped through oblivion on their way back to Aetherius. Magic literally rains down on Nirn from the holes they created. Oblivion is an void containing no space and the planets are the infinite realms of the Aedra because an infinite plane in an infinite void can only be comprehende by mortals as a sphere. The Empire flies castles to them sometimes, but it's very important for the crew to keep remembering they exist or they won't.
In Morrowind you find the literal beating heart of god and whack it with a hammer. In Skyrim you find the eye of Magnus, the god who tore the hole in reality that is the sun. In Oblivion you have to mantle a psychotic time-travelling genocide cyborg to defeat a half divine bird daemon from the dawn of time, in the very literal sense that time was kind of iffy back then. The first human empress was canonically banging a flying demi-god minotaur. Sometimes the Hircine just kidnaps you to do weird blood sports with werewolves. Dragons can yell at reality so hard reality says "Fine fine I'll do it stop screaming" and Alduin's role is to very literally devour the world at the end of each Kalpa. The Hist are bizarre super-trees that hid from Alduin to survive the changing of Kalpas and turned a bunch of lizards in to sentient people using their sap. When Mehrunes Dagon invaded they turned the Argonians in to hulking super-soldiers and counter-invaded the Deadlands, forcing the Kyn in to retreat until they shut down the portals because the Argonians were on the verge of conquering the plane of Oblivion that is both Mehrune's Dagon's realm realm and his literal body and spirit. There was a literal moon floating over Vivec city because Vivec thought it would be funny. The Adamant Tower predates all other structures on Nirn and is definitely literally the place where the gods gathered to sentence Lorhkan for his deceit. Sometimes a bunch of cats climb up on each other's shoulders to the moon. The narcotic that is the foundation of their religion and culture is literally congealed moonlight that washes up on the shores of their land. The vampires once stole God's longbow and made an arrow that could kill the sun. It's the same bow the God's used to shoot Lorhkan's heart across the face of the world, such that the falling blood of god congealed in to the valuable mineral ebony.
TES could be so much more than it is if they'd just be a little more flexible.
Can't leave out (my favorite): militant atheist taller-than-human dwarves who can change reality with music make a contrarian mecha who can debatelord anything out of existence (maybe including themselves). The robot (which is also a capital-T Tower that supports material existence) later gets thrown thousands of years into the future to fight against high elf mathemagicians while dark elf cyborg ninjas party on the moon
Right?!?!
It's so cool, it offers so much room for zany stories and serious investigations of humanity, and they're just like "Yeah, no, the Aldmer don't build towers out of giant bug wings and magic that's just too interesting for us.
That good shit like Nords hunting flying whales that spread cocaine snow as a defense mechanism
Talk a lotta shit for someone running an equally dogshit monetary goatfuck 
What metaverse?
I think that's the backing lyrics in songs
No, it's where Timmy Turner met up with Jimmy Neutron
Nah, it's where the antagonists to the Sailor Scouts came from
Nah it's a bunch of fighting, talking robots
Innovating and Disrupting Paradigms by building something that already exists from scratch for minimum cost without any of the bits that anyone actually likes.
Too awkward and expensive to work for general consumers in the ‘90s, too awkward and expensive to work now
If VR/AR becomes even remotely socially acceptable and mainstream I'm going to go to mark zuckerberg's house and torture every member of his family to death in front of eachother. The minute I see anyone other than a bazinga unironically wear one of those apple goggle things I'm going to devote my life to doing bioterrorism in the Bay Area until San Jose is devoid of human life.
Meta sucks
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
Rules
