This was probably the last thing I expected to read today, what timeline am I in?
Realm was THE game that got me into MMOs (god damn it) and I played it up until Sierra sold it off to Codemasters. I've peeked in on it now and again over the years but the main server always had like 50 people "online" and most were just statues sitting next to teleport hubs. Looking at the server stats right now, 173 for the relaunch doesn't seem that much better and I imagine that number will be back down to ghost-tier in a week or so after the nostalgia/hype train has come off the tracks.
Such an interesting game though, I remember always having to cast See Invis before leaving the house because people would legit just sit outside of people's houses invis waiting to walk into the front door and rob them blind, or bruteforce passwords on the door since anyone could visit anyones house by just typing in their name to a teleport master. This also let people do cool giveaways where they would just fill their house up with shit ranging from total garbage to BIS items and would just announce in general channels for people to come and get ready then open the door and watch the vultures go wild. 10 Year old Bobby also somehow managed to get himself suspended right before a gold wipe and managed to keep 100+ million after the rest of the server got nuked down to like 100k, that was an awesome surprise and shopping spree when I came back, free Wraths and Glowies for everyone!
The cybering in that game was unreal too, like how much it pervaded everywhere, but I don't really think that's surprising when there were literal wedding chapels in almost every city and characters could strip down to underwear and dye shirts/pants flesh colored. They (Sierra) knew exactly what they were doing.
I don't think I'll end up giving this a try, what made Realm so interesting to me I don't think can be recaptured or recreated in 2018 with such a tiny playerbase but it's cool to know that someone out there is still trying to keep it alive.
you know why it was a cyberfest? because before TheRealm there was (INN) ImagiNation Network from Sierra . INN was basically all chat all the time and if you were chatting, you were likely cybering.
i started playing INN in late 1993 i played for a year, then Sierra offered everyone in INN a free beta pass for those interested in playing their new game, The Realm Online. so instead of just chatting with your friends and cybering landwhales using little cartoon portraits to jack off to, you could have full sized tunes to be naughty with.
i hopped right on over to The Realm because i was more interested in gaming than cybering, but there was a lot of that going on. i stayed for close to 4 years on my human Adventurer got every conceivable bling there was, lost EVERYTHING in a masive itemwipe intended to control mudflation. as a consolation, Sierra or whomever was running the game at that point gave us all a plaque on our doors so we could brag about being oldschool. i rebuilt all my bling from naked. got even more powerful because the levelcap was raised from 100 to 1000 and we got a few new dungeons with mobs that were level 100ish. that was it. 2 years of killing the same King Kilroggs and playing dressup gets real boring. the pvp was the most fun when you got over lv 500, but their content was nonexistant.
you thought EQ travel was boring? try running through each one of those little blocks and having to wait for your screen to load each time on a 14.4k modem. you could port to different towns, but if you wanted to kill one of the bosses in a dungeon, you had to take a long fucking time to get there.
before encounters became trivial. you could have some fun with your friends in each dungeon. if you PK'd too many players the Warden would automatically gank you when you went into a major town like Leinster and there you would sit in a virtual prison and serve your sentence in REAL TIME. i once had to sit there for 3 hours with nothing to do but stare at a rat walk around the room until my sentence was over.
i had one friend who had acrued something like 3 months of RL jail time for pickpocketing and PK 'ing mass amounts of people. when the Warden finally caught up to him, he said fuck it and quit the game. i quit the week EQ went live. i had had enough. i said on general chat farewell to all my friends and where i was going. i told them to Everquest, the GM told me not to mention other games in general chat. i told him to fuck off and then i got banned too. never looked back. TRO was fun for a time, but it didnt age well.