While cleaning out a closet I found this huge paperback, published in 2003. It cost $19.99 plus tax and was almost certainly purchased at GameStop. It is essentially a walkthrough, with all sorts of character and lore information plus maps thrown in.
How times have changed! When the Solo MMO Player started playing video games around 2002, the xBox had been out a few months. Many games had walkthroughs and there were a few blogs about various PC games. Podcasts and Twitch and Discord were unheard of. Back then you could buy game discs at Best Buy, Target, GameStop, online, etc. Over the next 5 years, blogs exploded. There were plenty of player blogs that had lots and lots of information about the blog writer's favorite game. Some people collaborated on the larger websites. Very few people were paid for this--it was a labor of love. You can still see vestiges of this era in some of the blogs I reference here that haven't vanished or sites like The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.
Gradually I've watched the main game websites be purchased and consolidated. YouTube videos started to become more common as the verbal generation is replaced by the visual generation, then Twitch arrived with Discord not too far behind. Games are digital only. You don't actually buy a game, you buy digital access to it. Now the people who write for the big websites are paid and often have only a cursory acquaintance with the game instead of being obsessed with it. There are very few sources of information about a game in many cases. If you need help, it is hard to find.
So the Solo MMO blog hangs on. Hopefully some of the links I wrote about years ago aren't dead and you can still find useful information.
RIP gaming for fun. Corporate gaming is here to stay.
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