The joke is nothing is stopping you from recreating those difficult times in any game released today...
Did your character die? DELETE IT.
Are you camping a boss? SIT IN FRONT OF IT FOR 12 HOURS BEFORE YOU KILL IT.
Are you leveling too fast? DON'T KILL ANYTHING.
Miss being a wizard in EQ? PROP UP A BOOK IN FRONT OF YOUR MONITOR AND STARE AT IT FOR HALF AN HOUR AFTER EVERY KILL.
knock yourselves out. It's all in your hands. [mod edit]
I don't think the OP was "crying" just reminiscing.
All I remember was waiting forever to be allowed in a party unless you were a healer and killing yourself to stay in said party even if it meant no sleeping, eating, or toilet. But any level you gained was a huge accomplishment. Only to be taken away by deleveling in a crappy party the next day. And a lot of guild drama.
I have fond memories of a lot of the early MMOs, but I sure as hell don't miss many of the mechanics.
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
4) Parents would neglect their kids and leave them in feces and urine soaked diapers. Or when people would do a 13 day marathon leading to their death. Yup, I miss those days...
Just like the OP..people keep giving examples of tedious time sinks and calling them hard.
Nothing hard about tedium , and or, time sinks other than staying awake.
It's probably important to understand the context when people talk this way about the old games and use the word "hard".
Climbing Mt. Washington is not "hard". You start at the bottom, you put one foot in front of the other, you follow the trail and you get to the top. You then go reverse.
not - hard.
However not everyone can do it. So then what's "hard" about it?
It's more about perseverance, dedication, endurance and being resilient. It's those things that are being talked about when people talk about "hard". At least on the context your present.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
The joke is nothing is stopping you from recreating those difficult times in any game released today...
Did your character die? DELETE IT.
Are you camping a boss? SIT IN FRONT OF IT FOR 12 HOURS BEFORE YOU KILL IT.
Are you leveling too fast? DON'T KILL ANYTHING.
Miss being a wizard in EQ? PROP UP A BOOK IN FRONT OF YOUR MONITOR AND STARE AT IT FOR HALF AN HOUR AFTER EVERY KILL.
knock yourselves out. It's all in your hands. [mod edit]
What about raid bosses that took 200+ people to kill? Can't because of instances
You can increase the difficulty of a instanced raid boss that is player limited to 5 or 10 by not bringing your best gear.
You can increase the number of people needed to kill a non-instanced boss by bringing more players that are all under leveled.
You can do anything in these games. I know, I've done it. You just have to be creative. A mob of naked first level gnomes trying to kill Hogger. That's difficult, fun and all too funny. And it's available, RIGHT NOW.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
The biggest thing missing modern MMOs that very common in the old days was Kiting and real crowd control.
EQ had quad kiting and there were dungeons that were so difficult you couldn't do with a chanter. Anyone who says the old games weren't hard probably never quad kited or played a chanter. If you died you had do a corpse run and get your equipment back. God help you if you died at the bottom of really dangerous dungeon. You really knew who your friends were if they helped you get your corpse back. It was this adversity that built up the original EQ1 community.
I never played L1 but Lineage II (L2) was the biggest grind fest and the mobs were tough. On Deviane server there was not a single level capped player until 8 months after release. Level 30 mobs were as strong as level 30 players so fighting one solo meant ending the fight with only 1 or 2 hp left. Thank god for potions and soul shots. But to afford soul shots it meant leveling crafting alts was a mandatory part of leveling your main.
L2 also had the "Manor system" which was a complicated material farming system.
Then there was Star Wars Galaxies which pre CU / pre NGE forced you to level up every single class in the game to max level before you were allowed to play as a Jedi. Not many people had unlocked Jedi in the early days. To top it off if you died in pvp with your Jedi it was a permanent death. There was no revive, just back to the character create screen and restart at level 1. The only consolidation was your dead character would appear as a Jedi ghost to the new character that you just created which in a way was very awesome.
The so called glory days of mmos didnt attract enough players. Back then it was cheaper so mmos could stay alive with empty servers. If mmos of today only catered to that small audience from the past, we wouldnt have mmos to play.
People didnt do stupid shit and risk dying. Not when 1 death would equal 8 hours of grinding. Without risk what fun is there. Oh we died 10 times.. lets keep banging our heads against the wall. I think not.
Reason i play hardcore non mmo games like Path of exile or Full loot MMO's
The joke is nothing is stopping you from recreating those difficult times in any game released today...
Did your character die? DELETE IT.
Are you camping a boss? SIT IN FRONT OF IT FOR 12 HOURS BEFORE YOU KILL IT.
Are you leveling too fast? DON'T KILL ANYTHING.
Miss being a wizard in EQ? PROP UP A BOOK IN FRONT OF YOUR MONITOR AND STARE AT IT FOR HALF AN HOUR AFTER EVERY KILL.
knock yourselves out. It's all in your hands. [mod edit]
What about raid bosses that took 200+ people to kill? Can't because of instances
The sleeper from Everquest however that boss was intended not to get killed :P but after 3 hours and 15 min and 26% hp remaining the devs despawned the mob because the thought it was being engaged in a unintended manner. However 2 days later on Nov 2003 the sleeper was killed Ironically on the PvP server of all things, PvP is one of the biggest driving forces in games imo, atleast in the older games these days people rather play solo and they cant fix certain things solo, older games PvE orinated people grouped together to combat the PvPers and take things into there hands not these days though.
I played Everquest from 1999 I would not call it hard more inconvenient. Hard for me personally is avoiding aoe's and following boss mob patterns fast enough and not make mistakes. I find action combat hard but Everquest was never hard for me even when I did a few 30-40 hour corpse recovery. What that was not hard but tedious because I could not do it alone I just needed help and if worse came to worst a necromancer to summon my corpse and a cleric to rez me to the maximum amount I could recover. Even when I lost levels in Fear runs I made it back . That is not hard just time consuming.
I found the coils in FFXIV hard .I find games that require me to move fast or play skillfully using mouse and keyboard hard. Old MMORPGs were not hard I'm afraid just bothersome and tiresome.
As I recall it, games in general were more difficult, when I was a kid. That isn't just remembering it as more difficult as it was either. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDOZbvE01Fk
Games have gotten easier. But I think in large part that it is due to them getting better on a technical level. Which makes them easier to use more intuitively. Because the way things work with them now makes more sense.
Originally posted by Abuz0r It's just things you don't do, or even need to do know that every game is super easy mode now. Everybody wins and everybody gets a prize!
Yes OP
EASY - This is a trick to add to the shallowness of newer mmos.
How ?.....Think of it like this, If a game were made easy with fast leveling, developers need less content to their games. Say you were level 24 for three days. Can you imagine the amount of content needed for just that level alone ?
Earlier mmos were made with way more content. Today you do 2 quest and your level 25 !
Games are now cheap, yet Marketing can blame it on responding to players request to make games easy....It's a lie !
Treasure chests spawning randomly around the world(negated now by radar hacks), albeit often with traps.
Building my first log cabin and figuring out how to decorate it by building a bed with pillows recovered from shipwrecks and a fireplace with artifact rocks, ore and dyed cloth, etc., and looting candlesticks, bowls of fruit and other "rare" items from dungeons(now everything is bought from a cash shop or npc or occasionally still made by a crafter)
Being known as a trustworthy blacksmith that wouldn't steal a player's armour when repairing it, or their mats when they supplied them to have you build a new set of armor or a good quality weapon for them.
Dying to a mongbat, the very first creature I tried to kill.... lol
Sure skilling up was tedious, but it also gave a sense of accomplishment when you reached your goal, GM at last! The worst part for me was always dying, I have a very poor sense of direction and dang it trying to get back to my corpse even without that mean liche camping it, was difficult for me and although there were always other players willing to help they often had to travel a distance to get to you while you sat there and watched your corpse get looted by the mobs.
Anyway, if they weren't mostly fond memories for most of us, I doubt any of us would be here today discussing where we think mmorpgs went wrong, or right, because we just wouldn't care.
I do believe the audience has changed including the people who played those games.
I know my generation was a lot more aggressive in our younger years then the current ones.
We didn't mind suffering to get to the end goal as we were used to it and perhaps even started to enjoy the suffering in some way (grinding the same content and pushing yourself to exhaustion).
It was a time of introverts who kept their feelings inside and were more prone to blowing up.
Being angry, yelling at people, and making fun of people/things was an accepted norm.
Trying to break the rules (just to show it could be done) was part of the norm. We were a very rebellious and out of control generation.
I think some of us still have trouble living in this more tame society. Even in games and on forums we have to be polite and follow the rules. That is something many of us find difficult to adapt to. Most kids these days are taught to be the opposite of that in most cases. It is likely for the better, but also kind of boring.
I simple feel this is all to do with the changing of the times, society, and the large impact the growth of the Internet has had.
I remember those days having played a lot of games like that, Legend of Mir being one no max level , you had to grind for hours just to get 0.025 % at higher levels and people loved it . mainly because of the strong community but it was great .
I loved all those old games and played them for many happy years back in the day, but I wouldn't say they were hard.
Needing a long time to reach max level has nothing to do with the game being hard or not.
Having a harsh death penaly has nothing to do with the game being hard or not, you could easily put very harsh penalties in 0skill 1 button spam-clicking games.
Forced grouping has nothing to do with difficulty, you can have very easy group content, you can also have hard solo content.
Etc.
Those games weren't hard, they just were designed to do a specific thing (keep people playing for a long time), simply because back than that approach worked well due to almost no competition and a quite specific main target audience. But the times have changed. The markets and audiences have changed. Thus the games had to adapt.
I loved all those old games and played them for many happy years back in the day, but I wouldn't say they were hard.
Needing a long time to reach max level has nothing to do with the game being hard or not.
Having a harsh death penaly has nothing to do with the game being hard or not, you could easily put very harsh penalties in 0skill 1 button spam-clicking games.
Forced grouping has nothing to do with difficulty, you can have very easy group content, you can also have hard solo content.
Etc.
Those games weren't hard, they just were designed to do a specific thing (keep people playing for a long time), simply because back than that approach worked well due to almost no competition and a quite specific main target audience. But the times have changed. The markets and audiences have changed. Thus the games had to adapt.
I would argue that those things are difficult.
Generally reaching max level was hard because you needed a certain determination to get there. It's actually not easy to repeat the same thing over and over again all day long. Eventually it wears on you and starts to break you down (health wise).
Harsh death penalties don't really exist in today's games. Generally they forced you to play the game to a certain level of perfection in order to advance. You couldn't really afford to die multiple times. You had to learn from your mistakes.
I don't think any of the games had forced grouping. Everything was setup for groups, but certain classes could solo certain mobs using certain tactics. None the less the game being setup to be played with heavily encouraged reliance on others did make it more difficult. It's almost always more difficult to have to compromise and work with other people then it is to work alone. I know as I soloed most of my time in old MMOs. I didn't want to commit to a large time segment and have to share things with other people. I also felt it more rewarding to solo group content and see what I could accomplish on my own. I did enjoy interacting with others along the way once in a while though.
Overall MMOs were just a more trying experience that required a lot of patience and persistence. They are not better or worse then todays MMOs. They are simple different. It's been covered many times. There are other reasons that it was harder including things like having to deal with the real impact others could have on your game experience.
I remember the old days of Lineage 2 when you were fighting and our health got low we would all have to sit down on the ground for a while and let our health regain. We would just sit and talk about how one day we would be somebody.
When you died the penalty was so severe that you would lay on the ground until a clan healer would come out to you and resurrect you because then you would not suffer the penalty. A death could set you back days for xp.
Sometimes when you died you would drop a piece of your armor on the ground and hoped a clannie was around to come pick it up for you before another person grabbed it. It took months to get weapons and armor so losing a piece was devastating.
Killing a the wrong person would put you on KOS ( Kill On Site ) which made a lot of people actually have to reroll if they killed the wrong person because it was impossible to xp when someone would always find you and kill you.
Open world dungeons where you would actually meet other people inside of them.
Spending all day doing open world raids which dropped items and we would auction them off within the group and split the money within the group. It was a good way to make money when you got low on coin.
On my first toon I spent 2 weeks in the starter town before I was able to go the next town. We did not have enough money to use the gatekeeper so we had buy a boat ticket which was cheap and actually have to wait on a boat to come and pick us up and take us to the next town.
I can keep going but if a game came out today like this I would be there day 1. Lineage 3 my faith in the genre is in you.
I loved all those old games and played them for many happy years back in the day, but I wouldn't say they were hard.
Needing a long time to reach max level has nothing to do with the game being hard or not.
Having a harsh death penaly has nothing to do with the game being hard or not, you could easily put very harsh penalties in 0skill 1 button spam-clicking games.
Forced grouping has nothing to do with difficulty, you can have very easy group content, you can also have hard solo content.
Etc.
Those games weren't hard, they just were designed to do a specific thing (keep people playing for a long time), simply because back than that approach worked well due to almost no competition and a quite specific main target audience. But the times have changed. The markets and audiences have changed. Thus the games had to adapt.
I would argue that those things are difficult.
Generally reaching max level was hard because you needed a certain determination to get there. It's actually not easy to repeat the same thing over and over again all day long. Eventually it wears on you and starts to break you down (health wise).
Harsh death penalties don't really exist in today's games. Generally they forced you to play the game to a certain level of perfection in order to advance. You couldn't really afford to die multiple times. You had to learn from your mistakes.
I don't think any of the games had forced grouping. Everything was setup for groups, but certain classes could solo certain mobs using certain tactics. None the less the game being setup to be played with heavily encouraged reliance on others did make it more difficult. It's almost always more difficult to have to compromise and work with other people then it is to work alone. I know as I soloed most of my time in old MMOs. I didn't want to commit to a large time segment and have to share things with other people. I also felt it more rewarding to solo group content and see what I could accomplish on my own. I did enjoy interacting with others along the way once in a while though.
Overall MMOs were just a more trying experience that required a lot of patience and persistence. They are not better or worse then todays MMOs. They are simple different. It's been covered many times. There are other reasons that it was harder including things like having to deal with the real impact others could have on your game experience.
I think people really understate EQ's difficutly. Wandering mobs, wandering high level mobs, difficulty of mobs your level, in ability to escape failing encounters, trains, mobs that ran and called for help were all part of things that simply aren't in games now.
Originally posted by cribett I remember those days having played a lot of games like that, Legend of Mir being one no max level , you had to grind for hours just to get 0.025 % at higher levels and people loved it . mainly because of the strong community but it was great .
I played a MUD that had to up its level cap (for the first time ever) near the end of Year Fifteen.
Took that long for someone to get within spittin' distance of the first cap.
The "grind" (I suppose) was pretty excessive by MMO standards.You tended to stick to the same general hunting area, with the same people, for half a year at a time. Make three to five levels, then you'd be ready to move "up" a zone.
But it wasn't the combat mechanics or the grindiness that made the game attractive. Pretty mindless, really, repeating essentially the same battle again and again and again.
"Strong Community" is just a given in that sort of situation. Gabbing with your friends (while not paying much attention to the combat) is the norm. Same group of people in the same zone, week after week? Yeah, you knew all of them, every one.
People are much more entertaining than mechanics anyway.
It's not that modern games lack people. It's just simply that they lack the snail-crawl leveling pace necessary to get to know (random persons X and Y hunting the same area).
2) You shared your account with 2 ppl so as a team you could have the best character.
3) If you died you were so screwed.......
What else...?
I had maxed toons in UO and SWG in less than 6 months and I dont play very much. I never shared my accounts with anyone and had so much gold from fishing in UO that I had a fully decked out keep, a boat load of +5 weapons and dying didnt matter to me at all.
Are you sure you played the old school MMO's? Granted you made your own fun in those games which was much more awesome than a themepark game and there was always a chance you would run into some mob that would kill you but I dont think they were that much harder.
"Sean (Murray) saying MP will be in the game is not remotely close to evidence that at the point of purchase people thought there was MP in the game." - SEANMCAD
Originally posted by rojoArcueid The so called glory days of mmos didnt attract enough players. Back then it was cheaper so mmos could stay alive with empty servers. If mmos of today only catered to that small audience from the past, we wouldnt have mmos to play.
This is false. Lineage and Lineage II had huge populations and these were some of the hardest MMOs ever made. Both games had over 2 million subs each at their high points. What modern game pulls in 2+ million subs besides WoW.
What has really changed is there wasn't a lot of choice in MMOs in the early 2000s. The only real choices back then was Ultima Online, Everquest, Lineage 1 and 2, or DoAC and Star War Galaxies. It was either play those or play nothing. In 2015 there are 1000 different MMOs to choose from.
Comments
I don't think the OP was "crying" just reminiscing.
All I remember was waiting forever to be allowed in a party unless you were a healer and killing yourself to stay in said party even if it meant no sleeping, eating, or toilet. But any level you gained was a huge accomplishment. Only to be taken away by deleveling in a crappy party the next day. And a lot of guild drama.
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
It's probably important to understand the context when people talk this way about the old games and use the word "hard".
Climbing Mt. Washington is not "hard". You start at the bottom, you put one foot in front of the other, you follow the trail and you get to the top. You then go reverse.
not - hard.
However not everyone can do it. So then what's "hard" about it?
It's more about perseverance, dedication, endurance and being resilient. It's those things that are being talked about when people talk about "hard". At least on the context your present.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
You can increase the difficulty of a instanced raid boss that is player limited to 5 or 10 by not bringing your best gear.
You can increase the number of people needed to kill a non-instanced boss by bringing more players that are all under leveled.
You can do anything in these games. I know, I've done it. You just have to be creative. A mob of naked first level gnomes trying to kill Hogger. That's difficult, fun and all too funny. And it's available, RIGHT NOW.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
The biggest thing missing modern MMOs that very common in the old days was Kiting and real crowd control.
EQ had quad kiting and there were dungeons that were so difficult you couldn't do with a chanter. Anyone who says the old games weren't hard probably never quad kited or played a chanter. If you died you had do a corpse run and get your equipment back. God help you if you died at the bottom of really dangerous dungeon. You really knew who your friends were if they helped you get your corpse back. It was this adversity that built up the original EQ1 community.
I never played L1 but Lineage II (L2) was the biggest grind fest and the mobs were tough. On Deviane server there was not a single level capped player until 8 months after release. Level 30 mobs were as strong as level 30 players so fighting one solo meant ending the fight with only 1 or 2 hp left. Thank god for potions and soul shots. But to afford soul shots it meant leveling crafting alts was a mandatory part of leveling your main.
L2 also had the "Manor system" which was a complicated material farming system.
Then there was Star Wars Galaxies which pre CU / pre NGE forced you to level up every single class in the game to max level before you were allowed to play as a Jedi. Not many people had unlocked Jedi in the early days. To top it off if you died in pvp with your Jedi it was a permanent death. There was no revive, just back to the character create screen and restart at level 1. The only consolidation was your dead character would appear as a Jedi ghost to the new character that you just created which in a way was very awesome.
The only thing that stands in the way, now or ever, is available leisure time.
Just exactly like the "good old days".
Reason i play hardcore non mmo games like Path of exile or Full loot MMO's
The sleeper from Everquest however that boss was intended not to get killed :P but after 3 hours and 15 min and 26% hp remaining the devs despawned the mob because the thought it was being engaged in a unintended manner. However 2 days later on Nov 2003 the sleeper was killed Ironically on the PvP server of all things, PvP is one of the biggest driving forces in games imo, atleast in the older games these days people rather play solo and they cant fix certain things solo, older games PvE orinated people grouped together to combat the PvPers and take things into there hands not these days though.
http://news.mmosite.com/content/2008-12-23/20081223084659416,3.shtml
I played Everquest from 1999 I would not call it hard more inconvenient. Hard for me personally is avoiding aoe's and following boss mob patterns fast enough and not make mistakes. I find action combat hard but Everquest was never hard for me even when I did a few 30-40 hour corpse recovery. What that was not hard but tedious because I could not do it alone I just needed help and if worse came to worst a necromancer to summon my corpse and a cleric to rez me to the maximum amount I could recover. Even when I lost levels in Fear runs I made it back . That is not hard just time consuming.
I found the coils in FFXIV hard .I find games that require me to move fast or play skillfully using mouse and keyboard hard. Old MMORPGs were not hard I'm afraid just bothersome and tiresome.
As I recall it, games in general were more difficult, when I was a kid. That isn't just remembering it as more difficult as it was either. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDOZbvE01Fk
Games have gotten easier. But I think in large part that it is due to them getting better on a technical level. Which makes them easier to use more intuitively. Because the way things work with them now makes more sense.
Yes OP
EASY - This is a trick to add to the shallowness of newer mmos.
How ?.....Think of it like this, If a game were made easy with fast leveling, developers need less content to their games. Say you were level 24 for three days. Can you imagine the amount of content needed for just that level alone ?
Earlier mmos were made with way more content. Today you do 2 quest and your level 25 !
Games are now cheap, yet Marketing can blame it on responding to players request to make games easy....It's a lie !
I mostly remember how much fun it was ...
Treasure chests spawning randomly around the world(negated now by radar hacks), albeit often with traps.
Building my first log cabin and figuring out how to decorate it by building a bed with pillows recovered from shipwrecks and a fireplace with artifact rocks, ore and dyed cloth, etc., and looting candlesticks, bowls of fruit and other "rare" items from dungeons(now everything is bought from a cash shop or npc or occasionally still made by a crafter)
Being known as a trustworthy blacksmith that wouldn't steal a player's armour when repairing it, or their mats when they supplied them to have you build a new set of armor or a good quality weapon for them.
Dying to a mongbat, the very first creature I tried to kill.... lol
Sure skilling up was tedious, but it also gave a sense of accomplishment when you reached your goal, GM at last! The worst part for me was always dying, I have a very poor sense of direction and dang it trying to get back to my corpse even without that mean liche camping it, was difficult for me and although there were always other players willing to help they often had to travel a distance to get to you while you sat there and watched your corpse get looted by the mobs.
Anyway, if they weren't mostly fond memories for most of us, I doubt any of us would be here today discussing where we think mmorpgs went wrong, or right, because we just wouldn't care.
I do believe the audience has changed including the people who played those games.
I know my generation was a lot more aggressive in our younger years then the current ones.
We didn't mind suffering to get to the end goal as we were used to it and perhaps even started to enjoy the suffering in some way (grinding the same content and pushing yourself to exhaustion).
It was a time of introverts who kept their feelings inside and were more prone to blowing up.
Being angry, yelling at people, and making fun of people/things was an accepted norm.
Trying to break the rules (just to show it could be done) was part of the norm. We were a very rebellious and out of control generation.
I think some of us still have trouble living in this more tame society. Even in games and on forums we have to be polite and follow the rules. That is something many of us find difficult to adapt to. Most kids these days are taught to be the opposite of that in most cases. It is likely for the better, but also kind of boring.
I simple feel this is all to do with the changing of the times, society, and the large impact the growth of the Internet has had.
I loved all those old games and played them for many happy years back in the day, but I wouldn't say they were hard.
Needing a long time to reach max level has nothing to do with the game being hard or not.
Having a harsh death penaly has nothing to do with the game being hard or not, you could easily put very harsh penalties in 0skill 1 button spam-clicking games.
Forced grouping has nothing to do with difficulty, you can have very easy group content, you can also have hard solo content.
Etc.
Those games weren't hard, they just were designed to do a specific thing (keep people playing for a long time), simply because back than that approach worked well due to almost no competition and a quite specific main target audience. But the times have changed. The markets and audiences have changed. Thus the games had to adapt.
I would argue that those things are difficult.
Generally reaching max level was hard because you needed a certain determination to get there. It's actually not easy to repeat the same thing over and over again all day long. Eventually it wears on you and starts to break you down (health wise).
Harsh death penalties don't really exist in today's games. Generally they forced you to play the game to a certain level of perfection in order to advance. You couldn't really afford to die multiple times. You had to learn from your mistakes.
I don't think any of the games had forced grouping. Everything was setup for groups, but certain classes could solo certain mobs using certain tactics. None the less the game being setup to be played with heavily encouraged reliance on others did make it more difficult. It's almost always more difficult to have to compromise and work with other people then it is to work alone. I know as I soloed most of my time in old MMOs. I didn't want to commit to a large time segment and have to share things with other people. I also felt it more rewarding to solo group content and see what I could accomplish on my own. I did enjoy interacting with others along the way once in a while though.
Overall MMOs were just a more trying experience that required a lot of patience and persistence. They are not better or worse then todays MMOs. They are simple different. It's been covered many times. There are other reasons that it was harder including things like having to deal with the real impact others could have on your game experience.
I remember the old days of Lineage 2 when you were fighting and our health got low we would all have to sit down on the ground for a while and let our health regain. We would just sit and talk about how one day we would be somebody.
When you died the penalty was so severe that you would lay on the ground until a clan healer would come out to you and resurrect you because then you would not suffer the penalty. A death could set you back days for xp.
Sometimes when you died you would drop a piece of your armor on the ground and hoped a clannie was around to come pick it up for you before another person grabbed it. It took months to get weapons and armor so losing a piece was devastating.
Killing a the wrong person would put you on KOS ( Kill On Site ) which made a lot of people actually have to reroll if they killed the wrong person because it was impossible to xp when someone would always find you and kill you.
Open world dungeons where you would actually meet other people inside of them.
Spending all day doing open world raids which dropped items and we would auction them off within the group and split the money within the group. It was a good way to make money when you got low on coin.
On my first toon I spent 2 weeks in the starter town before I was able to go the next town. We did not have enough money to use the gatekeeper so we had buy a boat ticket which was cheap and actually have to wait on a boat to come and pick us up and take us to the next town.
I can keep going but if a game came out today like this I would be there day 1. Lineage 3 my faith in the genre is in you.
I think people really understate EQ's difficutly. Wandering mobs, wandering high level mobs, difficulty of mobs your level, in ability to escape failing encounters, trains, mobs that ran and called for help were all part of things that simply aren't in games now.
I played a MUD that had to up its level cap (for the first time ever) near the end of Year Fifteen.
Took that long for someone to get within spittin' distance of the first cap.
The "grind" (I suppose) was pretty excessive by MMO standards.You tended to stick to the same general hunting area, with the same people, for half a year at a time. Make three to five levels, then you'd be ready to move "up" a zone.
But it wasn't the combat mechanics or the grindiness that made the game attractive. Pretty mindless, really, repeating essentially the same battle again and again and again.
"Strong Community" is just a given in that sort of situation. Gabbing with your friends (while not paying much attention to the combat) is the norm. Same group of people in the same zone, week after week? Yeah, you knew all of them, every one.
People are much more entertaining than mechanics anyway.
It's not that modern games lack people. It's just simply that they lack the snail-crawl leveling pace necessary to get to know (random persons X and Y hunting the same area).
- Albert Einstein
I had maxed toons in UO and SWG in less than 6 months and I dont play very much. I never shared my accounts with anyone and had so much gold from fishing in UO that I had a fully decked out keep, a boat load of +5 weapons and dying didnt matter to me at all.
Are you sure you played the old school MMO's? Granted you made your own fun in those games which was much more awesome than a themepark game and there was always a chance you would run into some mob that would kill you but I dont think they were that much harder.
This is false. Lineage and Lineage II had huge populations and these were some of the hardest MMOs ever made. Both games had over 2 million subs each at their high points. What modern game pulls in 2+ million subs besides WoW.
What has really changed is there wasn't a lot of choice in MMOs in the early 2000s. The only real choices back then was Ultima Online, Everquest, Lineage 1 and 2, or DoAC and Star War Galaxies. It was either play those or play nothing. In 2015 there are 1000 different MMOs to choose from.