I miss the sense of adventure and danger in MMOs.

[Havenae]

Wait for Everquest Next

Don't.

EQN is becoming too much of a Unicorn. Go check out Landmark (you know, what they're using as a base to develop EQN) before you make judgment on how awesome EQN is going to be. Too many issues have arised of late for any of us to hold that game out as a final beacon of hope. Storybricks is gone. 'DayBreak' is no longer SoE, and no longer belongs to Sony. Dave Georgeson is no longer on project, not even with the studio anymore for that matter. Not to mention emergent AI is really just a clusterfuck of tangled webs when you sit down and really start to think about it. I mean they had some amazing ideas and their pitch two years ago was very inspiring... But then we've heard absolutely nothing but bad news since then... SO... I wouldn't count on it.


For the OP (On topic):

I miss the old days of MMOs. I've played online since I was a teenager, I'm 36 now, so I've ran the gambit here. Things were a lot different back then. We didn't have 'gamers' with this sense that the only thing that matters is end game and gear progression. We used to be in it for the adventure. We used to be in it for the community. Not really anymore. I have a lot of fond memories of games like Everquest, Ultima Online, FFXI. Knowing one wrong step could be your last. Spending a couple weeks to a month or more to progress just my character. I even miss having a designated puller who wasn't the tank.


I don't miss trains to zone, deleveling because I died. and for the most part I don't miss the unnecessary 'danger'. Mainly because I know we're never going to be compensated for that danger. It's a different time for this genre. Too many people want it easy. Including me. Full time job, family, the works. I don't have the time to spend hours upon hours online gaming anymore like I did back then when I actually enjoyed those things. Now days, if I had to spend 30 to an hour blasting through mobs just to get somewhere, that might be half my play time gone for that day. And for what? So I can feel a little nostalgia meanwhile SE didn't give me anything worthwhile? 1/11119th of a level?

No thanks.

[Asierid]

Snip

This. Finally, someone with a realistic outlook on how things used to be compared to today without all this extra crap in an attempt to fluff up what was now (In the grand scheme of things) a terrible idea.

This is like people talking about how a Gremlin was a bad ass car and deserves a ton of praise compared to the typical Toyota Corolla of today.

[Rumpelstiltzkin]

Stuff

I agree that EQN was looking more promising before all of the Daybreak news happened, but I still have my hopes up. I bought Landmark back in Alpha so I know all about it. As for Storybricks and all that I never really cared about it. I never cared about it and I never thought it was going to work anywhere near the level they talked about it working so it being gone makes little difference to me. The important thing about EQN is and always has been the basic design philosophy which is a lot more about adventure, exploration and options/variety in terms of the world, progression and combat. This compared to a game like XIV which is about grinding tomes, vertical progression, homogenization in an instanced hub based game where content is replaced rather than build upon as time goes on. Dave Georgeson leaving is not something I am happy about, nor am I sad because I don't really know what it means yet and anyone who says they do is just lying lol. Like I said was I more optimistic before? Yes because turmoil and big changes like these are generally not a great thing in the middle of development, but I am not going to throw in the towel either considering what they were talkig about that is now gone was a pipedream to begin with and was not what I cared about regardless.

As for old days MMO I don't miss the things you are talking about either, but I also think there is a happy medium and one thing does not have to exclude the other, I never understood that idea that anything not using the WoW design is hardcore and never going to work because people are now casuals. Especially when so many of the players are quitting/mmo hopping because of that very same design which is outdated. There are a lot of people like you who want to sit in town and wait for queue to pop, but there are a lot of people who would enjoy something different too. It does not have to be more hardcore or timeconsuming overall, it would just be a different experience entirely where for example travel is made a part of the experience.

Instead of me teleporting all over and grinding a single dungeon over and over and over to get tomes for two weeks to get my item I would spend my time by traveling to that large mountain you see in the distance in a dangerous area where you are going to hunt a legendary dragon and part of the dungeon/raid is the actual traveling there. On the way you face other monsters and puzzles and in the end maybe you might actually end up somewhere else because you realize hell there is a cave halfway to the mountain that leads elsewhere, down to another even more dangerous beast. Open world, choices, puzzles, secrets etc all of it being a part of the experience and it does not matter if you only have one hour to play because you've been playing the game the whole time. I have one hour of playtime per night and instead of doing a dungeon 12 times that week to reach the tome cap I actually do one long journey through the land and kill a monster to get the same loot I would have gotten via tomes. The difficulty of the monsters on the way could be like what they are in instances in XIV, but it would not be as linear, it would require choices and solving puzzles sometimes, all in the open world that is then dangerous. Do you see the difference? I spend the same time getting the same end reward, but I do it in completely different ways. I mean I am not saying it has to take even the same amount of time, but I think you get my point. Seeing my daily progress is looking at my map instead of going to the resource tab and see how many more tomes until I reach the cap.

This is combined with a lot more horizontal progression that is, this vertical progression they have here is horrible. Such a waste of resources to constantly replace everything you develop whilst content never grows. You might not like a game like this, that is just a matter of opinion and it is neither wrong nor right, but it has nothing to do with having less playtime.