Welcome to anniversary week here at TAGN. Come Saturday the blog will turn 20 years old, so I am calling this week the TAGN 20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition.
20 Years… see what happens when you let me use Canva?
Unlike most collector’s edition, this one won’t run you $100. It is free, though it might be deemed too expensive by some even at that price.
I have the usual summary post slated when the day lands. But I thought I might use this week to reflect on blogging and what has happened here over the last two decades. Or such was my plan. I originally had six posts sketched out, then five… and then I could only really breath life into three. So much for the plan.
Anyway, strap in for an abbreviated sort of self-aggrandizing snooze-fest that is only really possible when an old guy celebrates being bad at something for a really long time. Like, nearly a third of my life that is. But hold your applause and congratulations for Saturday, the day of real celebration. Who knows, I might not even make it that far at my age.
The first post I have slated for the week is a review of games I have written about. This idea started with a post by Tipa over at Chasing Dings, where she listed out all the MMOs she had played. That flirts with definitional issues and what is an MMO anyway, so I decided to avoid that… though I’ll probably return to it some other day… and just zero in on a list I could more easily define; the game I have written about.
And then I decided I didn’t want to write about every title I ever mentioned… there are some Zynga crap titles I mentioned once or twice that I could not possibly generate the interest to say more about… so I decided to cut that down to the top 20.
Twenty Games for Twenty Years. There seemed to be a symmetry in that alongside it indulging my laziness.
The Categories vs Tags and Post CountsMost of the titles on this list have categories of their own, selectable on the side-bar from the Categories drop down menu. Why some but not all?
If I give a title its own category on the blog, that means I feel I am committing to it. I want that game to appear in the categories menu on the side bar for easy access to the many posts I expected to write about it. Tags I generally reserve for games I don’t think I’ll write about much as well as things like expansion names, game locations, characters and NPCs, and in the case of EVE Online, star systems, fleet commanders, doctrines, battle names, war names, and organizational names.
If I play enough of a game I will elevate it to a category. If I end up not writing much about a game it might get demoted to a tag, though that function does not work reliably on WP.com, so some demotions never went through. Elite Dangerous, for example, has all of four posts here. Oh well.
Anyway, I am going to link to the category or tag URL for each game, in case you feel the need to infinite scroll your way through to verify my count or something.
As for the count of posts… well, not every one is a post solely about a specific title. For example, I wrote about multiboxing a bit back, and while I was mostly focused on EVE Online, EverQuest and WoW were both used as examples, so they got marked as well.
And then there are the month in review posts, all 240 of them, where I write a brief summary of games I played that month, which then get marked and included in the count, even if the post was mostly about other things. EVE Online was probably the biggest beneficiary on that front, with more than 200 such inclusions.
The Top Twenty1 – EVE Online – 2,507 posts
EVE Online holds the distinction of not only having the most posts written here (as well as another 2,800+ posts at my other blog), but it is the title I have been most committed to over the last two decades. I took a few breaks during the first five years I played, but have been on board with it since the Crucible expansion back in 2011.
I have spent time covering wars in null sec, expansions and updates, events and plans, the monthly economic report, CSM elections, as well as the often bizarro world beliefs held by the execs who dictate how the game should evolve.
2 – WoW & WoW Classic – 1,803 posts and 496 posts posts respectively
What can I say? Azeroth abides. While it was an early front runner for most posts, EVE Online passed it during one of the several breaks our group have took from the game. It is also the game I have likely played the most with people I know IRL. WoW Classic’s arrival in 2019 managed to get the group back together for another run at vanilla Azeroth. And, as happened the first time around, we fell off at Cataclysm. Seems to say something.
I usually tagged the expansion I was playing in posts, and the top five expansion tags are:
- Wrath of the Lich King – 91 posts
- Cataclysm – 86 posts
- Warlords of Draenor – 66 posts
- WoW Legion – 47 posts
- Mists of Pandaria – 40 posts
The Burning Crusade got screwed on that list because I seem to have used different tags at various time, The Burning Crusade, Burning Crusade, and Burning Crusade Classic as well as just Outland occasionally. They add up to about 70 posts… I might have missed a tag… so still behind Cataclysm. Why would I write so much about Cataclysm?
3 – EverQuest II – 822 posts
Unlike the previous two titles, I played EQII at launch. As I will get to in a later post, had I started blogging two years earlier I would have had a crazy number of posts about the game as its first year was… if not great… something to talk about. Still, nostalgia and revisits to the title kept it near the top of games I have written about.
The game was seeing a bit of a revival around when the blog started, with the Echoes of Faydwer expansion signalling SOE’s desire to maybe play the nostalgia card. I have been back a few times over the last 20 years, though I haven’t logged in for a few years at this point. But I keep covering it, and it gets an expansion every year that is usually worth a post or three.
4 – EverQuest – 741 posts
100% nostalgia driven. I played EQ at launch as well and who knows what this blog would look like had I started writing about it back in 1999. Instead, aside from the run with Potshot on the Fippy Darkpaw server back in 2010 or so, my time and writing has mostly been thoughts about the game without actually playing it in any serious way. I did do a tour of early zones for the 25th anniversary and I have poked my nose in for a couple of special servers, but EverQuest Legends, which I had decided is just a flavor of the main game so lives under the category, is the first time in a long time where I have actually put some effort into playing.
My coverage has mostly been about news, expansions, and special rules servers over the years.
In an odd twist, The Serpent’s Spine expansion, which came out not long after the blog launched, and which sought to redo the leveling experience into a more quest driven venture (totally not copying WoW which totally didn’t copy EQ) will be the focal point of a special rules server this year.
5 – Lord of the Rings Online – 561 posts
Another title I played at launch… hell, one of the few I played in beta. It will turn 20 itself come next April, so also a title that has been around completely during the span of the blog. One of my early posts explored the idea of how one could even tell the story through a shared world MMORPG. The instance group took a few swings at the game and I have come back and played it multiple times. I even made it to Mordor.
It helps both that the game is a unique look at the world of Middle-earth, unlike any other we’re likely to see again in my lifetime, and that I have a lifetime subscription. I bought in back at launch in what was likely the best economic deal ever for an MMORPG on my part.
As such, for actual time played it is probably in the top three, after EVE and WoW. The game is still a bit of a kludge and SSG doesn’t have the staff to maintain it properly, but it carries on and I keep an eye on it even when I am not playing.
Interlude – The Dividing Line
The top five were pretty obvious. I could have probably guessed that list without looking, possibly even in the correct order. If you have been reading the blog for more than a couple of years, you probably would have had a solid guess for the top five as well.
After that… we kind of get into the weird zone. There are some easy guesses in the 6-20 range for sure, but also a few “Did I really write that much about a title I barely played?” entries as well.
6 – Pokemon and Pokemon Go – 262 posts and 208 posts respectively
Starting off in the weird zone is the Pokemon category, which isn’t a game but… what… 20 or so games. It is a true “category” unlike the above, with specific titles specified in tags. The top tage is Pokemon SoulSilver, which has 40 posts associated with it, followed by HeartGold with 37.
There is some overlap. Early on I was using a Pokemon Go tag and putting it under the Pokemon category. Then I had two categories and was using both. So there are probably a dozen or so fewer posts that the two combined categories might imply.
Still, in the end, I wrote about Pokemon because we played a lot of Pokemon. My daughter and I started off on the DS Lite with Diamond and Silver and played through to the Switch era. We bot got Switch Lite units and played a few of the titles in that era as well.
7 – Rift – 164 posts
Now we’re into the “did I really write that many posts?” zone. I mean, I played me some Rift, that is for sure. Enough to get one character of each of the four archetypes to level cap before the first expansion. And then came the first expansion and the upending of the design philosophy that made the base game great and I did not play much more after that.
But I kept covering it I guess, writing about later expansions, business issues, and the eventual acquisition of the assets of Trion by Gamigo, which has kept Rift going ever since.
8 – Diablo III – 148 posts
Again, that many posts? Sure, there was a lot of pre-amble; posts about announcements for the then upcoming game around things like art style and the always online nature or the title and the lack of LAN play support. And then the game came out and it had problems, largely driven by the desire to make the auction house a thing, but was fine. Then there was the big expansion which fixed itemization and remove the auction house. I played it some more after that. But there wasn’t all that much to write about, was there?
9 – Minecraft – 145 posts
A very solid and completely valid entry on the list. For a stretch between the middle of 2015 and 2019 I played a lot of Minecraft. I setup a server that I ended up sharing with maybe 20 friends and acquaintances over its lifetime. It was a good time. We have tried to go back again and start over a couple of times, often when new features have been announced, but I always get a strong “been there, done that” vibe once the initial excitement wears off and the interest of the group quickly flags.
It doesn’t help that it is more sandbox than game. I have felt, since early on, that there was a missing element in that you could build, say, a castle… and then what? It looks cool, and that can be enough, but there is no “use” for it really.
Stopped covering it when Microsoft merged Mojang accounts into their account system and screwed up the process for me, so if I wanted to play again I’d have to buy another copy of the game… maybe… because my MSFT account was screwed up by the whole thing as well.
In short: Screw Microsoft.
10 – Vanguard: Saga of Heroes – 137 posts
That is a lot of posts for a title I never really played. I tried. A few times. In beta. At launch. After it went to SOE and had sat for a bit. Once it went free to play. One final time when it was on the chopping block. And it never grabbed me. But the drama around it… well, it was a tale of its own. It is an object lesson in the need to do the fundamentals well, you need to make the most basic game play loops enjoyable, because if you can’t do that then your special sauce features won’t matter.
11 – Valheim – 125 posts
Here we are with a title I have both legit played and written about. I grabbed it when it hit early access back in February 2021, saw its potential, and the group ran with it for a few months. I have been back since then, for four play through runs. I am not in love with the Mistlands and the Ashlands, and will probably not love the Deep North when it lands in two days. But I will probably have a solo go at it again once it settles down because it is a good game and really set a standard for the booming co-op survival base building genre.
12 – Warhammer Online – 96 posts
Remember how excited we all were for Warhammer Online? People were really hyped up and came to yell at you in your comments if you were anything but completely enthusiastic about the game. I had people angry at me for pointing out that the key in manual did not actually open the quest log as advertised. I was right and I will die on that hill.
This did not open the quest log
WAR was going to kill WoW as Mark Jacobs ushered in a new era of PvP and PvE with a host of revolutionary ideas. They knew the genre better than anybody and nobody could teach them a damn thing. Bears bears bears!
As I mentioned above, core gameplay loop must be fun or your special sauce won’t matter. Also, most of the special sauce was kind of mid. Public quests were fine, but not a revolution and WAR proved once again that being first doesn’t buy you much if other people implement your idea better. The Tome of Knowledge was just garbage, an attempt to force disparate data into a single format.
So people ran battlegrounds for a couple months because the quest path was such a slow grind by comparison. There were a few weekends of fun open world battles. And then everybody pissed off back to WoW or something else and the writing was on the wall. At GDC 2007 Mark Jacobs predicted disaster for companies throwing money at things trying to take on WoW, and he was right.
If you played back then and you’re thinking “Well, it wasn’t that bad. I remember liking quite a bit of it.” that is your brain tricking you by editing out the bad parts. This happens to me all the time. Still, if you have to prove it for yourself, you can over at Return of Reckoning.
Some people felt maybe Mark Jacobs had learned from the experience and placed their hope in Camelot Unchained. But no. Dark Age of Camelot was his peak and you can still go play it via Broadsword.
At least it was determined that MMOs are, in fact, a niche genre.
13 – World of Tanks – 96 posts
I have played quite bit of World of Tanks. I even made some YouTube videos about it back during my very brief run at that sort of thing. I’m not quite sure how I ended up with nearly 100 posts about the game, but there we are.
14 – Star Wars: The Old Republic – 90 posts
The silliest thing about this is that I pre-ordered it, then cancelled it… but since I had made an account during beta I somehow got to keep the pre-order items.
Played in beta, didn’t like it, cancelled my pre-order, then mostly covered the EA hubris as they also predicted WoW killer numbers and set benchmarks for failure that would come back to haunt them. Some companies will make their own drama. And then, after launch, EA stopped reporting on the game in their quarterly reports because it “wasn’t interesting” or some such lie. The whole thing was a drama machine, not helped by the fact that its launch required that Star Wars Galaxies be shut down.
The game wasn’t for me. It was too story heavy and I am not a fan of the BioWare thing of putting words in your character’s mouth. Also, I am not a fan of shooting mobs 17 times with a blaster at point blank range to kill them. That felt dumb in SWG and it felts dumb in SWTOR.
The game, however, has carried on and found success as a free to play title. Selling hotbars and other UI elements irked some people, but you have to make some money.
I did go back to try it again briefly at one point… but that didn’t last long, so I am surprised again that I managed 90 posts around the game.
15 – Diablo II – 89 posts
I feel like I should do two more posts just to get this past SWTOR. An influential title that lived on long past Blizz’s official support for it. The Diablo Battle Chest was still a top seller now and then for years after the Lords of Destruction expansion came out. It was revived and brought into the current era with Diablo II Resurrected, a model for such remasters/remakes. This fits on the list.
16 – TorilMUD – 82 posts
A very influential MUD during the 90s, arguably the inspiration that spawned EverQuest as Brad “Aradune” McQuaid played it at the same time I did, so we may have raided together. Last pwiped or restarted back in 2003, it runs on to this day.
I wrote a whole series of memory posts about various aspects and locations in the game.
Not a lot of posts given how much time I have logged on the various iterations of the game… my main has over 100 days played, and I have a dozen alts… but kind of a lot for a title I haven’t played really at all since 2004.
17 – Star Trek Online – 79 posts
This was one of the titles I wrote a bit about during the first month of the blog. When it ended up launching I was all in and jumped on board with a lifetime subscription. If my LOTRO lifetime subscription was my best economic deal for an MMORPG, this was arguably my worst.
I really wanted to like it, but it did not click with me at all, being poor at a bunch of things and not very good at any one thing. It has been traded around like a mediocre relief pitcher for years now, I think my most surprising moment was when it went free to play and I couldn’t imagine how that hadn’t already happened. Rarely mentioned now, but for a while I covered it. One of the titles demoted from Category to Tag.
17 – Guild Wars 2 – 61 posts
A lot of posts for a game that has honestly never clicked for me. I think my main insight was to predict that, despite Anet’s statements, that they would end up shipping regular expansions because that would bring the money NCsoft demanded of them. I have taken four runs at the game, and even after that it still feels like a game I should like. I just don’t like it when I get there.
18 – No M