Certain things, like the audio-visual aspects, are entirely subjective and can never be surpassed again, especially when it comes to a game that constructed an inhabitable world out of them, where you spent countless hours forming social bonds and creating sweet memories that will haunt you for the rest of your life. But I still believe there is something objective to be said about why this game still remains one of my all-time favorites (in its past iteration ofc), while other MMOs have failed to grab me in any significant way.

There was always this talk of World of Warcraft and how it's so much better than everything else. Perfect World has always been viewed as a kind of low-tier cheap grindfest that isn't worth playing. I've played dozens of other MMORPGs since and still I have not seen another game do what Perfect World does. Upon examination, World of Warcraft turned out to be extremely linear, to the point that it's hard for me to even view it as an open-world game. Every location is surrounded by impassable mountains and has two narrow entry points. You are stuck to the ground and forced to complete quests in a more or less linear progression. Most MMOs I've played are like this.

Perfect World, on the other hand, is a game about freedom. It promises you a world without borders, and it commits to that vision fully. Not only are you free to traverse the entire map from the very start of the game, you can explore it in three dimensions. In other words, you can fly, and fly pretty much anywhere. And this is where the game ends up feeling like a much more believable world to me. You can go to the remotest parts of the map and find traces of human (or inhuman) presence there. Some tiny shack somewhere in the woods, an isolated temple in the mountains, ruins of an abandoned military fort on the side of a canyon, and so on, and so forth. Discovering these locations and pondering on the life and activities of the people or creatures that left them behind or currently occupy them is what endears you to this world and makes you wanna keep coming back.

I've seen some people, playing PW for the first time, freak out and laugh at the height of the player's jump. To me, as someone for whom this was their first MMO experience, it's the other games that felt weird. It simply does not make sense to me why you would limit your character's movement with realistic physics, when you're trying to build an engrossing fantasy world that the player would want to explore. This jump height was a necessity to climb on big structures or even tiny 1-story buildings. It's yet another thing that adds to that spirit of freedom the game cultivates. Also, it's just more fun.

You don't even have to do quests in this game. You can just start it and have your own Bilbo Baggins adventure by just traveling from one side of the map to the other. Which is something me and my friend did once. Instead of fighting enemies, we avoided them. And, whenever we met other travelers, we hung out with them and learned about them and the game. And then we'd discover amazing places, like castles floating in the sky, underwater structures, all manner of cities, towns, and villages, each with their own unique designs.

The first guild I ever joined was the best guild I've ever been a part of in any game ever. Every time I'd come home from school and log in, there'd already be a conversation going, and it was about various fun subjects, not just a discussion of the game's mechanics or some boring shit like that. And the chat interface here is infinitely more convenient than in WoW or any of its clones. People were always happy to help each other with quests, and sometimes lower-level players would join in, even if they couldn't help, just to go on adventures together. Of course, at the time, there was a necessity to join a guild, because there was no auto-pathing. You had to actually read your quests and then ask people for help. After auto-pathing and a bunch of other QoL improvements were introduced, the guild system kinda fell out of relevance.

I could talk about the actual gameplay, like stats, spells, mobs, etc., but I find that this stuff is usually the same in every MMO, and, honestly, the least interesting aspect of these games. I've never played an MMO to grind and level up, and I didn't do that with PW. I had fun with the game instead. I treated it as a place of wonder, and that's what it really was to me. Most other MMOs I've played are too focused on these mechanical aspects, I think they fail to capture the same feeling of freedom and discovery.

Sadly, this game fell to the same problem every GAAS falls to. Over time, the changes introduced to the game have gotten greedier and greedier. By now the official version of the game is nearly unrecognizable. I play the fan-favorite version 1.3.6 on pwclassic. That's still not the same though, because there are too few people there. It's always amazing to revisit this world, but, without other people, it's less of a world.