I disagree. When I play it today it seems like a breath of fresh air because it's just so different to what you are used to. Unlike other games where you whiz through the shitty content to max level so you can raid or whatever, in old EQ, the game actually starts at level 1. It's a survival game right from the start because mobs are difficult to kill and there are much higher level wanderers that pwn you. And also XP is so incredibly slow, you really need to kill lots of mobs quickly and constantly, but you are just not capable of it because you are mostly naked with a rusty sword and some cloth pants (even as a tank). Yes some people would just rage quit as soon as they saw this, but a lot of people revel in that kind of challenge, and even modern gamers are the same. They maybe expect more information on how to succeed, but they are happy to step up to the challenge.
Also the real world feel is pretty much unmatched. Like when I'm waiting for the boat in freeport and the fisherman comes over to visit the girl fishing off the dock. I think there is some love story or something around those two. But with stuff like that and all the factions, even such an old primitive game succeeded more at feeling like a real world than anything else. I also like how there is limited music. The tunes play (in a loop unfortunately) when you step on specific triggers. So when you reach the entrance to Felwithe for example, that trumpet type song starts playing, and when you get in the vicinity of Kelethin the harp song starts playing. But away from the towns there is no music at all. It's just you and the crickets and the grunts of the wildlife, it makes you very immersed.
No instancing game about because it's a cheap way of delivering content. In EQ you had one or two key dungeons in the high levels and they ended up totally overcrowded. One solution is to just add more dungeons filled with similar content as a nice alternative (expensive), and another solution is to just copy & paste that exact same dungeon in to multiple instances for an infinite number of people (cheap as shit). A side effect is that it no longer feels much like a world, there are no trains and interactions with other people outside of your little locked group, and it also means that loot floods the world faster.
Vanguard showed how to solve all that shit. They did it the manly way and said no to instancing, and just made a shit ton of dungeons, and it totally worked. The world is so big and filled with content if you find one dungeon that is busy, you can just travel for a few minutes and find a whole other dungeon. And sometimes when you find other players in a dungeon you can just join their group. Personally I don't mind some instancing maybe for raid content or something, but I don't like the extreme ways games do it. I don't like Vanguard's extreme instancing phobia, and I don't like all the other modern games instancing everything.
You can remove instancing if you have enough content and design it so that people can spread out evenly through that content. EQ only had trouble with overcrowding because the game was hugely more popular than they expected it to be, and therefore their design was not sufficient. Again, Vanguard was their second attempt and knowing how much bigger the audience could be, they designed the world better, and it worked. Vanguard's failings were in other areas.
All that depends on the game.
In some games guilds are not interested in newbies because they need to waste time 'gearing up' people to their level. And then if that person gets burned out and quits, all that time was wasted. So in some games there are very high requirements for joining some guilds. You have some that are casual and open and end up with lots of members but also very high turnover. And you have small elite guilds who are the opposite.
Also as for technology, it doesn't HAVE to ruin the game. It's never going to be quite like EQ again, but you can make it close. In some games, the competition over raid content is very important, especially when it's not instanced. And the competition amongst guilds is key too. Add in some really difficult fights, and the strategies for those fights take a lot of blood sweat and tears to work out, and they end up being treasured strategies that people don't blurt out on the web.
The opposite would be games like TSW when dungeon runs are put together by the LFG tool, and you are locked out of that dungeon for 15 hours if you fail, so if you know the strategy then you really want to tell it to your whole group of strangers and make sure everyone understands it. It's just two different designs and they work in totally different ways. The design of a game can change things drastically. The problem with mainstream games is that you don't see these different designs, they all use the same mainstream design.
It's still like that today in some games, when raids are limited to 24 people, a raid guild generally doesn't want too many more people there will always be some people left out in the cold.
Yeah its better, but it only happens more in games where getting good traffic to your website is more valuable to you than getting good loot in your game. Again, the design of the game can change that. In very competitive games, if you find a rare mob somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, and he drops a really powerful item that you can use and then sell more of them for good cash, then the last thing you would want to do is tell anyone about it. I have played games where this happens and people in my guild tell me 'secrets' and make me promise not to tell anyone else, and I never did.
Again, it just depends on the game. When knowledge is power, people tend to keep their knowledge guarded. When nothing matters like in modern games, then nobody cares.
I think some of it will have to be down to the players too. If someone approaches a new game with 50% of their time spent playing it, and 50% of their time spent googling for info, then it's their own fault if the mystery is ruined - whether the info actually exists or not.
With games like TSW, there is even a browser built in to the game because it's required for some missions. But it also means you can google anything you want at any time. But I didn't, because I know that tweaking my build and doing missions 'blind', is more fun than just copying someone elses homework. And when I've paid for this content, then I sure as hell am going to try to get as much fun from it as possible and not spoil it myself.
I still think botting is no big deal. It just barely exists in most of the games I play, because there is no need for it. It's a big deal in WoW simply because WoW is so rewarding to a botter. You can go afk and come back a few hours later and your bot farmed up a bunch of really useful items. But play something like TSW and you won't see a single botter. Again, it's because the design of the game is very powerful and can completely change who plays your game and how they play it. Not everything is equal.
I don't agree. I think EQ1 became shit simply because it ran beyond what its lifespan should have been, and because SOE were not talented enough to deal with that. They mass produced expansions that ever increased the mudflation, because they only cared about the fast cash and didn't pay any attention to how it would affect the game a few years down the line. A decade later it has all caught up to them.
But there are other games run by very strict anal egghead types, and the game goes from strength to strength. It's those types of people you want running your game, not Smedley, blinded by dollar signs.
EQ Mac begs to differ. I wasn't sure it would work either, but I love playing it. It's like a denial of everything modern and I thought living in denial might not be satisfying, but it works great. It's the original EQ and all that was great about it, but it goes as far as PoP which means that there is a gigantic amount of content. I have been playing it hardcore for the past few weeks and yet I'm still only early level 20's, and I have only visited several old zones. There are a dozen or more zones I have yet to take on, and that's just the old world. I then have all of kunark, all of velious, all of luclin, and all of PoP, and I probably wont even get to see all of that with one character.
It's pretty close to the perfect game, for me at least, and yet it's ancient. If someone could take what makes that so good and update it with a better modern engine and graphics, it would be amazing. Whether there would be a big enough audience for it to survive is the question.
