[Ennewi]

While not at the top of the list of favorites, one standout yet to be mentioned is Nox, specifically the online multiplayer mode. It was a good option whenever the EQ servers were down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nox_(video_game)

The development of the game started in 1995 as a personal project of Michael Booth,[5] the future technical director and lead gameplay designer of the game. An avid gamer, Booth began programming his own games on Apple II and Commodore VIC-20 computers while still at school, and started working on Nox "in a spare bedroom of [his] house" in college. To help produce the game, he co-founded Hyperion Technologies, a company that also worked on driving simulators. After Booth showed a demo of Nox to John Hight, an executive producer of Westwood Studios, at the 1997 Game Developers Conference, Westwood decided to acquire it and moved the development team to California.[9]

Booth originally envisioned the game as an "updated version of Atari's Gauntlet", focusing on real-time magical combat in the vein of Magic: The Gathering and Mortal Kombat.[3] Inspired by the "epic wizard battles" described in fantasy literature, Booth wanted to create a "multiplayer wizard battle game"[5] and decided to set it in a medieval fantasy setting.[3] It wasn't until Westwood started working on the game that it began to lean towards the RPG genre and two more classes (warrior and conjurer) and a single-player campaign were added.[5]

...

The multiplayer modes were inspired by the online first-person shooters, such as Quake and Unreal, both of which the development team played extensively.[3]