In my mind back then, I was in awe of people that even had the knowledge of how to get across certain zones safely. You know it took effort/skill for them to gain that knowledge. You couldn't just look it up.
I've been thinking how you could possibly replicate a similar thing nowadays, but unless the world constantly randomly changes over time, rendering any created guides/maps/etc moot, I think that window has closed.
e.g. I created an Erudite wizard (who could not see in the dark) and insisted on leveling up in Toxxulia forest, the default "newbie" zone for Erudites. It was dark there, even during the day, and pitch black at night. I kept my monitor at the calibrated brightness level because I didn't want to "cheat". Monsters of an appropriate level were spread out and often hard to find. A troll NPC roamed the forest and randomly killed players. I spent many hours getting lost (and killed) there before leaving the island, only to discover the comparatively easy newbie zone that stood outside Qeynos, a short, safe, free, ship voyage away.
The game was full of stuff like this. If you wanted to do something, there was usually a very bad way to go about it and other ways that were much better. Finding those gave you a sense of accomplishment that was far sweeter than mere levels.
Modern games tend to be more balanced so you can be assured that, however you're doing something, there probably isn't another way to do it that is vastly easier unless you're doing something really weird. This "wastes" less of your time, but somehow feels less realistic. In real life, different strategies for doing things are seldom equal.
A little way down a loading screen hits for a zone called "The Hole"; a high level raid zone. My levitate was removed by the loading screen, and retrieving my body would require a team of high level players - thus lose (meaning ALL my gear and inventory was permanently lost, and a heavy XP penalty).
I don't think experiences like these are as positive as your nostalgia has led you to believe.
Admittedly, it does take a degree of willpower and sometimes I will still do some online research when a game gets particularly frustrating. The biggest obstacle to my approach of avoiding online information is that some games feel like they're designed with that in mind and don't provide enough information in the games for an isolated player to really figure everything out.
This is the metagame: game designers vs. every single player in the game. I kind of like it, though once the players win (by figuring out a strategy that works) the solution (often not exactly what the developers had intended) tends to be enshrined in youtube videos, wiki pages, and common practice.
To figure out all of ER, you'd need to play through it multiple times, comb through everything, do things in a different order, etc etc. There was a post on Reddit the other day, someone said they found Jarburg after playing for more than 900 hours. I know of it, but in two playthroughs I don't believe I actually went there yet.
I wonder if they collect analytics and they can at one point say which areas, questlines, gear items, etc are discovered the least.
Probably an uncommon experience, but I felt something similar playing Final Fantasy XV. The semi-realistic scale and emptiness of the world map that people complained about actually contributed to the consistent feeling of being out in the wilderness, stumbling on dungeons and whanot. Most open-world games feel like theme parks, Eos felt like a national park. I'm told RDR2 and Death Stranding carry similar vibes.
I'd like devs to get a bit more bold about real-world scaling environments. Let a long-ass walk between towns be a long-ass walk between towns. And no mini-maps.
RDR2 is very enjoyable to go out and just explore, you definitely feel out in the wilderness sometimes there. Another one would be Kingdom Come 1 / 2, especially 2 (it's a bit 'fuller') where you can just decide to go for a hike in the forest and go hunt or find some bandits or an easter egg. It's got long-ass walks (or horse rides) between towns; when I played the first one I barely used fast travel.
Death Stranding, again not so much; the only interesting things there are the actual destinations you have to go to / from. Great scenery and experience though, and the long-ass walk is core gameplay.
I'm not sure how far you got into XV, but it's completely different from XVI. XVI is XIII-style hallways, but with no battle wipe, so areas are designed to be large enough for combat. XV is a Ubisoft-style open-world, but with a lot less of the dopamine hacking cruft of AC et al. Using the car feels very roadtrip-like, but you certainly can and should get out and hoof it through the wild areas.
What made EQ an experience was those areas were static and took real skill to uncover how to do things.
The game meta/knowledge spreads through realtime video and incidental entertainment instead of through slow message boards only frequented by power users who would do something as lame as spend time on a 2005 message board.
It's amazing how deeply knowledgable everyone is about every game because of it.
I guess it's not good or bad. It's nice that gaming is mainstream instead of being a stereotypical loser activity it was when I was in high school.
It now works by reading spawn data from the running everquest application, instead of looking at network traffic.
I still use it sometimes, but
a) modern macroquest has built in spawn tracker
b) server don't send loot data to clients so we cannot sneak preview it anyway
At this point, even if a good MMO were to come out (incredibly, this has not happened for close on two decades), recreating that experience is entirely on the player. It's on the player to forgo looking things up, or to forgo using external tools to chat, find groups, trade items, calculate strategies, etc. But since players doing that will be at a disadvantage, that is unlikely to happen in an online game...
Interesting that progression was massively eased in later versions.
If it's hand generated, realistically they could only do a new map once every period, and the first guides would be online within hours of release. I believe Fortnite does or used to do this, making big map changes every season.
How about a simple NDA to prevent players sharing this kind of info?
I feel like the same "most" of the content which lives on the wiki is very secondary to the gameloop and that the designers did a wonderful job at not letting the player optimize the fun out of the game.
The game teaches you nothing and is very cryptic, but the gameloop is simple (go down, don't die). You naturally learn how the sandbox interact (i'm on fire but I have a water flask, water clear up sludge) and the randomized (and shuffle) wands expose you to spell interactions.
You can easily spend multi hundred hours just learning through the sandbox and trying to break the game.
The cryptic stuff (34 orbs, impressing the gods, the messages) is also very cool and I think motivating to keep playing with the sandbox even after having "mastered" the mechanics of the game. (As in you never know what you could manage to find if you try to break the game)
I don't think people play noita with a guide on a second monitor.
Sorry if poorly worded, tired
The overall layout (e.g. the progression of zones) and some set pieces are fixed, but the details are randomized.
Fun fact: the overall layout is configured by a PNG file, with the color of each pixel controlling which "biome" is used.
Last weekend I played a beta game called "Monsters and Memories" that's trying to be an EQ clone, and it's very faithful in that it's carried forward all the terrible parts of EQ.
Just the amount of sitting around waiting that you have to do in EQ that I had forgotten about is incredible. Managing your water and food levels, having to go find your corpse when you die and it taking 5 hours just to get there, pitch black nights so you're forced to walk around with a lantern, camping a spawn with 100 other people trying to get the same items as you to complete the same inane quests, broken quests that you can't even complete to progress the game forward...
And yeah, one weekend was enough. I got real shit to do, I have time for nonsense, but not THAT kind of time.
wow that's a memory i had lost for many years. thanks
Painful death makes you try hard to avoid it ensuring real stakes.
I didn't play EQ but on FFXI airships ran on a 15min schedule and if you missed it you would have to sit and wait, not dissimilar to real life. This kind of friction added a charm and immersion to the game but would never fly in a game today [pardon the pun].
Nowadays a lot of the enjoyment I seek out of games is mechanical difficulty and adrenaline because most the other aspects can be fulfilled away from the screen...
I agree with everybody else commenting here, it was a truly unique experience that I would love to be able to re-live, but our expectations as players have moved on a long while back, you can no longer capture that magic because it's now all rote and routine. In 1999 it was the first time many of us had ever experienced anything like it, it flooded the senses and it felt like a world full of interesting people and epic adventures. It was the frontier at the time.
I wonder if there's a game that focuses on that sort of travel experience.
Back when there was Morrowind, which didn't have map markers and whose in-game map had to slowly be uncovered. You get a description and that's it. The game did come with a paper map, which was stuck to my wall for years and frequently consulted.
A modern one would be Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2; when you turn on hardcore mode (which was only added after release, but the game was designed with it in mind), you don't get your position on the map, compass, or map markers; every quest involving a location has the NPCs give you a description (and at least in normal mode, your character making a remark when you've reached a landmark). It's not so much about planning your route though.
I still lament how UO played out. It quickly became apparent that most players binned into one of two categories, and neither category really fit in with the original UO vision. And of course, one of those two categories drove away the customers in the second category. The rest is history.
Gaming was more ambitious and experimental then. The FFXI documentary [0] made me reflect on how much games have changed since. FFXI was heavily inspired by EQ so more credit to EQ but games today are so much more bland and engineered by design. That's how they achieve universal appeal and commercial success - by engineering its engagement. Reminds me of how packaged foods are engineered to be the most addictive by empirically finding the bliss point [1]. In games it will essentially be dopamine per minute and now mainstream games will never do something as crazy as crafting experiences as random and lumpy as real life. Instead every engagement is crafted to never be too frustrating and to give just enough rewards to keep the gamer on that hamster wheel, with the next engagement never being too far away.
Original Soulsborne games felt fresh because FromSoftware put friction and obscurity back in the spotlight.
Eq has of course had some major server merges but your old account will still be on both UO and EQ.
To me UO is a breath of fresh air after 20 years of trash games except for a stand out few. Seeing my old wood elf ranger with swift wind and lupine dagger still glowing was magical. Almost as magical as re-exploring kelethin.
But still, it was fun to run around with one of my guys for a couple of hours. One thing I thought was cool was there had been some custom content involving my guild added near the bank where my guild hung out. It was still there, all these years later!
I had no idea what I was doing but I was hooked on figuring out.
I think you are generalizing on a stereotype. Gamers love experiences. If you give them enough to know there’s more beyond the wipe, they will keep wiping.
Given the way death was implemented ("LFG @ EC tunnel for a corpse run to Guk!") and the fact that you could fall off the ships in the middle of the ocean when the game lagged, it _was_ epic and dangerous. I remember the first time it happened to me and players in public chat coached me through a 20 or 30 minute swim to get my wizard and stuff to an island with a portal.
i met so many people who helped me get into some really scary places (lguk at 16 is terrifying) as i wondered in all sorts of climates and places, what a fantastic place!
looking back the world felt so different and huge and alive with life
i will never get that experience again
Going from Qeynos to Freeport, or crossing the ocean on a boat felt absolutely epic and dangerous. It was wonderful, but not something I would want to play today now that I have real life obligations.