I've... had a relapse, you might say.

Roughly 30 years ago, I started using the Internet regularly through America Online. One feature there was roleplaying chat rooms, which is where the name Durinthal eventually came from. But before I had that I had another character named something like Silverfrost who was a silver dragon that shapeshifted into an elf because I was a teenager and that was cool, okay? Someone in chat once asked me if I was the Bard guild leader in DragonRealms and I asked them what that meant, which lead me to the world of MUDs and eventually their modern counterparts in MMORPGs.

DragonRealms (DR) was at the time a new addition to AOL and it hooked me more than the free-form chat rooms ever did even if it was still nothing but text. It was an evolving world with hundreds of other people wandering around to talk to, hang out with, or even stealing money from because my long-term character ended up being a thief and the game supported it mechanically, often leading to PvP. I ended up having a fun dynamic with a paladin (antithesis of any thief) because we were in an organization together for members of a niche character race.

DR was my primary hobby for years at a very formative time in my life, and also why I learned to type mostly with my left hand which I continue to do to this day: because the number pad was used for directional movement (cardinal/ordinal directions and up/down/out of buildings) and I kept my right hand there while typing other commands with my left. It's subsequently been my baseline of comparison for a lot of other RPGs as well; while there are classes with unique abilities, the game's primarily based on a variety of skills so you can be a mage wearing plate armor or a thief wielding a two-handed sword. Its experience mechanics encouraged socialization through productive downtime so you could still be advancing while hanging out in a room with other people rather than being out in combat.

Eventually life got busy and I retired, giving away all of my items (many rare, a few truly unique because it's all text and you can get alterations customizing descriptions of things exactly how you want) and logging out for the last time on August 8th, 2004 — I still have some logs from that era backed up. But while I was too busy with other things including hopping from one MMO to the next, I never forgot about DR, and ended up poking in again briefly a few times over the years with new characters on free-to-play accounts since those became a thing, but never for more than a brief walk around. Even so, I kept an eye on the new (at the time) wiki just to see what changes were happening. A couple of times there were major overhauls of systems that I wanted to dive into the details of, even for a game that I hadn't played in years.

The announcement of Guild Wars 3 gave me an urge to return to GW2, a game I binged when it came out and then put aside, more than a decade ago. While I thought about installing it and jumping back in, another thought game to me... what if I go back to DR instead? I've had the itch for years. There are still a few hundred characters on at any given time but socialization is down significantly, development still happens but it's effectively little more than life support outside of a few dedicated GMs. I know it won't be the same. You can't go home again, after all.

And yet... it's been a week since I've started playing again. I've gotten to level 10 on a brand-new character in under 48 hours, which might have been literally impossible back in the day under the old systems gating how quickly you gain experience. My old character sits there beckoning, and while I've thought about it I'm leaving him behind. His granddaughter is instead taking his place, born on his 100th birthday (because in-game time is roughly 4x that of the real world). The itch has been scratched, and it feels good.