Eventually I got that key and enjoyed many, many hours of online play with a good friend. I never did get to play the expansion, although I'm well aware it's considered the definitive experience.
Counter-Strike is similarly something else I had to miss out on, I just didn't have a way to purchase games digitally. Steam was around as well as services like Direct2Drive but my Mom didn't have a bank account, so I just accepted that I'd be missing out on these multiplayer experiences as a teenager.
I did manage to keep up my subscription to The Realm for a long time, but that was thanks to the wonderful concept of money in birthday cards. Once WoW launched it basically killed The Realm anyway, I could have spent that money more wisely in retrospect.
Starcraft was a rare multiplayer exception for me, along with Jedi Academy, and UT. It'll always have a place in my heart because of that.
Later in life, I ended up putting over 800 hours into CS:GO and now own over 300 games on Steam, so I lived my multiplayer dreams eventually.
I've shelled out enough for Hearthstone packs by now that I don't feel guilty about trading that now worthless huge chunk of The Realm Online gold for that valuable Starcraft CD key.
There happens to be a fresh private server with 100+ players during primetime!
All my old friends are here already as well, this was honestly awesome to find when I got up this morning.
The novelty was phenomenal to me at the tender age of 12.
Here was a chat room, and a game, all rolled into one. I'd never seen anything like it. I wanted my own account.
It would be a few years until that happened. When I was 15 I started with an annual subscription for 49.99, playing on my mother's computer at first after assuring her it wasn't a virus.
This was before the launch of DAoC, so maybe early 03? The game still had a relatively active population (500-750 players near peak hours, something I would scoff at today and declare dead. relative!)
After the launch of WoW in '04 the regulars became less regular and eventually the population was under 200, then 100, etc. It had 25 players online last time I got nostalgic and installed it to hear the startup tune.
Anyway, I had a great time with The Realm Online. I loved it. I made friends and liked talking to them. So I stuck around and watched it slowly wither away, at least until 2007-8 or so.
It was clear that the "developers" who purchased the rights to the game had no interest in developing the game any further.
I still think The Realm Online would do fine in the F2P space, stuffed full of microtransactions. The turn based combat would be perfect for a touchscreen. Apparently it's coded in a dead language invented by Sierra, so I'm not holding my breath. It'd be nice to see a private server, at least.
Over the years I made many friends, some of whom I still regularly play games with.
I imagine many folks had a similar experience with their first MMORPG, whenever I see people talk about Runescape or WoW, I always think of The Realm and my time with it.
The graphics of Broodwar are so much better for the audience’s sake (and I assume also for the players’) than Starcraft 2 or similar 3D games.
Having pixel sprites and a fixed isometric view is a huge advantage in character legibility/contrast.
3D everything demos well and looks more “realistic” (i.e. more like a high-budget space film), but it’s horrible when you’re trying to see past the clutter to figure out what’s going on.
All the rotating cameras and fancy animated backgrounds and tricky lighting and so on are pure gimmicks which distract from the gameplay.
It's not as if you have anything to gain by zooming in on a unit or rotate around it, pre-rendered graphics will look better and have less hardware demands.
In full 3d, animation can tell a player a lot about what is happening on the battle field, such as where the bounding boxes actually are near a unit, what the actual angle is they are using to target a unit, or how a unit is physically affected by different buffs/debuffs.
Although I find well made 2d games to be remarkable for their own reasons, I don't there is a legitimate argument as to which provides the superior gameplay.
I think you're conflating graphics and gameplay too much here; different games need to communicate different things. If anything, well made 2D games, because of their economy of expression, possess superior legibility once you learn to read the sprites.
And yet somehow with superior visual fidelity, Andromeda looks worse than Mass Effect 1. 'Better' animation technology not always the answer.
Especially since if anything dense clustering of units is way more common in SC2 because the pathing is more efficient.
Even the anti Broodwar fanboys can't get their hatred of it right.
Sounds like they weren't really wasted after all. :)
I was semi-pro Age of X player from 2002 - 2008, Never had chance to switch pro, since AoEII/III(M) were not so hyped and there were little money comparing to W3, SC:BW and Quake3.
Still one of the best memories in my life.
Play the two and you'll see the difference.