[jghn]

> somehow all the 3d MMOs seemed to downgrade a lot of the interesting

Unfortunately two things turned out to be true:

1) Most people don't want any of this and prefer to be on rails

2) The two groups of people most attracted to a game like this wind up in a dynamic where one group will leave the game if the other is present. Whereas the 2nd group requires the 1st to want to play.

[low_tech_love]

The “rails” thing is very much the gist of it. Don’t get me wrong, I think classic WoW is probably one of the best games ever made, but after it came out, nobody wanted the raw experience of early online worlds anymore. Which is just life I guess.

[jghn]

Yep. After I stopped UO I took a break for a few years and picked up WoW after it had already settled in for a bit. I was surprised how on rails it was. Get a quest? Well my UI plugin tells me exactly what to go. Add *any* sort of mystery or nondeterminism? People whine.

This is also where I first started seeing people focusing on "end game", although it may have existed in EQ. The actual sandbox-ish game was just a warmup you blasted through in order to get to the "real game". Meanwhile I ran around solo and just explored, and did whatever weird thing I wanted.

[low_tech_love]

I never got to the endgame but I solo-levelled a couple of characters in a slow pace in classic wow (pre-tbc) and it was mind blowing. The world is so well crafted, the lore, the art design, it is just fantastic. I guess if we have to be on rails at least they did it well.

[shermantanktop]

Who are these two groups of people? Sounds like a predator/prey situation.

[jghn]

At a high level, that. And of course that requires a certain ratio of predator vs prey. And there were way too many would be predators.

Both groups self-identify as wanting a "real" experience in a sandbox that lets them "do anything". However one means this allows them to slaughter people with impunity whereas the other means it enables them to explore the world, choose their own occupation, define their own goals, etc. It's not even a PVP vs PVE divide, as there are plenty of PVPers in the 2nd group. Instead it's closer to "Griefers" vs "Sandbox game enthusiasts", where the griefer crowed requires prey to feed their urges.

So what happens is the griefer oriented crowd chases away the other crowd, then has no one to grief and then they leave too. You'll see it in comments here as many posters were, shall we say, not super mature 25+ years ago :) they'll be pining for the days about how they could kill everyone, steal their stuff, loot their houses, and otherwise cause problems.

One of the issues with the game was that while those behaviors were intentionally allowed, the designers didn't account for the kind of player who *only* wanted to do that and generally were obnoxious about it to boot instead of trying to massage it into the lore/RP of the game. So the scale was all off.