Worst MMO Ever? - Animyst

During the video premier, enough people logged on that we actually broke the player peak record: twitter.com/JoshStrifeHayes/status/167015675217039…

We are making Animyst 2!

Hey! Tarpit here, one of two Animyst devs. This weekend has been surreal! We had moved on creatively years ago, taking a huge amount from the experience of making Animyst, and contentedly assuming that a very few people would ever go into the world. Our pre-Josh upper limit was 14 players on a PvP event (going back to 2018.) The game is designed and balanced for an average of 5-10 players constantly, a number that still ended up being overly ambitious for us to attain. Josh was absolutely right pointing out that a multiplayer game without a community literally never gets experienced, no matter how good (or scuffed.) All that to say, we are so thrilled that people are playing Animyst! We both adore the video. Writing this on the Monday after it dropped, we have patched 6 times since the video came out. (All of the glory for that goes to Ded; I made the game worlds but can't assist with programming labor) Lag, and other issues resulting from these hitherto unseen server loads are much better than they were feeling Saturday. The game is built for group PvP, and we will keep turning the screws on networking and optimizations to make that as possible as possible. Neither of us thought we would ever update again. We are still disoriented and need to think deeply about what the future holds. Josh, you made instant fans out of the both of us. The video is hilarious, awesomely done, and perhaps overly generous.

Out of all MMOs he reviewed, this one is the anti-thesis of the usual aftermath. Instead of shutting down a dying game for good, he breathed life into it.

Started playing the game right after the video was posted. Managed to gather all 8 pages in about 6-8 hours. Now the real grind begins! The 2 guys who made the game were actively in the game communicating to players, answering questions, replacing items lost by server resets, and just general being cool dudes. They’ve dropped at least 2 performance patches in the 48 hours since the population has boomed. Super awesome to be a part of!

I actually like the voicelines, it feels so wrong and raw exactly what you would expect from someone who has been dead for 10.000 years. It adds to the uncomfortable atmosphere

90% sure this game's dev had glimpsed beyond the veil and was compelled to create it after witnessing the eldritch truth underneath and enveloping our reality

"This is the Afterlife, but it is not eternity... But then where does the soul go next?" Come on, this line alone has give this more character than all of Ubisoft's games over the last decade together.

"Made by 2 mortals" Keeping the server up for 5 years is an accomplishment in of itself and shows their dedication.

Just so you know, this video almost singlehandedly brought this game back from the dead. After watching, I downloaded it and played and we had about 60 players on the server. It got enough attention that the two devs who made the game even pushed out a new update to help with the lag that having that many people on the server caused. This game is awesome and now that there are a few people playing, it's one I'd recommend people actually look at.

Josh... this needs a series... we need to form a group and find all pages.... there is no other way....

To be honest, if you're going to use text to speech, this is the way. With the characters, voice and speech patterns being quite detached from human, there's no space for the uncanny valley to set in. This works, unlike people making photorealistic human characters with realistic sounding text to speech.

this game almost perfectly captures a genuine feeling of early gaming, something that is extremely rare to come by now due to how fast people take games apart to the last file and share their findings online. just look at how Mario 64, early Pokemon or Zelda used to have all these rumors, some innocent, some very creepy. and the endless gaming creepypastas back in the hayday. early Minecraft was the last game i really ever experienced this subtle horror in: the fog, the endlessness, the loneliness, the lack of online resources and your young self's inability to think very critically and so you soak up the scary rumors and try to figure this game out by yourself while you feel watched. i think Animyst channels this exact energy: there are no resources online, you can't apply some long standing gaming knowledge just like when you were young, the endless empty world, and this inability to really make sense of it paired with the low graphics and fog, the loneliness with structures made by someone but there's nobody there. this feels like a game i could've played in 2006 and share rumors with friends on the school yard as we collectively shit ourselves. and i think that's beautiful.

Josh Strife Hayes is officially not the MMO Grim Reaper, but the MMO Necromancer. He commands them to die and to raise from their graves in equal measure.

Somehow this "worst mmo ever" turns into "forgotten world explorer" type of series and honestly, this is what I am here for!

The consistently weird portrayal of the game, intentional or not, is one of its greatest strengths. It's like the player is experiencing the game in an actual state of undeath - you can't properly comprehend the world and its characters, you can't interact, everything is *wrong*, like a fever dream that never ends.

A tiny interesting thing about all this: I love the subtle storytelling and worldbuilding that all the fancy magic you get pales in comparison to the weapon the first boss drops, which is just an ACTUAL WEAPON, made of steel and wood. The rest of Animyst deliberately makes very little sense, but that one detail speaks so clearly and loudly that I adore it.

The text to speech madness oddly fits in this game, sounds like a transmission from a hellish dimension or something.

i have to say, with every passing minute this video became more entrancing, and looked like a 10/10 creepypasta. And after watching the video, i'm 100% sure that this game is a memetic agent.

Now I know in which type of evil Josh turned after playing this cursed game, cause now it has a hundred players peak and 50 playing right now, it was brought to live it had never seen before. Truly a work of Master Necromancer, hats down.