OK, some of these may sound downright insane but, then again, these might resonate with some of you.
I did a quick estimate and figured I've spent 10,000-12,000 (real life) hours in Norrath over the past 17 years. For five years this was my main hobby with 20-40 hour weeks (and years long stretches of 3-4 hours sleep (no. seriously 3-4 hours per night for years. really)
Over so much time I had several experiences where I was so immersed in EQ that the rest of the world "went away".
But, here are a couple that stick with me....
I remember when I was a very young Druid in late 1999, just starting out and having trouble. Everyone said you need a magic weapon in order to be able to hit wisps. Forget that the info was wrong and +1 was magic RESIST....whatever, that's what I believed. My friends learned about a Runed Totem Staff from the gnolls half a world away and these were easy to get weapons. We traveled for so long to get to their camp. We stayed there so long trying to get one of these and checking loot over and over every time we team-killed a gnoll.
I thought about the Runed Totem Staff obsessively. I remember driving home one day from work. For some reason my wife had picked me up and we were driving down the road chatting. I glanced up and a telephone pole was nearby and my heart raced and I saw an RTS in front of me. I laughed at myself - it was like those cartoons where Wile.E.Coyote imagines the Roadrunner all cooked under glass - seeing him look like a thanksgiving turkey.
OK, I was traveling a lot on business. If I went somewhere interesting I would go sight seeing but, usually it was some boring industrial location. I wasn't one to hang out in the hotel bar or anything so I always sat in my room and played EQ on my laptop. Between flights I would use the bank of payphones and my modem and use the company calling card to dial up and connect. One time I was so engrossed I didn't hear them calling my name and I missed my plane
I want *THAT* level of immersion....
One day while I was grinding in Velketor for like half of a day, when I got tired i went to sleep. I still remember hearing the sounds of the spiders LOL when I was trying to reconcile my sleep lol
When WoW launched, I was preparing for deployment back in late 2004. I had a few weeks of play time before I had to close the ol' laptop and head off to the desert. I've always been a bit of a nerd when it came to technology, so I was one of those soldiers that took a 17" Pentium 4 gaming laptop to war with me, and I regret nothing. Fast forward to December of 2004, and we're in full battle rattle right in the middle of Baghdad. Now since this was my second deployment, I got a special assignment. Myself and a few other buddies were to convoy down south to one of the prisons to set up and run a lab at a small hospital taking care of the prisoners (I was a lab tech in the Army). Remember that incident where some girls got in trouble for mud wrestling? That prison; and yes, I have the original pictures. ;) Now, there are 3 wonderful things about deploying as a lab tech. The first 2 are air conditioning and a freezer. Tang slushies when it's 120 degrees outside is a truely wonderful thing. The third is that we have to have an internet connection to place blood orders for transfusion from the Red Cross. I manually copied the IP addresses, moved the cable to my laptop, and allowed myself to be whisked away to another world. The next day, I made sure to bring my sleeping bag when I reported for duty. For the next 8 days, I didn't leave my little box that we called a lab. I got an MRE when I needed to eat, and just slept on the floor. If I wasn't running a test, attending to personal hygeine, or eating, I was killing orcs. It was a bright spot in an otherwise dark time for me.
Even though it was WoW, and not EQ, the level of immersion I got from the early days of that game has been completely unmatched by anything since. I realize that much of this was due to what was going on in real life at the time and, specifically, my desire to distance myself from it, but MMOs just aren't made that way anymore. Not even WoW is made that way anymore. I want that level of immersion again too, OP. Sadly, not much released in recent years has held to the MMO formula that made that possible. We've traded in cohesive worlds and interdependence for dungeon finders, hearthstones, and teleporters all for the sake of convenience, which is nice sometimes, but it comes with the drawback of lost immersion.
I love reading stories like this lol.
I used to work at Fedex and we have these little tractor tugs we used to pull containers around the complex. For the past several weeks on EQ2 I had been hard pressed in looking for shineys, the collectibles that were on ground well one day at work driving one of those tugs I notice a white object off in the distance and I immeditaly though to go collect it, which was me almost driving into the taxi ways that the aircraft used, luckly I came to my senses and realzed it was just a cone shaped paper cup that had blown away.
