New MMOs tend to be so slick. Publisher Square Enix smoothed down FFXI’s rough edges with the MMO’s 2013 incarnation, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Its character creator is exceptional. Its tutorial is thorough. It’s effortless to figure out where you’re going, how to get there, who to talk to. The game’s graphics are beautiful and its systems coherent. Yet, I was struck by how low-stakes everything felt, despite the game’s overwhelming beauty and ease-of-play. Playing it with my MMO-loving friends, who whiled away their childhoods in a similar fashion, FFXIV and its modern MMO kin feel a little heartless.

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Shroud of the Avatar has heart and does feel like a throwback to at least one past MMO age. The player, an avatar in a medieval fantasy world, learns of a new evil that’s overtaking New Britannia. It’s a divided world, rebuilding after some cataclysm years ago. Its people are slowly developing mechanical technology, a fun insertion in the traditionally-styled MMO. After an Oracle determines the player’s class, she travels across the world, learning of the growing evil and fighting its ever-stronger incarnations. In Shroud of the Avatar’s online mode (there’s an offline one, too), you and a couple hundred players develop your Virtues to ward off evil. It sounds like a “glory days” MMO, looks like one, and plays like one, too.

Combat is a pretty basic auto-fight with a few extra skills thrown in—although you can opt for a deck-building mechanic for their skills. Looting a corpse means clicking on a dead body and taking their money and items. Talking to NPCs, you can ask them more questions with a keyword system (a la the Ultima franchise) that sometimes works and sometimes assigns you quests you don’t want. Players can also type whatever they want to NPCs, but whenever I did that, the NPCs responded something a little nonsensical. If you die, you have to wait about four minutes to respawn unless somebody resurrects you. Holding a torch means not holding a shield.

I appreciated how dedicated Shroud of the Avatar was to accessing the retro style of its predecessors. In practice, I felt like I’d played this game before, years ago. Although its story is filled with unique plot points and world-building details, I didn’t feel a desire to continue the game. Shroud of the Avatar felt all too familiar.

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Is a return of MMOs’ so-called glory days what I want, or do I want there to be new glory days? A decade after binging on the MMOs of the time, perhaps it’s time to admit my tastes have changed. Top-tier graphics can sell a game, I admit. Unique combat mechanics and a fresh world (preferably not medieval-style fantasy) might whet my palate to figure a game out. Perhaps once MMOs stop trying to recapture their own ghosts, we’ll see something really special.