[andrepd]

>That’s the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a player-killer out to strip the dungeon crawlers of all their loot and gear; or, spending your days baking bread or running your own player shopping mall, your only limitation was your effort and imagination. The idea that you could stake out your own small part of this vibrant world, right down to building a house in the limited land space available; or making your name as an accomplished crafter who people sought out for their superior crafted equipment, it was so fascinating to me.

This is absolute magic to me. Wow. It sounds like an absolute dream. It is my opinion that the possibilities of a shared, persistent, virtual world were never fully realised. The description you make: of a fantasy world, persistent, vast, "real" (as in, internally consistent and fair), a world you can live in... modern MMOs offer absolutely none of that. It's a shame.

It speaks volumes that probably the best realisations of the MMO were... Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, maybe Everquest? Maybe even some primitive MUDs and, oddly enough, a couple Minecraft servers. Instead we're stuck with WoW (and its clones), which was an excellent game in its own right, but it wasn't a true MMO in the sense above described.

[chii]

> we're stuck with WoW (and its clones), which was an excellent game in its own right, but it wasn't a true MMO

because most companies didn't realize what they were copying when they copied WoW.

True MMO - aka, a sandbox game. See this very indepth critique, if you want more about this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64

[firekvz]

Let me tell you this, but.. WoW was the clone, it tried to copy already existings MMOs, the only reason WoW was sucessfull was because all the advertising it got

Asia (KR/JP) had already huge mmo games before WoW

[nrb]

That’s not completely fair... WoW was successful because it was outstandingly polished (no other game was even close at the time) and fun to play.

[kungtotte]

It also got a massive amount of early hype by being a Blizzard/Warcraft IP and not generic fantasy.

All of the buzz surrounding it prior to launch was about being able to play as characters from the Warcraft universe, not that it was a polished MMO.

The IP got people to sign up, the polish made them stick around.

[andrepd]

I knew which video you were talking about after reading your first sentence hehe :)

[jghn]

It's interesting that you mention EQ in that statement. EQ was viewed as a direct rejection of the virtual world concept of UO. I only played it for 5-6 months so perhaps it changed over time.

[mdpopescu]

> ... a fantasy world, persistent, vast, "real" (as in, internally consistent and fair), a world you can live in...

Incidentally, are you aware of the LitRPG genre in fantasy? It's pretty much that, in literary form.