Personal bias is all that matters. Also tastes and ideals change with time and experience as well. Things that failed in the past may work in the future for unforseen reasons.
EQ is not particularly hard compared to the personal bias mentioned in Danths post. Or other games like...
Roguelikes.
At some point the EQ devs had enough personal bias to create EQ ;p and they made it well. For those of us who have seen the whole game though there is not much to do. CR's increasingly become a case of some external failure or issue rather then our own exploration or fun gameplay. I never die unless its a server issue, pathing, or some bug, or other players (and even then I still manage to avoid most of the known buggy stuff). Abstracting the immersive parts of the game even further. Levels are not relevant in regards to this stuff, except as a measure of time invested dealing with it all.
If EQ were some how procedural, or user content could be easily created by a large community. I would be more interested in it. Even modded EQ etc... the levels would cease to matter again. Like the first few times around. Yeah none of that is a "new idea". Yet it hasn't been tried for a game like this.
And accountability is important. It required teamwork to accomplish great things. Therefore your reputation mattered. Soloing was not the norm. No big studio who needs to bring in a million $ a year can afford to cater to the 1% though.
I would like to bring up that I never played Ultima Online, later on because I played EQ first, and the original Ultima games before that. I also had been playing a lot of MUDs and roguelikes. When I researched Ultima Online it looked cool, but only slightly more deep then Asherons Call 1. There are better roguelikes to play and I do not like "crafting" things as a main focus of gameplay. I did not feel like *levels in an online clone of the Ultima series would be worth it. No matter who they got to play Iolo or Lord British that week. Or what the paper dolls looked like.
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