Mimesis Online was a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game created by the Polish company Tannhauser Gate. Open beta tests were launched in December 2001, followed by an official launch in January 2002.
The game was set in the year 5692, approximately 600 years after a cataclysm known as the "Day of Rage" destroyed the boundaries between various dimensions, merging Earth with several alien planets. The resulting new world, Mimesis, is inhabited by humans and a variety of nonhuman species, some civilized and friendly, some not.
After a few years, Mimesis Online shut down in March 2005. It is now mostly forgotten, with few screenshots available online, and only one surviving gameplay video
. However, the game's official website has been (mostly) backed up by the Internet Archive, and can be found here. The game's manual contains some details on the gameplay and lore. For those who would like to research the development history of the game, RPG Dot has a series of articles from 2001-2005.
This game featured the following tropes:
- After the End: The game took place in a post-apocalyptic world, set 600 years after a catastrophic event that devastated human civilization, as well as the civilizations of other merged worlds.
- Anti-Frustration Features: After you died and respawned, a red dot in the middle of the life meter would indicate the direction to your corpse, which you needed to reach to recover your money and items. This was helpful as the landscapes were large and easy to get lost in.
- Continuing is Painful: When a player died and respawned, they received an experience penalty, and lost all their items and money. They could be recovered from the corpse, but there was a time limit (24 hours when you're offline; one hour per player level when you're online) after which all the equipment was lost anyway. And, of course, someone else could get to the body first and steal all your stuff.
- Future Imperfect: The Day of Rage destroyed almost all records of the past, to the point where almost nothing is remembered from the pre-cataclysm years, not even what year it exactly was.
- Karma Meter: The game used a "fame level" mechanic. A player's fame level was depleted (even down to negative values) for Player Killing, and could be regained by fulfilling quests. The amount of lost fame was dependent on the victim's own fame level: killing someone with very high fame would mean a large penalty to your reputation, while killing someone with negative fame (i.e. a notorious player killer) would actually boost your reputation. At low fame, the player risked being attacked by lawman NPCs.
- One-Gender Race: Out of the two races available to players, humans came in male and female varieties, while the "hirudon" were described as a unisexual race.
- Patchwork World: The game's world, Mimesis, is the result of combining inhabited planets from across several universes.
- The Place: "Mimesis", according to official materials, is the name of the world where the action is set.
