The Digimon MMO You NEVER Knew About

Digimon Masters Online is a F2P tab target Digimon-controlling MMO that was released in 2009. I had never heard of the games existence until quite recently so i had to do a deep dive and see if the game is worth trying in 2024.

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[ventous]

I played during closed beta, open beta, release and for years. I can tell you this is literally a shell of what it used to be. Leveling used to take way longer, the tutorial explained way more, no as many bots. some of my fondest memories of that game was farming a specific digimon with my buddy for weeks hoping to hatch a 5/5 digimon (which is essentially a bigger and stronger version of said digimon). When the first big raid dropped and we found out you could get the OG tamers as a drop from that raid it was a crazy time. But even back in the day it was always heavily P2W.

[Danston_Phoenix]

my hope is one day we will have a great Digimon MMO.

[Arenumberg]

This levelling feels like what happens in an MMO this far in that just wants people to level and begin the "real game" (which here probably involves spending a lot of money)

[GoingBroke]

You know what's funnier is that this ISN'T the only Digimon MMO. For the record, Digimon never disappeared or anything. The latest season of the anime wrapped up a little over a year ago, and there have been somewhat regular game releases, and, God willing, there's a new Digimon RPG that we've been hearing bits and pieces of, in development for some time now. Hopefully, in a few days' time, we'll actually hear well, ANYTHING Digimon-related from Bandai's panel at Tokyo Game Show.

[acationx]

As someone who DMO was a big part of my childhood and teenage years, I wanna give my 2 cents: The game didn't used to be like this. It actually had a full tutorial (I saw the game go through 3-4 different iterations of it), the level up experience was more "normal", Yokohama Village used to be a whole map that had quests leading you all around it (One of the last times I played, this wasn't the case anymore: I assume these last two are to try and get new players into midgame faster).
I audibly GASPED when your "tutorial egg" was Piyomon (They used to give you a stanky Kunemon, I'm thankful for that at least). The story progression is also different from what I can see: You went from Data Center to File Island, it used to be Data Center to Western Area. File Island used to be the placed you'd go to for high risk high reward EXP. It's also important to note that this game has gone through MANY companies over the years and was plagued with problems since the beginning (bad translations, disconnects, exploits, bugs, bots).

Here are some core memories for my fellow DMO players:
- Intensely changing channels in Silver Lake to find out where the Kuwagamon raid was happening
- Desperately trying to click on the NPC's in Data Center but you keep clicking on everyone's shops (Data Center had 17 channels and they were always full)
- Farming Renamon for hours and STILL not dropping an egg (you know who u are, u furries)
- Using your parent's credit card to buy Riding Mode items
- Scamming the survey system for free ingame currency
- That period when every time you logged in, the patch notes were "Server Maintenance Announcement" "Server Maintenance Announcement" "Server Maintenance Announcement" "EMERGENCY Server Maintenance Announcement"

[ohiei]

There are digimons that are locked behind a gacha that you have to spend more than 3.000 dollars to get and there's quite a few people that have them lmao

[ulfrey]

This mmo is actually fairly well known in South America and Asia, like a lot of "obscure" mmos.

[LucaBarzola]

2010 player here . I came back after a 6 years break, i deeply hate how expensive, grindy and monotone it has become . They lack copyrights to digimons they sold so they are locked, and the game is soo expensive that i need half of the money i make in a month just to shoot a couple of gatcha with % 0.5 to get an item needed to endgame ... As an adult today i have less chances in the game than in 2010 as a kid

[marcopohl]

"A twenty foot angel spawned next to me" It was actually a demon...

[SenpaiXico]

I loved to see you tackle this game in 2024, a totally new player into this game with zero knowledge is something courageous to see honestly. I've been playing since 2012 and the tutorial has changed so many times throughout the years. I've done several characters to re-experience this new feeling and it's just gotten worse and worse. Really, nowadays as you saw it gives no sense of achievement and leaves you totally lost. Especially now that they introduced a new gacha system to all digimon evolutions, with no daily free way to do summons on you are dependent on people that spend to buy evolution items off from. When you picked your Steve, that was a new player package to get a digimon of your choosing from that list, once again not enough clarity into what you are actually exchanging.

I suppose one of the great changing factors for this game was in 2015 when the game changed companies, because no old players have complains of the game before 2015. The tutorials back then actually gave you a sense of playing and didn't let you one shot anything, you had to actually be at the target level and exp was so so little. What you did in 15mins it would take me like 2 weeks minimum of grinding to achieve as a new player at that time. When the level cap increased from 90 to 99 (currently it's 170) it took me at least 10 hours of killing mobs to get those 9 levels. Nowadays it takes you 20 minutes for that, but later levels get so so grindy as well that it doesn't matter, billions of exp that take weeks of grinding and they keep increasing levels.

As some people pointed out in the comments, this game is straight up pay to win, there is no excuses around it, I've been stuck in the "mid game" if you could call it that for half a decade because it's just not doable as a non-spender. The introduction of lootboxes and now the gacha system, along with license issues and revoked evolutions just keeps making it worse. Bots plague this game, as you were stuck in that quest due to the bot killing before you could reach them, as still do I when trying to level myself. Manual leveling has always been the major thing I do because I cannot do hard content, nor do I have the time to invest or even money to throw at this game. And yeah, 3000$+ evolutions is comical.

I've stepped away and came back to it more times than I can count but I can never fully abandon it, I always loved digimon and leveling different digimons and seeing their forms. I always enjoyed manually leveling with people and talking to them, helping newer players and guiding them on how to play. But it's just impossible today, I've seen several people quit the game, come back later and in two weeks of spending they get a stronger account than mine that is more than a decade old, all due to whaling. I go try to level up in the new spots that give "modern" experience rates, it's filled with bots. Alright then, I go to old leveling spots that take 10x the time to level up, they are also filled with bots.

Over the years there has been and still is a lot of drama and controversies. An overall lack of communication with the community between the GMs and players. it's just sad. I miss the casualty the game had, now it's grind for 8h daily and spend if you wanna keep up. Yeah it would take me hours to do stuff back then too, but I actually could do it and have fun, grinding for new digimon and showing it off to your friends. Nowadays anyone can get it in minutes and it get no actual feeling of "finally, I did it!", it's just, "I bought this".

It's very hard to put all of this into a short text, this is more than a decade of experience and so many things that happened, but overall I feel very sorry to newer players who are trying or thinking of trying this game out, it's just sad, so sad. Returning players even more, it's a literal water drop compared to an ocean. Veterans are used to all the bullcrap this game keeps giving and it's just hard to fully abandon it because it's all we got.

We were promised a remaster on unreal engine years ago (March 2021 I believe) but they give zero progress posts on that, in nearly 10 years they still have no interaction with the player base, we had at best 2 updates on how that remaster is going, and it tells your jack about it still. Only just a few weeks ago the game updated to 64bits, and it caused major issues which are still being fixed, it's just hilarious.

[Esotericspirits]

I knew about this game since early 2010s because it has the same publisher as one of the MMOs I play (Silkroad Online)
Even though I knew about this game, i never knew the mechanics so thanks for exploring the game for us!

[gamerraito]

Wow, I do not remember Digimon Masters Online feeling this... weird. I remembered always wanting to play this game as a kid, and the few times I did, I had a blast (before needing a password the next time I wanted to play that my mom never told me since my computer itself - not the game's login - always needed one to play it for some reason). It wasn't the best game in the world even back then, but it was alright for what it was and a sense of progression actually existed. The game still had issues like not explaining its mechanics well, but it treated itself as a proper MMO, fulfilling being a Digimon one at that.

But after watching this video, wow... It's like the devs just stopped caring and treated this game as if it's about to shutdown the following day.

[Kompyyy]

its crazy how much this game has actually changed in the past few years

[WVEY-]

this is my childhood game i still play to this day since 2013

[BijutsuYoukai]

Been playing DMO since about 2012 off and on. Spent maybe $300-$400 on the game over the time period through small purchases. Honestly all those bonuses/boosts you were getting have made the game a lot more f2p friendly as time has gone on and there are even events held every few months that give even more extra stuff to new players (Known as 'Jumping' events). There's still a lot of p2w in game - like the latest strongest U rank series of Digimon, but even f2ps can do a good deal of the content without actually having to pay. However, those boosts/etc do mean there's far less emphasis on actually doing the story in order, and fractures that questing structure. The myriad typos and mistranslations do not make things any better in that regard either. Partying up to do dungeons/etc is also a nightmare as its done through in-game yell/shout chat rather than any actual matchmaking or party finding system.

But it's really the best you've got currently if you want a Digimon MMO. There's the unofficial DMW server as well with rebalanced and custom Digimon, as well as their own unique events, but its still quite grindy and not super satisfying imo.

[MegaRare]

I think almost every digimon fan knew of this mmo.

[aladinocave]

This game use to be fun and fair but then they did this,

It use to be F2P friendly then became P2W

LIST

1. This game use to support free bucks and when you used it you could get the whole worth like

$5 would get you 500 currency, but now it’s 300

2.they made digimon eggs have ( mid data to make hatching eggs harder )

3.Only level 5 hatch level eggs can upgrade to higher size
so good like with level 3/4

4. The worst of them all is anti body x in digimon is a lottery, that have a low to luck base chance to complete

[denyingfate]

majority of mobs drops seals which u need 3000 of a specific type to activate stats, hence why the bot was farming patamons

[PiggyDash]

There is one based on the Tamers series, released 2 decades ago, and is still active.

[moistysomeone]

"you name it mon" was amazing