The classic MMO, featuring titles such as Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Ultima Online, and others all have something in common which is missing from the modern MMO. That is they have open spaces, empty can describe some of the expanses in Everquest, especially with the current player-base. Scads of level 1 rats, snakes, and other fodder with no real goal in life except to be killed for experience. There was a category system in place for items that were just garbage and those which you could put to good use, but who really knows what Spider Goo is for. And don't look it up at your tradeskill trainer, they don't exist. So there was all this stuff. Half of it was useless, and you'd discover the use of the other half five levels after it was useful to you, a month in real time. As a result, it took forever.
The modern Massive Multiplayer Online game is a purpose built affair. Everything you see is there for a reason, and if you find something out of the ordinary, odds are you've missed something. The newer games are more streamlined, they tell you what you are supposed to be doing and if you are ever at a loss there's global chats, online resources, and sometimes a fully marked out map. Once you've picked an area clean and killed absolutely everything in the zone there are usually three or four quests giving you the option of heading to another zone, starting the whole process over again. World of Warcraft's rebuilding of the old world zones follows this model to a T. The developers have trimmed the fat, leaned out the juicy bits, and put it all on a plate in front of you. From your first click, to saving the universe, it is all planned. MMO developers have become overbearing gods, the string of your existence weaved into an efficient money making machine.
That's progress, right? Well we'd best dive into progression while we're at it. "Back in the old days," nobody had hitlists for rats. They were just there and you killed them because they were rats. Then you killed wolves, cause wolves are bigger than rats, and you have your first example of progression. Graduating to lions, tigers, and bears, oh my, you got there because killing bigger things and getting more expensive guts was your progress. Then you needed to group with other people because those Orcs are tightly packed, and you had two abilities and three scraps of ill fitting armor. End game progression is another topic, and a big one, so moving past that.
Multiplayer. That's in the name right? In what other genre are you going to play multiplayer and not even interact with the other players? In a shooter the least that will happen is someone will kill you. How can that make sense in a game that only has one mode which you are even paying extra for. Even outside of the realm of video games you don't play a board game by sequestering a quarter of the pieces and ignoring the other people. If you wanted to play Monopoly, but there was nobody around, would you play it alone? Would you? You sad, sad human being. That is to say people play games because they want to; right? If you aren't going to group up, don't play an MMO. This applies to MMO developers especially. Don't build your game with solo play as a main objective, because that is wrong. If there aren't going to be enough people playing to make solo play the only option, you are doing it wrong and shouldn't be wasting your time on solo content anyway.
What really is the big difference between modern MMOs and those decades old sacks of nostalgia? Modern MMOs are developed as games. Sit back from your daily quests and your fifty progress bars tracking everything from how much the bear people want to kill you to how shiny your armor is and you can begin to see the scaffolding. Classic MMOs were developed as worlds. There were no carefully strung together questlines laying a yellow brick road of experience ahead of you. Experience was harder to gain, but in lieu of grouping it gave time to explore, time to hand draw a map of your surroundings, time to mash a bunch of ingredients into an oven and hope something edible comes out. You know, things you might do in the real world if you were bored and had time to spare. There was opportunity to create your own experience out of a basic set of tools, boundaries, and ideas. Let's end with something that ends all our time in any world; death. Only natural.
There was that pesky cockroach of a feature, the experience bar. But that thing moved so slowly you'd best ignore it. Except when you died, which was a tragic experience. Which it very well should be. Death is wired into our brains as a very bad thing, the end of your physical existence. Take away the penalties and death no longer carries that significance. I mean, you don't even lose experience anymore. The worst thing that can happen now is you waste 5 minutes on your fighter jet of a flying mount and you are exactly where you were, nothing happened. Death used to be the equivalent of walking up an icy hill both ways during a blizzard with a pack of hungry wolves stalking your lunch of saltines and water melted from the snow pelting you in the face. The good old days. Death is something that is innately thought and fear provoking. The harsher you make death the more powerful it becomes as a game mechanic. Make it hurt.
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