Graphics, as in graphical fidelity, polygon count, etc. are valueless to me.
Art style is everything. I don’t care if I can see the pixels in the game, I still play the same SNES my family had 25 years ago. The game has to look good, and graphical fidelity is a tool to help achieve that, but it’s only a tool, and useless without the appropriate art direction.
TIL LOTRO is still a thing. I remember being so excited and hopeful that it could compete with WoW so I could have an alternative scratch for my MMORPG itch. I just never found it very fun or as intuitive (to me).
Of course, and it’s important to keep in mind how much the context changes. Not just in gaming context, but keep in mind:
MMORPGs are hardly a new genre. Their players nowadays are a different generation of humans than when the genre was young.
Social context changed entirely between the start of the genre and today.
In a similar vein, digital socialisation is entirely normal now. We no longer need a very fancy minigame (EverQuest) attached to your online chat room just to socialise.
Through WoW and then again with the Wii gaming exploded as a hobby, even before mobile games created a somewhat separate but huge extra market. The modern target audience is on a wholly different scale. Just look at the peak subscription counts for EQ1 or DAoC.
It’d in fact be quite noteworthy if default features didn’t change substantially and continuously.
The move towards more solo play is just a natural consequence of players wanting to be as efficient as possible with their time. Needing other people causes downtime, even longer ones if you need them to organize manually.
When New World came out, ignoring all the other issues, a lot of the people who were playing it really wanted mounts. They said it was absurd the game didn’t have it. I missed being able to move faster too, but just by looking at the game I could tell that the only thing stopping me from getting to max level in three days was that it took time to go from point from the quest givers to the quest locations and then back. If it had mounts that would completely break the progression and they would need to make us have to kill a lot more enemies or collect a lot more items to complete quests or get exp.
I heard they added mounts in a recent update. I wonder how they ended up doing it. A couple years later getting to the end game pretty quick is probably no longer an issue so they may have done nothing.
Recently got back into New World since the updates and DLC and I am enjoying it a lot more than when it first came out. They added a lot of content and things to do, made good changes to crafting, qesting is more fluid now and overall its a lot better gameplay wise.
I didn’t play Vanilla but my friend talked me into Classic at launch. I played for a year or two before quitting and playing retail (which I’ve since stopped playing as well).
I loved my time in Classic but in retrospect, my fondness was just for my guild. I hated the “leveling journey” they’re praising here. Both games are a rush to max level…Classic is just slower.
With limited time, I really don’t want to spend half my night looking for a group and then traveling to the dungeon. I don’t want to wait 20 minutes for the quest mob I couldn’t tag to respawn.
Personally I just don’t want a level grind in an MMO. I love them in single player games (or even some multiplayer like bg3) but not in an MMO where levels are a barrier to entry for a lot of game activities. I think I would have loved Classic as a jobless teenager but now…it’s just not for me.
I’m happy for anyone who finds joy in Classic, though.
loved my time in Classic but in retrospect, my fondness was just for my guild.
The social aspect and the game being slower are intrinsically tied together. Having to run to the dungeon and then wait 15 min til a straggler shows up lets you know the people you are playing with in ways that modern MMOs and their gogogo playstyle just don’t allow.
Classic was full of systems that intentionally put the social aspect of the game front and center.
But I got that on my retail guild, too, we just weren’t waiting for the zeppelin while we did it. By far the biggest social loss of the modernization is that so much of it is cross-server now - you’ll probably never see the people in your group again after the dungeon. I do miss knowing nearly everyone on the server. The time our whole faction rallied to stop this one guild from getting scarab lord after they griefed another guild by mass reporting them is one of my favorite gaming moments of any game.
But really, it’s the LACK of systems that put the social aspect front and center. There was very little to do outside of pvp and leveling alts - two things I didn’t enjoy. Non-raid nights were usually extremely boring, Classic became a chat room I’d keep on my second monitor. As fun as guild chat might have been, the lockdown is long over and I don’t find that to be a great use of time.
As a kid I’d sit my favorite tfc server just to chat so I get the appeal but with so many options out there, I guess nowadays when I log on I want to play more than socialize
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