[CydeWeys]

Some of my very favorite moments in videogaming ever occurred during the EverQuest closed beta. That game was so great. It would get dark at night, to the point where if you didn't have a torch (which cost money) you'd be bumping into the trees in Kelethin in pitch blackness, and shortly get taken down by monsters. I remember spending nearly half of my time playing that game just waiting around in the dark by the town torches of Felwithe or Kelethin, chatting with other players and waiting for the sun to rise again so I could go back out into the world. That game didn't even yet have a minimap, so when you got lost, you got LOST, and it was especially bad when the sun started going down and you still couldn't find a safe haven. The areas were big too, so you'd be playing for hours until you finally started learning how to navigate them. I remember downloading maps and printing them out, and referring to them when I got lost in game trying to figure out where I was.

[abakker]

The lack of a minimap is pretty awesome. There is a careful balance between preserving adventure vs making the game frustrating; between convenient and immersive.

I very much liked the early days of D2 when you had to legitimately watch out to always have scrolls of town portal. Or in D1 when your mana didn't auto-recharge and you had to meter out potions, trips to down for free heal/mana, and just getting in there and doing physical damage because you were out of mana and needed to wait for a potion to drop.

Convenient features always take me out of the world a bit, and stuff where you have to die, try something new, die again, etc to win always makes me feel like I'm actually learning to play better.

[mipmap04]

Yes! Felt like an actual adventure and less of a roller coaster on rails.

[supercanuck]

Exactly, I remember the feeling that you needed to have a certain level of situational awareness with what is going on around you.