Three MMORPG's That Totally Should Make Their Way Onto Handheld Devices

Being an MMO player since I was around 14 years old, playing Meridian 59 as my first MMORPG, I'm a huge fan of these games. It's something special about being drawn into a huge seamless world with thousands of other players, working together (or fighting each other) to slay big monsters, quest and achieve certain goals, even back in Meridian 59 we formed our own guilds and worked together to reach certain Mana Nodes, get gear and reach areas that was almost impossible to get to on your own.

What's a Mana Node you might ask yourself if you never played Meridian 59? Well, allow me to explain. Meridian 59 is quite an open MMORPG, much like Skyrim, when it comes to character progression. Hunting down Mana Nodes and touching them make you get more mana and as such 'magical power'. They're located all over the world and some require team effort to reach or just sheer luck and/or a combination of it. It's a lot of fun to try get to each Mana Node and it was an adventure in itself.

Now, without going too far from the actual subject at hand, you probably realize that Meridian 59 is the first MMO I will write about, right? Yep. That's how I roll.

Meridian 59



This game is known as the first actual 3D MMO released. Made by 3DO, it has an open world, where you can progress pretty openly and basically solo your way to becoming very powerful. There's quests, and a lot of focus on PVP (PVP is open everywhere, except inside certain taverns and areas, plus certain spells such as the spell called "Truce" can disable PVP in a whole zone). M59 was released in 1996 to give you an idea about the graphics.

This game is split between zones, much like EverQuest and one great aspect of M59 is that you can hunt for Mana Nodes, that are located here and there in the world, the difficult of reaching these nodes are everything from being super easy to almost insanely difficult. Touching a Mana Node grants you more total mana and you become stronger in your magics.

Having offered several expansions, Meridian 59 has a lot of things for the players to do together, massive PVP, tournaments in PVP and you drop all of your items if you're killed, so it's important to store things in the 'warehouse', to be safe. Also, there's ways to prevent people from looting you for a limited time, so you can run back and get your stuff back.

M59 was very mysterious in a way, since back then a lot of things on how to do things the most efficient in these type of games weren't there. Simply put, it was a true challenge and the fact that it was dangerous to die and you had a lot to lose if you did, made you extra careful and excited when running by everything from huge giants to spiders and ghosts.

No MMO is complete with boss fights, and Meridian 59 offered these too. Everything from a Spider Queen to bigger things.

Now, why should Meridian 59 make it's way to for example iOS and Android? Well, the graphics would be of no problem to handle at all and the pure fun experience mixed with a epic adventure and true challenge will entice a lot of players, for sure. And porting it shouldn't be too difficult (don't quote me on that, though).

I can totally see myself sitting at an airport playing Meridian 59 with touch optimized controls and screaming out when I get player killed... or exploring the Spider Queen nest... feel the adrenaline, knowing that one wrong turn might end up killing me, and doing a corpse run inside that nest is really, really difficult.

There's a lot of fun information to be had over at the current official site for the game at Meridian59.com.

EverQuest



Well, this goes further down the memory lane. A lot of people probably never heard of this game (which is too bad, since it's still according to me the best MMORPG there is). After Meridian 59 I eventually started to play EverQuest, so it's only natural for me to write about this game and let everyone know why I feel it should make it's way on handheld devices.

While I know EverQuest is still actively being played with a brand new expansion just released, it makes sense to see a 'pocket version' released. Much like how Mojang release their pocket editions for Minecraft (we have a review of their pocket version for iOS here.

EverQuest is the MMORPG that started it all, it had up to 700,000 subscribers at one point, which was considered amazing until World of Warcraft shocked the world. But that's neither here or there.

With the sheer size of EverQuest these days, it make no sense to port it all, so as I mentioned; making a pocket version; perhaps based on the original EverQuest world, would be a really cool idea. You see, I spent maybe 5 (or was it 6) years playing this game. And yes, on a very high level. It started out innocent enough, but I quickly got immersed into the crazy world of Norrath and I simply had to explore and do it all! And as those of you have played MMORPG's and especially EverQuest know... that takes time!

EverQuest, or "EQ" as I will refer to it now, is a game with the focus on group-play. So you team up with fellow players and slay evil monsters and clear through dungeons and what not together, it was also nefariously known for having 'spawns' that you 'camped'. E.g, a certain monster or 'named npc' would spawn on a timer that could drop an item you wanted.

Another thing EQ was known for was the experience loss of dieing and having to recover your corpse when you died (much like M59). And of course the crazy quests that was required to do in order to acquire certain keys to access parts of the game, going into detail on that would keep me up all night, so let's not do that.

All in all, EQ is an amazing game that would most likely (very, very likely) be crazy popular if Sony Online Entertainment would decide on making an portable version (limited) of the game. Perhaps start out with the iOS platform due to how it's easier for most to release games with subscription models there.

Lineage 2



'Whoa now' the western crowd screams. I know. Just give me a bit to explain! You see, after having played EverQuest for such a long time I checked out Lineage 2. It seemed like a lot of fun, especially since I had no clue about the insanely crazy (super crazy!) grind that would end up consuming my life. The world is beautiful and breathtaking, there's plenty of cool monsters, items, armors and things to do. A formula for success, right? Well, the time it takes to rise in levels and 'craft' (or farm/acquire) gear was simply out of this world. I'm almost ashamed of saying it that I reached level 60 before the first expansion even hit; if you played Lineage 2 since beta you know this requires perhaps 10 hours or more per day in a very powerful group for many, many months. Yep, that's how much I played this game. But even for me and my friends, we realized after awhile that this wasn't worthwhile anywhere at all.

Ok, so why am I even mentioning this game as a worthy one for making it's debut on the handheld market? Well, here's why. In Lineage 2 there's something called castle sieges, which were a ton of fun. Large-scaled epic PVP battles between different guilds to siege castles that could control taxes in the towns nearby. Lot's of fun. My idea here is that Lineage 2 would be a very fun MMORPG in a very 'lite' version on handheld devices, again, most likely on the iOS due to how many people there are available and different payment methods and subscription models, but of course other platforms are possible too. This so-called lite version would have castle sieges only. Perhaps with an added element of towns nearby where you could trade and sell things. There's many ways to do this, but I think having large-scale battles such as this with castles and players versus players would be quite amazing, imagine sitting down by the lake sieging a castle with tons of other players on your iPhone? Yep, cool stuff indeed.

For this to happen it would need the Unreal Engine (which it's done on from the beginning anyway), and as seen with Infinity Blade, it's possible on the iOS devices.


Well, these are three MMORPG's that I could easily see making it's way on handheld devices. What are your thoughts on this?