When Phantasy Star Online Died

This is a True Story. It happened to me.

  1. I was browsing inside a game store when I notice a new game titled "Phantasy Star Online. It was for the Dreamcast console. From the box art it looked like a Japanese action RPG game. Futuristic but with swords spears guns etc. In the Japanese 3d anime style. It was the first online game for consoles. I took it home and started playing. Up to then I had only played offline games for the dreamcast. This was new.

Well from the minute I logged in created my character and spawned in a lobby I was impressed. bunches of other players avatars running around. I went and transported to a pre-dungeon lobby. Met 3 other players. Spent some time at the shops buying weapons and gear and consumables. Then when we were all ready we headed to the teleporter that would take us to the first dungeon. The excitement was palpable.

We moved together from location to location fighting monsters and looting as we went. I was thrilled! my first Online game with other real people. I was hooked. I had started playing after work at 7:00pm and played until 4:00 in the morning. Was having so much fun I didn’t even realize the passage of time. I stopped then got I few hours sleep. And went to work.

At work I found myself daydreaming about the game. When I got back home that day. I made a sandwich grabbed a soda and headed to the console for another long marathon of game play. I was in love with PSO. My love afare with this game was all encompassing.

I played happily for a few years. Then something changed. My group had just started fighting monsters in the first room when a player character was one shotted by another player. That was impossible! There was no PVP in this game except for a little arena. Which nobody used because it was strictly consensual, limited, and boring.

Next we all were killed by this one player. This could not be happening, but it was. For the rest of the evening every other dungeon we played we all got killed by a PKer (Player Killer). We couldn’t figure out how they were killing us?

In a nutshell: There was a company that sold a Disc that was used for re-coding the dreamcast’s Memory Cards. The Memory Cards Save file could be recoded. Unfortunately each persons entire game was recorded in the memory card and changed at will by these hackers that could buy the hacking disk at the local game stores. They would then Recode their memory card, and when they joined online play the memory cards recoded file was transferred to the online version. I forgot to mention the game had both online and offline but both versions used the same hardware Dreamcast memory card.

From that day forward PSO became a hacker’s paradise and an honest player’s nightmare. There was no defense against these player killers. This continued until the players just stopped playing including me and the servers shutdown due to very low population.

It was such a depressing thing that only a few hackers not only killed other players in mass. But they also effectively Killed a wonderful game.

I was so distraught as a gamer for a long while Until I discovered World of Warcraft. My first day of playing Wow had me enchanted. And I was happy again.

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Worst. Scary. Story. Ever.

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PSO is such a terrible game.

PSU was fun. PSO2 was fun. NG is garbage though.
New Graphics =/= More fun.

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Here’s a video of the game. In case you are curious: Skip to 1:30 that’s when it actually starts.

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About the Title “Want to hear a scary story?” Its a joke title just for fun. Humor. Think I won’t use it anymore. People seem to take it seriously. I dunno?

I changed the title of the thread to better reflect the story.

The Story itself is true.

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I have a lot of good memories with that one, playing with my brother and best friend.
I went to a lot of trouble getting online access with broadband because the US release didn’t support it officially at launch. I had to find translations of the JP text and acquire the online boot disc from a 3rd party and burn it to a disc myself.

Never experienced PKers in it, but we might have already moved on when that happened. We went at that game hard for a couple months at least.

I remember that fiasco. I loved PSO too. The thing that made it really bad was that players couldn’t protect themselves at all. Imagine playing in a regular WoW PVE server and every time you go online within minutes you are PKed. Nothing you can do about it. Can’t fight back. that was terrible. I did have fun for several years before the tragedy happened.

One supreme aggravation was when you had a level 200 character went online and in the main lobby some jerk hacker changed your level 200 character into a level 5 little girl that looked like Alice in wonderland! All your gear was gone too.

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I have a better scary story! I once went onto deviantart with mature images enabled. I’ve never been the same since.

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The game was later available for other consoles as well as PC. And there was a sequel Phantasy Star Universe.

Developer(s) Sonic Team
Publisher(s) Sega

Series Phantasy Star
Platform(s) Dreamcast, Windows, GameCube, Xbox
Release
December 21, 2000
Genre(s) Action role-playing
Mode(s) Single-player, multiplayer

I have heard that you can play it on private servers.

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Dear diary,

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Thanks for sharing.
I loved playing PSO on dreamcast as well, and thought I was one of the only ones.

There is a new PSO game Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis.
I can’t speak to it’s quality, because I haven’t played it, but it looks pretty fun. Probably pay-to-win, but then again so is WoW.

It’s on steam if you care to look

why post something so inane

Totally loved the Phantasy Star NES games. Same goes for Chrono trigger, final fantasy, Dragon warrior, crystalis, golden axe (ok sega too), Zelda.

I tried the online but it just wasn’t interesting to me.

It wasn’t until 2016 but I actually tried WoW. I couldn’t justify in my head playing a subscription base game. But then again I was spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars every year on both computers peripherals and games prior to WoW.

The most I spend now is two 6-month payments. If anything this game has saved me a fortune. However I was a lot more versatile and knowledgeable of other games.

For better or worse this is the only game I play now. It has all the elements I need in the game and so much more that I could never hope to achieve but I’m surrounded by people who do as well as watch videos.

This game is like being part of an Olympic sport where there’s a role even for people like me who don’t mind coming in dead last.

And say what you want about WoW but I don’t think an exploit that happened to phantasy Star would fly very long in this game.

:white_square_button: :blue_square: :black_large_square: :yin_yang: :white_square_button: :blue_square: :black_large_square: :yin_yang:

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Interesting story.

On a side note though, OP you might want to toggle that date back about twenty years.

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What was I thinking.
I did now. Thanks.

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I enjoyed PSO on the dreamcast but I never went online. Had a big robot ranger dude.

Just got a little too grindy for mini me, maybe if I had buds it would have lasted longer but sounds like I would have just been hacked!

WoW is always a great game imho.
It’s a bit less addictive than it used to be, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

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Look at the mog. :slight_smile: