Nostalgia for MMOs
Sighs, game nostalgia ... though mine usually always swirls around the old MMOs I used to play. Well, one isn't even all that old, considering I only quit it just 1–2 years ago.
I love Elsword still as a game, but I miss the old era of it, when the level cap wasn't 99, it was 60, when the newest character was my future main LuCiel, when the graphics and UI were chunky and dungeons took 10 minutes to clear vs the 2 minutes they take now. And it sucks because the private servers I've found rarely ever capture the essence of that time in the 2012-2015 era (minus one I just literally found that's barely getting its legs as of April 25th) because most move to the modern game, which I dislike.
There's a tinge of nostalgia that lingers for that era of 2013 Elsword, and for the time I used to play Perfect World International too, one which has so many private servers that it's not hard to find one covering the classic era I played it in (also in the 2010-2013 range), but unlike Elsword ... trying to play it ends up with me just dropping it a couple of days later. Some servers allow you to boost to level cap, but I don't see the joy in that when I never got to level cap and experienced endgame; to me, I liked the idea of leveling and going through dungeons on my own, but even in private servers that have a boost in EXP, it still unfortunately feels tedious and clunky and awkward!!!
And it makes me sad, because Perfect World International has SUCH a gorgeous landscape, beautiful music I still enjoy tenderly to this day, and allowed you to take a mount and fly across the entire map if you wanted to.
It's a nostalgia, but it's one that makes me sad to some degree because I wish I could enjoy those games like I did when I was young, where I remember losing hours staying up late to play and grind, with the guilds I used to be in ... and perhaps It's because I don't have the people anymore that brought light to those games that makes it so much harder to get back into them. I don't mind solo grinding, but a lot of my fun was in partaking in guild PVP fights and running dungeons and just talking with people while playing dress-up with my cute fox-girl summoner (funnily enough my nostalgia here was from a private server, I never got far in the official game and instead opted to play long-term in a private server).
Elsword I just straight up quit alongside my bestie, so that's less a case of community and more a case that there aren't many private servers that cover the era we both knew. Otherwise, the game as it is sucks, more in terms that raids and continual enhancements have made the game a riddled, pay-to-win elitist mess, where if you decided to main the 'wrong class' people don't want you in the most recent raids (case in point, my class was considered a sub-par DPS and only could work alongside a second DPS instead of carrying a raid like other more powerful DPS classes, so I was shafted a lot when it came to finding raid parties vs my friend who played a support that was always in demand ... and since we were a duo pair, and we didn't go into separate parties, it made progressing in the game stressful because of how people were about it).
(das me and my friend there, I'm on the right)
I'm glad FFXIV (even if on hiatus for me at the moment) fills a lot of that hole of an MMO I can see myself dedicating time into ... and that I already have; although it cannot replace the ache and longing for those games of the past, at least it can give me something new to pour myself into.
Although it makes me sad to think about sometimes, I'm glad there are places trying to preserve the older times, even if the people that made those times good are gone now, it doesn't hurt to live a little bit of nostalgia before shelving it again.
(I realize this is the same case with Club Penguin for me, a deeply nostalgic game, but I can't play it anymore like I used to because it's such a community centric game, and doing stuff on your own is only so much fun)