As MMO players, we take on the role of adventurers and heroes. We fight evil and save the world on a daily basis. But being a hero often means going where others fear to tread, and fighting evil means facing it in its lair. As a result, we sometimes end up in some pretty frightening places.
These are some of the darkest and most disturbing virtual locales found in the MMO genre.
8: Icecrown (World of Warcraft)
World of Warcraft isn’t a game many would think of as particularly scary, but over its many long years of operation, it has occasionally produced some fairly unnerving stuff.
Near the top of that list is Wrath of the Lich King’s Icecrown zone. Known as the roof of the world or the cold heart of death itself, Icecrown is a glacial wasteland home to the undead Scourge. Every inch of the zone exudes dread, and its land is so choked with the dead that the faction “towns” are actually flying ships patrolling high above the frozen ground, where it’s (slightly) safer.
7: Blue Mountain (The Secret World)
Let’s be upfront: The Secret World is going to dominate this list. It’s the only major horror MMO on the market, and even if it wasn’t, it would still dominate through its sheer mastery of creepy ambiance.
One of the earliest showcases of how frightening the game can be is the final zone of the New England region, Blue Mountain. From the lightless labyrinth of the Blue Ridge Mine, to the ghost-infested Franklin Mansion, to the Lovecraftian surrealism of the Moon Bog, to the grotesque living nests of the Draug, this entire zone is a cavalcade of nightmare fuel.
6: Orr (Guild Wars 2)
Intended to be the focus of the endgame when Guild Wars 2 first launched, Orr was once a thriving human kingdom, home to the god’s themselves, but an act of reckless magic blasted the once wondrous land beneath the sea, where it rotted for many years.
At the time of Guild Wars 2, Orr has been risen from the deaths by the elder dragon Zhaitan, its vast population turned into an army of ravenous undead.
Covered in macabre ruins and dying sea life, Orr is a surreal nightmare landscape, and the hordes of undead and near-constant world events mean you are never truly safe. In Orr, even the animals — from sharks to chickens — have been risen into undeath by Zhaitan, and this is truly a place where absolutely everything wants to kill you. It is not for the faint of heart.
5: Abandoned asylum (The Secret World)
Exclusive to the Dragon faction, the abandoned asylum is a burned out ruin players are sent to in order to investigate a dangerous sun cult, eventually opening the way to the Egypt region.
The asylum offers a throwback to Lovecraft-inspired games of yore by giving players a sanity meter of sorts. As they delve deeper into the mysteries of the asylum, they recieve a stacking insanity debuff that must be managed by salvaging bottles of medication.
As insanity increases, your character’s grip on reality will fade, and you will begin to see and hear impossible, terrifying things, and if your insanity should reach maximum stacks, you will suffer a grizzly death.
4: Kithicor Forest (EverQuest)
A horror from the early days of the MMO genre, Kithicor Forest is a place whose memory can still send a chill down the spines of EverQuest’s old guard.
During the day, the forest was a fairly standard stretch of MMO wilderness. A bit wilder and more confusing than average, but nothing too special.
But come nightfall, things got interesting.
Powerful undead began spawning all over the zone, and the darkness made navigating this already confusing zone all but impossible. Players were left to stumble through the darkness, with few paths and fewer landmarks, hoping they would survive the onslaught of the dead.
3: Karazhan Crypts (World of Warcraft)
One of the oldest and strangest mysteries found within the world of Azeroth is the crypts beneath the haunted tower of Karazhan.
These crypts are not accessible under normal circumstances, but MMO players being the industrious lot that they are, many have managed to glitch inside. While within the crypts, a persistent heartbeat can be heard, and they contain many strange subzones, by far the most memorable of which is the so-called “upside-down sinners”: chained corpses hanging upside down.
Fear often comes from the unknown, and it is the mystery of the Karazhan crypts that makes them so disturbing. What are they? What is their purpose? Are they a hint of some future content or abandoned plot thread, a random experiment by the developers, or something stranger still?
2: The Nursery (The Secret World)
Another nightmare-inducing experience from The Secret World, the Nursery is a secret laboratory hidden in the mountains of Transylvania, and it plays a central role in issue seven’s “A Dream to Kill” storyline.
Within the Nursery, the sinister Orochi Group conducted experiments on mystically gifted children and supernatural creatures, pacifying their subjects with a haunting tune known as the Sleepless Lullaby.
But inevitably, something went terribly wrong, and the Nursery became a blood-soaked charnel house stalked by unspeakable terrors.
In the end, it’s hard to say what’s more horrifying about the Nursery: what the scientists did to the children, or what the children did to the scientists.
1:The Fear Nothing Foundation (The Secret World)
The Secret World’s mastery of horror peaks with Tokyo’s Fear Nothing Foundation, a twisted cult masquerading as a youth self-help group.
It has little of the elements one associates with horror. The environments are brightly lit and cheerful, and there is no gore or jump scares. Instead, it finds much more subtle ways to frighten you.
Chairs move when your back is turned. The player slowly unravels the mystery of what happened at Fear Nothing by finding notes and letters from the children depicting the torture and indoctrination they endured. Through it all, you’re filled with a sense of futility as you realize you’ve come too late to save them, and it all builds to a finale that will haunt you for days, or even weeks.
In the end, the Fear Nothing moniker could not be more ironic.
