Larva invited his friends to play and started advertising Ultima on forums and other sites, and it was slow going at first: he'd be lucky to have five players online at a given time. I decided to take my computer and give a try to the software and that's how Ultima started, in a local computer shop… using the internet of my job." I already had two machines that I could always have online in the shop, one was for the Ragnarok server of my friend, and the other one was the one I used for work. I didn't really play much online back then due to my economy but still loved to jump on my Dreamcast and play the classic way. The Sega US servers for the game closed just a couple of months before that.
I was helping a friend to launch his Ragnarok Online server and while I was doing some research I found out about the software to run your own PSOBB server, I went totally crazy about that. "Back then in 2008 I was working in a little computer shop and had a lot of free time during job hours. "I have always loved PSO since the Dreamcast, that's where everything started," Larva wrote me over email. That's especially true of the people who run the servers keeping the Pioneer II in orbit. It's alive and well, and everyone has a story about how PSO fits into their lives. Phantasy Star Online didn't just refuse to die. Where many of today's derelict MMOs like The Matrix Online and Planetside struggle to sustain a single fan-emulated server, nine years after its third death Phantasy Star Online has at least four communities of active players, often with anywhere between 50 and 100 people idling in a lobby or grinding a 16-year-old grind. What's really remarkable is that I can do all of those things and have options. I can make a new HUnewearl, a lithe hunter with low HP but a penchant for knives and specialty skills, and find a party of players happy to walk a beginner through an opening mission they've done a thousand times before. In 2017 I can still step onto the deck of the Pioneer II and beam down to the surface of Ragol, clumsily fighting the keyboard controls of a game designed 17 years and half a world away from me.
0 kommentar(er)
