[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...