What would it take for a new mmo to recapture the feeling of eq?
 

I love eq. Love the game and mean it, when I play it I really appreciate the game even exists at all and I can play it in its original form and enjoy it. Love the entire game world and all the zones and everything. However sometimes I find myself wishing for new content or for small class changes that I know will never come. I think anyone who says nostalgia is what makes people like project 1999 are totally wrong... because EVERY time I play project 1999, I have that same amazing feeling of how cool and great this game world is that I never get from other mmos.

Personally I think what makes eq so fun is the simplicity and yet the detail of the world. Stuff doesn't always make sense. Things are just there and you don't really know why, you don't know what's out there. The world is dangerous and you have to respect it so you can actually survive. You can't just port around easily, for the most part travelling is slow and you have to think about where you want to go and where you want to be. When you go to an open zone out in the middle of nowhere with no one else around, it's a pretty great feeling. The lore is really great but there is no real directed path. You just go out and do what you want and I love that.

So the question is, what would it take for a new mmo to recapture the same feeling? As I said, I don't believe the "first mmo" theory holds up. I think there is something special here that just hasn't been revisited since. I feel like there is a strong chance we're gonna lose the potential for a spiritual successor to eq forever cause game devs just don't get it and don't care. So what would it take?

custom server -mostly the same but with intelligent tweaks.
Also - see my signature ;)

I agree, its not the nostalgia that makes EQ great.

I think its the open world, no instancing, can still die at max level if you're not careful. You can die in places that are hard to recover your corpse, adds a sense of danger and adrenaline rush. Gear that lasts, mmos nowadays you replace you entire gear set every few levels. The fact that classes are not balanced, this is important, gives you a reason to roll alts for a 100% different experience. No level restrictions on gear, twinking is fun as hell.

All that and I actually enjoy the gameplay, it still holds up to this day, I prefer it over a WoW rotation anyday.

There are always custom servers abornin' - see www.eqemulators.net in the general conference for announcements.

In my case I'm working on a Trilogy server that will launch with pretty basically Trilogy content (and I'm not a slave to Classic-ness, see P99 for that!) then roll out new expansions based on the feel of Trilogy utilizing the best of what SOE released (e.g. PoP will be pretty close to stock except no PoK and books) while customizing content and mechanics. I've already got some folks helping drive the expansions with things like new ranger mechanics and tradeskills, feel free to click on the launchpad link below and comment.

Regards,
Mg

Substantial, substantive support from a playerbase.

I don't really think EverQuest was successful in its heyday just because it was one of the first MMOs; I think it was successful in its heyday because people were willing to invest insane amounts of time into it. I think people were sort of caught off-guard by this thing, and just kinda dove head-first into this huge fantasy world and willfully forgot about their real lives.

Most people quickly found out that doing so is simply not a sustainable way to entertain oneself. Online gaming addiction saw a meteoric rise into public awareness immediately after these kind of games hit the shelves, and World of Warcraft was largely developed in response to this problem, which is why it's so intent upon not only rewarding the casual gamer but being entirely designed around their needs.

And honestly, I don't really see anything wrong with that. Games that require investing inordinate amounts of time into them now have a more reasonable place in the gaming world among niche audiences and hardcore gamers. As long as a game requires people to invest as much time as EQ does just to see its end game, I really don't think we'll ever see another one quite like it - at least not at the caliber that EverQuest was during its peak years. Or, at least not until society no longer demands that most of us actually have something of a real life or hold down a job or support ourselves in some way.

It would take a completely different gaming landscape for something like EverQuest to actually be profitable in 2015. In short, developers don't care because developers have to eat.

Match. ^

Couldn't have said it better if I tried.

First and most important: Community

This would mean no instances, or cross server queues. Both kill community. Which IMO is where EQ started going downhill. When they added instances. And for those of you that have played WoW. You know where I am coming from on cross server queues.

I don't think it's just the massive time investment thing- this game is still pretty fantastic for someone with only casual desires. A big part of EQ's draw and the reason I think people take much longer to tire of it is that it seems to be one of the only MMOs out there that does not immediately make the player feel like a hero of its world on your individual path to glory. You start out and a fire beetle or a snake can kick your ass if you don't watch yourself. Even as you progress in levels you are never really safe- it might take a while, but give some green con long enough and they will eventually kill you if you go AFK. There's also the lore factor mentioned above- how many huts and houses exist in this game with no NPCs inside and no real purpose other than to flesh out the world? Especially in the classic era, how many quests are there that give little reward or are completely irrelevant to every class but 1? Where else is faction so intertwined/complicated and so relevant even in high levels? Norrath is a world that doesn't care about you. You have to make it care about you if you want something. It will keep going whether you're there or not.

1: No instancing - nothing kills a community like instancing.
2: No leashing - knowing a mob will chase you until either you or it die gave a sense of trepidation to making that 50/50 pull.
3: No hand holding/spoon feeding, discovering an obscure item then figuring out what to do with it was part of EQ questing. Personally I hated seeing a bright yellow "!" mark above NPC's then the progression to getting more XP from questing than out fighting on top of that.
4: In general the higher you get the more you grouped be it for that rare spawn/rare drop camp or just plain XP'ing which in turn feed back into that thing called community
5: Respawning naked, nothing made death more challenging than the naked corpse run. It also forged reputations of those that would take the time to help out and those that ignored pleas for help. Once again leading into that fable community thingy.

I think there's something to be said, perhaps an argument to be made about the role MMO immersion plays in the amount of time the average MMO player spends in game.

Most gamers I talk to outside of our secluded P99 world don't really want anything to do with an online gaming community. In fact, the sole reason a lot of people turn to video games is because they want an escape from social situations, not to be subsumed into them while they're trying to level up or acquire gear.

But on the main point here - that community defines the feeling of EQ - you're absolutely correct. I just tend to think that that's another problem as to why the game is so incredibly immersive and demands that you spend as much time playing it as you would spend in any other endeavor in your life. And at the end of the day, I don't think we'll ever see anything more than a small audience tucked away in the corner of the internet willing to broadcast a substantial amount of interest in it.

Or I dunno, maybe I'm wrong.