[Rick Sanchez]

Originally Posted by BlackBellamy [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Classic EQ occupies a very special place in evolution of gaming.

Before EQ people mostly played games to challenge themselves.

The overwhelming majority of the games were binary. You either won or lost. So you played to win, and the satisfaction you got was not only from winning but from overcoming the obstacle, whether by skill or by persistence with a bit of luck. These games tended to be brutal. There was no 2nd place, you had 1 winner and everyone else was a bankrupt loser.

After EQ the games shifted to a progress-based model. Now it doesn't matter who wins, there's no winning anyway, it's about progressing, and the game determines whether that's badges or titles or levels or grossly-oversized shoulder pads. Now people are just ticking off boxes. They get more buttons to press, more items to equip, more achievements, cosmetics. Cosmetics! Now that's Progress! Capital pee.

Name me one game released last 10 years that doesn't have some sort of progression system. Every single Steam, Origin and Epic game has them to start. All the mobile ones too; you bake cookies and now you have a high score but also progressed to level 76 baker why? Why not just make cookies for a high score? Oh you want the pink hat...I mean you don't but now you have 250 'cookiecoin' and a pulsating icon to the Cookie Store.

EQ sits right at that intersection. People talk about progress, and there is that. You get your levels and you get your stuff etc. But it's all super hard and everything takes forever, including the reward interval. That's because the original EQ devs were about challenging players. Think about all the hard, detailed quests with mediocre rewards. Not much effort spent there; reward was not a priority.

If you look at EQ dev videos and interviews you can see the mindset behind the product was this: "this is our idea of a fantasy world, come play in it" and for years it was true, we were in their world. It was apparent they were all surprised at how popular their product was. And it didn't matter how hard it was: It was the Only Game In Town.

But that changed. The games that followed EQ had a much different philosophy. In essence it was "let's build a casino". You take the bus, you get off the bus, you hit a bunch of buttons while loud sounds and flashing lights blast in your face, you get back on the bus and you camp out at the senior characters home.

Casinos make a lot of money.

Which is great because developers and project managers expect a of money because players expect outstanding graphics, deep lore, complex character development, fancy skill trees and a lot of other doo-dads. Paid-off streamers also expect money. But most of all investors expect profits. Because EQ showed them that you can have a couple of hundred thousand people paying as much for the product as their internet connection so hey let's make that a couple of million or whatever.

So when you say WoW is designed about the gear grind, or however you want to characterize it, you might be correct. But also the ultimate design decision is based upon monetization. You can be sure that no change to the game is made without approval from Retention. You can also be sure they are running a/b testing to subtly manipulate the reward interval for various sets of their player base in order to optimize retention rate by monitoring their subsequent activity rate. Modern games are exercises in consumer psychological manipulation.

Hope remains for a small studio of idealistic nerds out there somewhere.

Help me Obi Nerd Mmogy, you're my only hope...

Pretty much this, there’s no denying the magic that was classic Everquest, I know I’ll never get that feeling from any other game for as long as I live and my only hope is what this guy is referencing some small studio to do this. Merely from the fact that the center of all modern games is all based around purely manipulating the consumer. Let’s face it, those here felt that immersion, magic feeling and we’re all chasing it here but it’s not the same. However, the stars aligned perfectly at the right time for this to happen. I bet everyone can remember the exact moment they saw Everquest for the first time as well as remember the exact class/race they first made. Because it was someones idea and really didn’t give a fuck whether or not it was going to make money, it was special.