I consider myself an older gamer. I started out in UO, and I moved to EverQuest when it went live. Dark Age of Camelot held me for five years, and I played it from day one. I stll have maps of all the orignal zones in EverQuest. It is amazing how involved in a game we were.

To answer the question; It is quite simple. It was the players/people that we played with. I played with the same core group of players for years and years. We became friends and guild mates etc.. It was a different time for sure for the player base of MMOs. There were very few people who jumped from game to game or guild to guild. Guilds were constant. To give a example, I play WAR right now. I have been in three guilds, and all three guilds have folded. People come and go all the time. There isnt that same constant that there was in EverQuest or Dark Age Camelot in the early days.  The players that I played with back then were awesome. To this day, I still talk to them, but most of all the old EQ players do not play mmos anymore, Sadly.

Well, lemme tell you a bit about two of those that I've played (AO and EQ) and why parts of them made the perfect MMO. Parts.

EQ. The two things I loved most about this game were the HUGE, open world (it took literally hours to cross on foot, and boat trips didn't have a stupd loading screen and voila you're acrtoss the world...you sat through the whole ride), and the open faction system. It made a real, solid world that felt gigantic and real. And the faction system made it so that anyone could group with anyone, guild with anyone, and talk with anyone. You could even learn other races' languages! Plus, with hard work and perseverance an evil Dark Elf could walk amongst good heroes in Freeport, or a halfling drink and carouse with evil Ogres. As much as I ike WoW, one thing I hate is the feeling that I can't interact with half of the playerbase because we're opposite sides. I want a game where alignment is something that can be altered by my deeds. Sadly, it suffered from being heavily group-based and grindy, and de-leveling is never cool.

AO. The skills system in this game is still to this day one of the most flexible and min-max friendly ones ever designed. The initial idea of three factions warring it out in the wastelands was cool, and Funcom had TONS of player events with sweeping storylines. It was kinda cool that my Fixer, while Omni, was part of a clandestine network of Fixers from all factions that formed their own underground community. But it was a Funcom product, and schizophrenia on the part of the developers has led to the games slow and painful decline.

So it seems that what made those pre-WoW games so fun was the communitiies and the world's themself. It seems that the communities in these older MMORPG's weren't commando style hardcore anythings, except for the select few who made the game fascinating for you all. I remember playing AC and having people being labeled as PKers... I find it interesting that on PvP servers in games now people just say "You're on a PvP server, ganking is implied" instead of it being discouraged and given penalties to.

I suppose the true games that we are looking for them are niche games that won't take the WoW audience but interest the same people who enjoyed UO, EQ, etc. Everybody is looking for the next 'big' MMO but we don't want that as WoW has introduced a bad community that is carrying over to all new releases. Going to be tough to find the next great game eh...

Originally posted by zchmrkenhoff

So it seems that what made those pre-WoW games so fun was the communitiies and the world's themself. It seems that the communities in these older MMORPG's weren't commando style hardcore anythings, except for the select few who made the game fascinating for you all. I remember playing AC and having people being labeled as PKers... I find it interesting that on PvP servers in games now people just say "You're on a PvP server, ganking is implied" instead of it being discouraged and given penalties to.

 

I suppose the true games that we are looking for them are niche games that won't take the WoW audience but interest the same people who enjoyed UO, EQ, etc. Everybody is looking for the next 'big' MMO but we don't want that as WoW has introduced a bad community that is carrying over to all new releases. Going to be tough to find the next great game eh...

I think you pretty much nailed it on the head there.

Not to say that the older games were just the best thing since sliced bread.  For the most part they were far from it.

The thing is most of the gamers who played  UO and EQ were players mixed 90% old MUDDERS and 10% Single Player RPG.  The gmaes were not made for the masses they were made as a combination of the 2.  These games that MMO were based on were games that were intended to promote RP and not necessarily just on graphics and End Game.

Today's MMO's are geared to ramp up players to the End Game which is where the MMO is supposed to be different from every other MMO out there.  This lead the popular MMO's to come up with quest "floaties" and maps and icons and indicators of who has what for you to do.  And another "cloatie" or icon or map indicator or locating device pointing you to where you need to be to accomplish what the first "floatie" or icon or map inficator or locating device indicated you need to go with a list of what to do.

Essentially, Today's MMO can be boiled down too ( forget about "ThemePark" or  "Rails" or "Sandbox" )  a colored icon/map indicator that initiates another different colored icon/map indicator and a shopping list of items to be collected/returned/delivered.

THAT is what the MMORPGR's from old are complaining about.  The games of yore did not have this.  You had to read and decipher the text to get to the goal and then detemine what to do once you got there.  That was easily 80% of the appeal of the games at the time.

Other than the way the quests have been watered down and reduced to the base element above, they have not really changed much.  Essentially making them more "User Friendly" and appealing to the masses by taking the "tedium" of quests out of the game.  THey are removing what MADE those games as popular as what they were.  Strip away the LORE, the STORY, and BACKGROUND to WHY you are doing something and ALL MMO are the same 20% of the game play.

Which is why the thread on "WHO NEEDS STORY, PLEASE" in the SWTOR forumn has me so baffled.

Originally posted by Jimmy_Scythe

...and losing all of your gear and a percentage of XP everytime you died. You could always get your gear back.... if you could make it all the way back to where you died before the body disappeared. Good luck with that because you got killed the first time wearing a full kit and now you've got to run through that crap again buck naked!! That was EQ.

I actually laughed out loud when I read that.  But hey, that was part of the fun.   Dying really sucked in EQ, it's true.  But that's what got your pulse pounding when you were in a touch and go fight.  Or when you agroed some big nasty and were running for your life...just a little further to the zone line..please God let me make it. heh.

And because death hurt so much it made you really appreciate it when somebody saved you.  I mean it actually mattered to people.  You really, truly felt a rush of warm gratitude to the guy who saved you from dying even though he didn't have to do it.  I'm talking about random strangers helping out just to be nice.  And people did that sort of thing a lot.  People always remember the griefers but hardly anyone ever mentions all the times some random stranger tossed a heal on them or rooted the thing that was chasing them or jumped in to beat down the thing that was about to kill them.  Nobody remembers the drive-by-buffs that people would put on others as they ran past.

But back to the death penalty.  Man, EQ just wouldn't have been EQ without the death penalty.  Sure it sucked when it happened but it was that fear of death that put some excitement into the game. 

Originally posted by Neanderthal

Originally posted by Jimmy_Scythe

...and losing all of your gear and a percentage of XP everytime you died. You could always get your gear back.... if you could make it all the way back to where you died before the body disappeared. Good luck with that because you got killed the first time wearing a full kit and now you've got to run through that crap again buck naked!! That was EQ.

 

I actually laughed out loud when I read that.  But hey, that was part of the fun.   Dying really sucked in EQ, it's true.  But that's what got your pulse pounding when you were in a touch and go fight.  Or when you agroed some big nasty and were running for your life...just a little further to the zone line..please God let me make it. heh.

And because death hurt so much it made you really appreciate it when somebody saved you.  I mean it actually mattered to people.  You really, truly felt a rush of warm gratitude to the guy who saved you from dying even though he didn't have to do it.  I'm talking about random strangers helping out just to be nice.  And people did that sort of thing a lot.  People always remember the griefers but hardly anyone ever mentions all the times some random stranger tossed a heal on them or rooted the thing that was chasing them or jumped in to beat down the thing that was about to kill them.  Nobody remembers the drive-by-buffs that people would put on others as they ran past.

But back to the death penalty.  Man, EQ just wouldn't have been EQ without the death penalty.  Sure it sucked when it happened but it was that fear of death that put some excitement into the game. 

 

I couldn't have said it better myself

Originally posted by Neanderthal

Originally posted by Jimmy_Scythe

...and losing all of your gear and a percentage of XP everytime you died. You could always get your gear back.... if you could make it all the way back to where you died before the body disappeared. Good luck with that because you got killed the first time wearing a full kit and now you've got to run through that crap again buck naked!! That was EQ.

 

I actually laughed out loud when I read that.  But hey, that was part of the fun.   Dying really sucked in EQ, it's true.  But that's what got your pulse pounding when you were in a touch and go fight.  Or when you agroed some big nasty and were running for your life...just a little further to the zone line..please God let me make it. heh.

And because death hurt so much it made you really appreciate it when somebody saved you.  I mean it actually mattered to people.  You really, truly felt a rush of warm gratitude to the guy who saved you from dying even though he didn't have to do it.  I'm talking about random strangers helping out just to be nice.  And people did that sort of thing a lot.  People always remember the griefers but hardly anyone ever mentions all the times some random stranger tossed a heal on them or rooted the thing that was chasing them or jumped in to beat down the thing that was about to kill them.  Nobody remembers the drive-by-buffs that people would put on others as they ran past.

But back to the death penalty.  Man, EQ just wouldn't have been EQ without the death penalty.  Sure it sucked when it happened but it was that fear of death that put some excitement into the game. 

 

In WoW, as a rezzer that wasn't a druid, I would always rez corpses I would see on the ground out of pure goodwill, not even knowing how old the corpse was. Good will has not died!

Originally posted by zchmrkenhoff

In WoW, as a rezzer that wasn't a druid, I would always rez corpses I would see on the ground out of pure goodwill, not even knowing how old the corpse was. Good will has not died!

Maybe not but it matters very little since death has no meaning in WoW. You save somebody from a small run in ghost form. I doubt that's a big deal to anybody even though that's very nice of you. Back in the old days of EQ you would almost donate your first born when somebody agreed to make a group just so they could go retrieve your puny corpse and rez it at the efreeti camp in Solusek B.

I remember as a rogue, i would go retrieve corpses in plane of hate for people who were very very desperate so my friend could rez them. Back then you would see some real gratitude and a real meaning of helping people out with a rez. People rarely blink if you offer give a rez anywhere in WoW. It has completely lost its meaning a long with so many other things...thank god for mainstream eh?