[mike1o1]

I absolutely loved EverQuest and it’s still probably holds some of my fondest gaming memories. My favorite feeling about it is that it felt like a real world first, gameplay second. It had a real sense of danger and wonder that I think will be almost impossible to recreate.

Going from Qeynos to Freeport, or crossing the ocean on a boat felt absolutely epic and dangerous. It was wonderful, but not something I would want to play today now that I have real life obligations.

[thegrim33]

It was also at the perfect moment in time where you couldn't just pull up the game's wiki on a second monitor and have fully detailed maps and quest details on hand. You actually had to learn things for yourself by exploration and trial and error. You had to learn things from other people by talking to them in game.

In my mind back then, I was in awe of people that even had the knowledge of how to get across certain zones safely. You know it took effort/skill for them to gain that knowledge. You couldn't just look it up.

I've been thinking how you could possibly replicate a similar thing nowadays, but unless the world constantly randomly changes over time, rendering any created guides/maps/etc moot, I think that window has closed.

[beloch]

I too formed memories by playing EQ in a way that was, in retrospect, dumb, and learning from the experience.

e.g. I created an Erudite wizard (who could not see in the dark) and insisted on leveling up in Toxxulia forest, the default "newbie" zone for Erudites. It was dark there, even during the day, and pitch black at night. I kept my monitor at the calibrated brightness level because I didn't want to "cheat". Monsters of an appropriate level were spread out and often hard to find. A troll NPC roamed the forest and randomly killed players. I spent many hours getting lost (and killed) there before leaving the island, only to discover the comparatively easy newbie zone that stood outside Qeynos, a short, safe, free, ship voyage away.

The game was full of stuff like this. If you wanted to do something, there was usually a very bad way to go about it and other ways that were much better. Finding those gave you a sense of accomplishment that was far sweeter than mere levels.

Modern games tend to be more balanced so you can be assured that, however you're doing something, there probably isn't another way to do it that is vastly easier unless you're doing something really weird. This "wastes" less of your time, but somehow feels less realistic. In real life, different strategies for doing things are seldom equal.

[bluelightning2k]

I can top this. The Erudite zone was literally built around a massive chasm. Early on in the game I unlocked "levitate" - and naturally levitated down into the big chasm.

A little way down a loading screen hits for a zone called "The Hole"; a high level raid zone. My levitate was removed by the loading screen, and retrieving my body would require a team of high level players - thus lose (meaning ALL my gear and inventory was permanently lost, and a heavy XP penalty).

I don't think experiences like these are as positive as your nostalgia has led you to believe.

[Aeglaecia]

the magic of old computer games stems from a combination of a sense of the unknown, inconsistent difficulty curves, and freedom ... these did come at the price of a buggier experience compared to modern guardrailed polished titles ...

[MBlinow]

I've made an effort in recent years to actively avoid researching wikis and guides on games as I play them. I've come to think that a lot of the joy in gaming is the discovery and unraveling the systems that make the game tick. Finding the optimal ways to level or complete some mission through exploration and experimentation is always so much more fulfilling than finding the first result the comes up in google where the answer is already there for you.

Admittedly, it does take a degree of willpower and sometimes I will still do some online research when a game gets particularly frustrating. The biggest obstacle to my approach of avoiding online information is that some games feel like they're designed with that in mind and don't provide enough information in the games for an isolated player to really figure everything out.

[rhines]

100% agreed with games being designed for online aids. Some of the quests in Oldschool Runescape make me wonder if I'd ever have completed them without guides - it's like they're designed to be a challenge for the whole community upon release, rather than for individual players.

[musicale]

> it's like they're designed to be a challenge for the whole community upon release, rather than for individual players

This is the metagame: game designers vs. every single player in the game. I kind of like it, though once the players win (by figuring out a strategy that works) the solution (often not exactly what the developers had intended) tends to be enshrined in youtube videos, wiki pages, and common practice.

[andrepd]

2007 Quest Cape with no guides is a long-standing childhood dream of mine. One I think I will never complete, but still!

[dgfitz]

I will always be in awe of the folks that figured out all of Elden ring without a guide. Some of those quests were just bananas.

[Cthulhu_]

I try to play through these games without a guide first, but especially with Elden Ring, there's a high chance you miss half the game then. Which is a shame.

To figure out all of ER, you'd need to play through it multiple times, comb through everything, do things in a different order, etc etc. There was a post on Reddit the other day, someone said they found Jarburg after playing for more than 900 hours. I know of it, but in two playthroughs I don't believe I actually went there yet.

I wonder if they collect analytics and they can at one point say which areas, questlines, gear items, etc are discovered the least.

[bee_rider]

I love FromSoft’s environments and gameplay, but the obscure quests, I don’t really get it. There’s being mysterious so the players want to do multiple playthroughs… then, there’s being so mysterious the players just have to use the wiki (ruining all the mystery).

[h2zizzle]

You have to make the world big and uncharted enough that it can't be picked over quickly. I have some hope that Light No Fire might pull it off.

Probably an uncommon experience, but I felt something similar playing Final Fantasy XV. The semi-realistic scale and emptiness of the world map that people complained about actually contributed to the consistent feeling of being out in the wilderness, stumbling on dungeons and whanot. Most open-world games feel like theme parks, Eos felt like a national park. I'm told RDR2 and Death Stranding carry similar vibes.

I'd like devs to get a bit more bold about real-world scaling environments. Let a long-ass walk between towns be a long-ass walk between towns. And no mini-maps.

[Cthulhu_]

XV was very much "on rails" IMO, especially at first when the car could only go on pre-programmed roads; there's very little content outside of what the developers intended, and exploring isn't really rewarded. Same with XVI, which was better, but still a mostly empty overworld, little incentives to go exploring or hunting because while there is a crafting system, it's shallow and a very linear progression from one weapon to the next, usually involving taking down a hunt mark.

RDR2 is very enjoyable to go out and just explore, you definitely feel out in the wilderness sometimes there. Another one would be Kingdom Come 1 / 2, especially 2 (it's a bit 'fuller') where you can just decide to go for a hike in the forest and go hunt or find some bandits or an easter egg. It's got long-ass walks (or horse rides) between towns; when I played the first one I barely used fast travel.

Death Stranding, again not so much; the only interesting things there are the actual destinations you have to go to / from. Great scenery and experience though, and the long-ass walk is core gameplay.

[h2zizzle]

The whole idea is that exploring is its own reward, and points-of-interest need to be few and far between in order to kindle the feeling described above. "You see that mountain? You can climb it," is inferior to, "I heard there's a mountain beyond the horizon; we should find it and try to climb it." And then you spend an in-game day or two working your way there. If you're constantly being bombarded with "things to do", 1) It deadens you to their novelty, and 2) The game can't make them TOO difficult. Sometimes the player should just be walking; sometimes they should be physically lost; sometimes they should happen upon something that is of zero use to them.

I'm not sure how far you got into XV, but it's completely different from XVI. XVI is XIII-style hallways, but with no battle wipe, so areas are designed to be large enough for combat. XV is a Ubisoft-style open-world, but with a lot less of the dopamine hacking cruft of AC et al. Using the car feels very roadtrip-like, but you certainly can and should get out and hoof it through the wild areas.

[shostack]

Unfortunately as an early NMS player with hundreds of hours, I have seen nothing that gives me hope that LNF will have the depth that is needed for the world to feel like that. Mile wide, inch deep.

What made EQ an experience was those areas were static and took real skill to uncover how to do things.

[tacocataco]

There sure isn't much information on Light No Fire online. Hello Games must be keeping the cards close to the chest with this one.

[throaway955]

what someone needs to do is create an mmo based around treasure seeking or dungeon-crawling. It writes itself!

[hombre_fatal]

Streaming also changed the landscape.

The game meta/knowledge spreads through realtime video and incidental entertainment instead of through slow message boards only frequented by power users who would do something as lame as spend time on a 2005 message board.

It's amazing how deeply knowledgable everyone is about every game because of it.

I guess it's not good or bad. It's nice that gaming is mainstream instead of being a stereotypical loser activity it was when I was in high school.

[Bluecobra]

There was a cheat program that kinda did this called ShowEQ. It analysed the EverQuest network traffic and was able to draw a map of the zone, and showed called the NPCs and players. The best part was that it even showed what loot was on each enemy. The barrier to entry was a bit high. It required a hub, and a second PC running Linux. Eventually it became a cat and mouse game with SOE changing the network traffic/adding encryption/etc. It was fun while it lasted!

[0points]

"More recently" (since 2003 or so), we use myseq which can run all on your windows desktop.

It now works by reading spawn data from the running everquest application, instead of looking at network traffic.

I still use it sometimes, but

a) modern macroquest has built in spawn tracker

b) server don't send loot data to clients so we cannot sneak preview it anyway

[andrepd]

Hit the nail on the head (note: you can even look at long-running MMOs like WoW or Runescape and compare how they were played in 2004 and how they are played now, to see this in action). The data-mining and hyperoptimisation and looking everything up on the wiki means the _exploration and wonder_ that did make the MMO experience so unique is gone. Even chatting is not done in-game, at the same location in the physical world, but just on a discord chat you alt-tab to...

At this point, even if a good MMO were to come out (incredibly, this has not happened for close on two decades), recreating that experience is entirely on the player. It's on the player to forgo looking things up, or to forgo using external tools to chat, find groups, trade items, calculate strategies, etc. But since players doing that will be at a disadvantage, that is unlikely to happen in an online game...

[slashdave]

Another aspect that differs from many of today's game is just how long it took to progress. Every upgrade felt earned. Today, rewards are tossed at players.

Interesting that progression was massively eased in later versions.

[Cthulhu_]

It depends on how it's earned though, I think the brainless grinding is no longer fun or rewarding. FFIX removed, solved, or hid a lot of the tedium of a lot of MMOs.

[Cthulhu_]

The only way the world could continuously change is via procedural generation, but for those games, the base mechanics remain the same. Minecraft comes to mind, where the 'golden path' is to gear up, find certain items, go through a portal and kill the boss. The levels are generated different every time, but the base steps are the same. I'm afraid it'd be the same with a procedurally generated MMO.

If it's hand generated, realistically they could only do a new map once every period, and the first guides would be online within hours of release. I believe Fortnite does or used to do this, making big map changes every season.

[lsaferite]

I feel like a combo of large scale procedural generation mixed with a large library of hand crafted content is needed. I was just thinking about this today. I'd love an MMO so large that I rarely meet other players unless I want to and with quests that are random, unique, yet meaningful.

[p3rls]

I was a janitor over at mrfixitonline, gamefaqs, casterrealms-- there definitely were guides up for these things if you knew where to look. I know, because I was making some of them. Maybe not at release, but within a few months... and by 2000, 2001, definitely we had everything covered.

[normie3000]

> I've been thinking how you could possibly replicate a similar thing nowadays, but unless the world constantly randomly changes over time, rendering any created guides/maps/etc moot, I think that window has closed.

How about a simple NDA to prevent players sharing this kind of info?

[bombcar]

The various tank games can’t keep people from violating military secrets laws to post tank diagrams. A game NDA ain’t gonna do shit.

[hnlmorg]

How would you enforce that?

[dmbche]

You should look at Noita!

[thaumasiotes]

Noita is the last thing that comment suggests he wants. Most of Noita's content can only be learned by consulting the wiki, which I assume is an intentional legacy of the designers' love of Nethack. And the world is the same every time.

[dmbche]

I dont know it's the last thing he wants.

I feel like the same "most" of the content which lives on the wiki is very secondary to the gameloop and that the designers did a wonderful job at not letting the player optimize the fun out of the game.

The game teaches you nothing and is very cryptic, but the gameloop is simple (go down, don't die). You naturally learn how the sandbox interact (i'm on fire but I have a water flask, water clear up sludge) and the randomized (and shuffle) wands expose you to spell interactions.

You can easily spend multi hundred hours just learning through the sandbox and trying to break the game.

The cryptic stuff (34 orbs, impressing the gods, the messages) is also very cool and I think motivating to keep playing with the sandbox even after having "mastered" the mechanics of the game. (As in you never know what you could manage to find if you try to break the game)

I don't think people play noita with a guide on a second monitor.

Sorry if poorly worded, tired

[duskwuff]

> And the world is the same every time.

The overall layout (e.g. the progression of zones) and some set pieces are fixed, but the details are randomized.

Fun fact: the overall layout is configured by a PNG file, with the color of each pixel controlling which "biome" is used.

[ModernMech]

Totally, me and my friend used to share an EQ account in school. His parents paid for it so he got to play during the day, and I would play at night from midnight until 6am, then I'd go to school. It was profoundly unhealthy, which is why that game earned the name "Evercrack".

Last weekend I played a beta game called "Monsters and Memories" that's trying to be an EQ clone, and it's very faithful in that it's carried forward all the terrible parts of EQ.

Just the amount of sitting around waiting that you have to do in EQ that I had forgotten about is incredible. Managing your water and food levels, having to go find your corpse when you die and it taking 5 hours just to get there, pitch black nights so you're forced to walk around with a lantern, camping a spawn with 100 other people trying to get the same items as you to complete the same inane quests, broken quests that you can't even complete to progress the game forward...

And yeah, one weekend was enough. I got real shit to do, I have time for nonsense, but not THAT kind of time.

[daeken]

There's a musician named Richie Truxillo who made so many comedy songs about EQ back in the day, but your comment just reminded me of "Has Anybody Seen My Corpse." I haven't thought about corpse runs and dragging folks' corpses back to them in ages!

[Tokumei-no-hito]

ohh if i had a million platinummmm

wow that's a memory i had lost for many years. thanks

[michaelmrose]

Your perception of time is profoundly different when you are a kid with no job.

Painful death makes you try hard to avoid it ensuring real stakes.

[nkrisc]

It makes it more realistic. At this age, it would mean I just quit the game - like my character died for real!

[djtango]

For me it feels like it was the perfect storm of games like this releasing at a time when a generation of gamers' attentions weren't saturated.

I didn't play EQ but on FFXI airships ran on a 15min schedule and if you missed it you would have to sit and wait, not dissimilar to real life. This kind of friction added a charm and immersion to the game but would never fly in a game today [pardon the pun].

Nowadays a lot of the enjoyment I seek out of games is mechanical difficulty and adrenaline because most the other aspects can be fulfilled away from the screen...

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

Oh my, that long journey is one of my fondest memories of the game as well. Absolutely terrifying as a low level with barely any information on how to pull it off, having to ask strangers for help. The fear of losing all of your stuff on the way and having to run all the way back. Magical. I was just a humble human paladin on the Mithaniel Marr server.

I agree with everybody else commenting here, it was a truly unique experience that I would love to be able to re-live, but our expectations as players have moved on a long while back, you can no longer capture that magic because it's now all rote and routine. In 1999 it was the first time many of us had ever experienced anything like it, it flooded the senses and it felt like a world full of interesting people and epic adventures. It was the frontier at the time.

[blueblimp]

The inter-city travel was my favorite part of EverQuest. (The rest of the game, I didn't find too interesting.) The level of challenge was about right: if you looked at maps and planned your route, you could generally get to where you wanted to go, but it was hazardous.

I wonder if there's a game that focuses on that sort of travel experience.

[Cthulhu_]

As another commenter pointed out, Death Stranding focuses on the travel experience, where you have to plan your route according to how much 'effort' and risk you want to take.

Back when there was Morrowind, which didn't have map markers and whose in-game map had to slowly be uncovered. You get a description and that's it. The game did come with a paper map, which was stuck to my wall for years and frequently consulted.

A modern one would be Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2; when you turn on hardcore mode (which was only added after release, but the game was designed with it in mind), you don't get your position on the map, compass, or map markers; every quest involving a location has the NPCs give you a description (and at least in normal mode, your character making a remark when you've reached a landmark). It's not so much about planning your route though.

[michaelbarton]

Perhaps death stranding and its sequel might be the closest?

[aspenmayer]

Depending on what you do and how you play, Eve Online has a harrowing navigation system.

[smogcutter]

And part of the joy of Eve Online is that if you want, you can be a reason travel is dangerous.

[jghn]

I hated EQ for me the reason was it was not UO nor was it even trying to recreate the vibrancy & real world that UO's designers had gone for. *BUT* I also recognized that EQ represented a game that was much more aligned to what a normal gamer would want, one could already see that path being forged in UO as time went on. And then of course WoW came along and perfected the art.

I still lament how UO played out. It quickly became apparent that most players binned into one of two categories, and neither category really fit in with the original UO vision. And of course, one of those two categories drove away the customers in the second category. The rest is history.

[CSMastermind]

UO had such a huge influence on me. It was amazing.

[andrepd]

It's legitimately insane that perhaps the best MMO, or at least the one which came closer to fulfill the MMO's promise of a shared, persistent, virtual world, was also the first. How come in three decades of technological and creative development did nobody do it better?

[djtango]

Because the real world isn't "fun" and video games became more commercially successful when they realised that theme parks are more accessible than simulations.

Gaming was more ambitious and experimental then. The FFXI documentary [0] made me reflect on how much games have changed since. FFXI was heavily inspired by EQ so more credit to EQ but games today are so much more bland and engineered by design. That's how they achieve universal appeal and commercial success - by engineering its engagement. Reminds me of how packaged foods are engineered to be the most addictive by empirically finding the bliss point [1]. In games it will essentially be dopamine per minute and now mainstream games will never do something as crazy as crafting experiences as random and lumpy as real life. Instead every engagement is crafted to never be too frustrating and to give just enough rewards to keep the gamer on that hamster wheel, with the next engagement never being too far away.

Original Soulsborne games felt fresh because FromSoftware put friction and obscurity back in the spotlight.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MUAJ-cJbOFY

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

[whatwhaaaaat]

Both of these games are still going. Atlantic has a huge player base. It’s not the cutthroat game it once was but it’s still very much exciting. You can still die and all your shit poof. Housing on Atlantic is still in demand and hard to get if that gives an idea how healthy it is.

Eq has of course had some major server merges but your old account will still be on both UO and EQ.

To me UO is a breath of fresh air after 20 years of trash games except for a stand out few. Seeing my old wood elf ranger with swift wind and lupine dagger still glowing was magical. Almost as magical as re-exploring kelethin.

[jghn]

Not only is it still going but it's possible to dust off your ancient account. An old guild mate reported that he had recovered his account originally closed ~2000. Sadly, of the two accounts I had back in the day the only one still recoverable was my alt/mule account. My original account was one of the, well, original accounts from opening day, so it's a shame it was lost.

But still, it was fun to run around with one of my guys for a couple of hours. One thing I thought was cool was there had been some custom content involving my guild added near the bank where my guild hung out. It was still there, all these years later!

[reactordev]

My first memory of EverQuest was leaving the tutorial quest, running along a road at night, and being eaten by a lion.

I had no idea what I was doing but I was hooked on figuring out.

[djtango]

Based on my experiences playing FFXIV, there's an entire generation of gamers now that get completely despirited by experiences like that and give up on the first sign of a wipe, even though these days there's no penalty for even dying...

[reactordev]

And then there’s Dark Souls and Elden Ring…

I think you are generalizing on a stereotype. Gamers love experiences. If you give them enough to know there’s more beyond the wipe, they will keep wiping.

[Cthulhu_]

IX is probably the most accessible "traditional" MMO there is, but it's still very intimidating because it throws a lot of information and a complex UI at you right away. If you've never played an MMO before, it's a lot.

[kwk1]

For me, I made a high elf, didn't know page up/page down were needed to control swimming, and died in the water by the bridge leaving Felwithe, I didn't even get beyond the city gate.

[markbnj]

> crossing the ocean on a boat felt absolutely epic and dangerous

Given the way death was implemented ("LFG @ EC tunnel for a corpse run to Guk!") and the fact that you could fall off the ships in the middle of the ocean when the game lagged, it _was_ epic and dangerous. I remember the first time it happened to me and players in public chat coached me through a 20 or 30 minute swim to get my wizard and stuff to an island with a portal.

[mixxit]

i remember doing the staff of the wheel quest as a newbie level 16 wizard who had barely seen any of the world

i met so many people who helped me get into some really scary places (lguk at 16 is terrifying) as i wondered in all sorts of climates and places, what a fantastic place!

looking back the world felt so different and huge and alive with life

i will never get that experience again