The Selectiveness of Memory
In M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, a community of outcasts with a variety of problems give up their modern existence and choose to live a more primitive lifestyle. That’s how it works in the movies. In real life, such people create unauthorized EverQuest servers limited to early expansions and eschew unnecessary conveniences like being able to see your screen.
Nostalgia is intoxicating, and those of use who played EQ back in the early days of the MMO frontier remember a lot of things fondly. But you can’t recapture the magic of the past simply by ignoring the lessons learned in the years since. Things change for a reason, whether we want to believe it or not.
In other news, I’m creating my own society set in the good old days before color TV and penicillin. Beta apps will be accepted soon.
Personally, it’s the style of the game that I miss, not the archaic trappings like being face-planted in my spell book. Open, non-instanced dungeons. MOBs hard enough that it takes lots of patience, skill, a pet class, or a group to handle them (encouraging grouping but rewarding soloing). Complex dungeons with traps, secrets, and death at all turns that feel more like a new environment for me to explore than an amusement park ride on rails. Death stinging enough that you don’t want to just zerg that challenging named mob from the bind point/graveyard until it drops.
Some of that I’m finding recaptured in Vanguard as Sony works hard to clean up Sigil’s mess and get to the goods underneath, but I can understand why people have the kind of servers you’re talking about. When you really like a game and nobody is making a good (newer and updated) alternative, oftentimes sticking with the original is more fun than playing something that just feels wrong.
Yeah, no question there’s a lot of great things from EQ that haven’t been duplicated (yet) in another MMO. The trick is capturing those emotions without falling too far into the frustrations that we sometimes forget about.
I guess I’d just rather see people moving forward rather than back, because in the long run trying to return to seven-year-old gameplay isn’t going to be satisfying. Vanguard had a chance at building a classic MMO that got players to care about its world, but it brought too many other problems that got in the way.
In other news, I’m creating my own society set in the good old days before color TV and penicillin. Beta apps will be accepted soon.
Will Ngruk be dressing up in costumes and scaring the shit outta Shwayder and leaving marks on random office doors?
I might pay to see that.
(not a monthly fee, mind you)
The marks on random office doors thing happens already.
Don’t ask.
Oh, great, give away the ending to the movie, why don’t you?
Nostalgia IS intoxicating, but I don’t think something like an EQ1 emulation server counts as true nostalgia yet. The game is still live, expanding, has a large population, etc.
In another 10-15 years? Hell yeah, I’d hit up an emulation server and take a fun trip through memory-land! Mind you, it will likely be like most of my other trips into emulator territory, which means I’ll be back to modern games after a few days of nostalgic thrill, followed by the letdown of crap I don’t miss….like resting for 20 minutes between solo kills
*goes and loads up dragon warrior 1 while the SOE servers migrate*
Good ole Memory Lane and the Wii virtual console has cost me way to much money. I’m such a sucker for an ole classic. My 5 year old just leaves the room now when he sees me buying some ole RPG off of there cause he knows he isn’t getting the controller back for awhile.
People are always trying to get back that feeling they got when they played their first MMO, but it will never happen. You can’t get it back. It’s like trying to get back your virginity. Remember it for what it was, be glad you were able to play it, and look forward to the next game for what it is, and the joys you will get out of it.
It’s a blast reading those forums. The thread on seeing the book while medding is a study in masochism.
When they yell BOOKINTHEFACE, I just can’t help but picture the wandering monks in MP’s Holy Grail.
I sometimes see games recreated by professional devs later, but they are all graphics and lack substance. While people would love to play those old fashioned games with updated technology, it often doesn’t translate. There’s something to be said about how a game blends in with the technology at the time.
Then there are a lot of independent mod-makers out there for games like NWN and NWN2 who recreated games like Ultima 4,5,6,7, etc ad did a decent job of recreating the essence of the game without overbearing special effects.
I sometimes like to download the old Bards Tale games and re-play them. There’s an element of fun about those games, largely for me, in walking around the dungeons and mapping them on graph paper (the bt1 maps were all 22×22 grids). That aspect of “fun” doesn’t translate well to modern games. When has a game recently compelled people to map something by hand? The technology nowadays is smooth-flowing as opposed to step-walking so it’s much more difficult to map and just leaves people frustrated and so they put built in map-makers/overhead views now. The concept of drawing your own maps on a grid are long gone, but it’s things like that which modern players crave so they go back to the old games to get that sensation again.
So on some level, LIKE some aspects of older games over newer ones, but understand that at this point, technology is so advanced that it makes things like that pointless to implement.
EQ was amazing for what it was. No doubt about it. It hit all the right hooks, wonder, excitement, awe. More importantly it presented them all in a way that the majority of the population had never had a chance to experience before (excluding MUDS, etc…).
I loved that game, I spent endless nights in that game. But I dont think I could go back again.
I’ll take Adele’s analogy a step further. Its always best to remember old girlfriends the way they were. As soon as you see them again you start to remember why you broke up.
Crowded dungeons, with layouts that made no sense at all. Monsters that would follow you for ages. A painful leveling process often referred to as grinding ! Grinding levels! What is positive about the word grinding? Broken economies… the list goes on.
And yet people played for ages, longer after they saw the inerrant flaws in the game play. Why? The people they played with. The new friends you met that kept you coming back night after night. I brought a lot of my EQ buddies to WOW, I’ve been gaming with the same people now for almost ten years. A bigger question I rarely hear developers address is “how do we convince a community that we are a good switch?” It seems like they are all relying on Bartle’s explorers to spread the word. It may have worked for Kevin Costner but you can’t always rely on “if you build it they will come.”
@Adele: I wish people would stop repeating the tired old meme that the feeling of one’s first MMORPG can never be recaptured. Perhaps in your case, that’s true.
When SOE created the progression servers last year, a large number of people regurgitated that tired old mantra. Guess what? I had a blast for the time I played. It was just as fun as I remembered it being back in ’99. I am looking forward to playing on the new server.