It's a love/hate thing I think with most. There's a sizeable minority who prefer it.
The lack of in-game bells and whistles (maps/etc) and inclusion of interdependence between players and corpse runs and death penalty and first-person mean you have to keep your attention on the game. As you play, you're aware of this and it keeps you glued to hte screen. This is what creates the immersion and the illusion of being in the other world. HOwever, many are exhausted by this and some are too strained.
When you combine that with the lore and openness of the world, it creates a unique experience.
The thing is, we don't just live in VR, we live in RL too. So we cannot invest our full attention to the game, given so much can happen in RL. So players prefer to not be immersed as much.
Any game can reproduce this by simply limiting your capability to objectively observe your environment and by serving you heavy consequences for mistakes. You'll have to give lots of attention to the game. You'll feel immersed.
I play Wurm ONline and it reproduces a lot of this feeling. It has no GPS-enabled maps. It has corpse runs. It has no in-game radar. It's first-person only. It has dangeorus creatures in the wild. Players aren't as interdependent though. This feeling gets dulled whne you get a horse and become powerful as a fighter and magic user, but it always remains in some amount.
Games just need to limit what a player can objectively know and add Choices & Consequences.v The environment needs to be reasonably dangerous. The player has to feel like their attention is necessary.
And ya community is part of it, but I think the things I bring up here are the heart of it. Keep in mind the reason community mattered in EQ was because it was a strongly group-dependant game. You could solo, but even a solo-centered class was limited. It was because you'd have your corpse handed to you by the maker of death you turned to a community for help.
Most MMORPGs now favor soloers because most gamers prefer soloing. Soloing is so much frienldier to RL. Want to AFK to feed the baby? Easy. Want to take out the garbage? Easy. Want to cook a quicky? Easy enough. Need a potty break? Do it! The demands are low. The game caters to these people because most people are like this. Most people have demanding real lives and just cannot devote much time or attention to games. They don't wnat demandin games. They want to relax.
And you know that's not a bad thing. RL is more improtant than gaming.
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