Rift: The Planes of Telara

[Uberom]

A lot of it has to do with audience. These new MMO's are aimed to entertain 10 year olds with ADD, and they do a pretty good job. Those 10 year olds grow up to be 18 year olds with ADD, who expect to play an MMO that is similar to what they have always known.

I tell my friends this all the time. The MMO genre has been tainted, and it probably will never go back to what we remember it as, difficult. Vanilla WoW was legit, but those expansions really softened the game, and the community. Now that people know what a smooth, easy, carefree MMO feels like, they don't like it when they try a difficult one.

I think there is still a market for difficult MMO's, though. SOE is working on "Everquest Next", a rework of the EQ intellectual entity. I have no details on it, but we can only hope...