Old Man Yells at (Gaming) Cloud

Kids these days and their MMOs...

I recently made the terrible mistake of looking at some Reddit comments about various MMORPGs and I’ve got my own thoughts.

Kids these days don’t know how “good” they’ve got it. Today’s MMORPGs are but a fading shadow of the real thing, barely an echo of the kinds of games we got to play back before the war. It was a time of rage and excitement and awe and intolerable grinding, all rolled into a single love-hate addiction package.

Maps

The first really involved RPG that I ever played was the first Phantasy Star. It was a vast game that spanned multiple planets and had many dungeons on each planet. What it didn’t have, was an in-game map. I had a notebook of graph paper full of hand-drawn maps for that game.

I did the same thing for EverQuest. That game–widely considered to be the ancestor of all modern MMOs–had no in-game map. There was no overlay map in the corner, no minimap, no zone map… nothing. EverQuest had discrete zones which made making zone maps easier… but every one of us either had to make our own maps or download them from the fledgling Internet.

We had to look for landmarks to figure out where we were at any given time. If that didn’t work, we’d have to run a command like /loc to give us our X, Y, and Z coordinates within the zone. Every single player of these games was a highly trained wilderness navigator.

Today’s MMO players can get a zoomable world map that they can use for fast travel, and many of them can even just drop a marker on the map and get turn-by-turn GPS instructions on how to get there, even if the journey involves tricky maneuvers.

Back then, mapping a new zone with graph paper in one hand and prayer beads in the other (for fear of imminent death) was a huge adrenaline rush. Now it’s little more than a soft “ding” and a few experience points.

Fast Travel

Today’s games pretty much all have fast travel built in and, referring to the “comments section” again, people will riot if this feature is missing. To give us the illusion of challenge, fast travel often comes in the form of unlock challenges. Find a new temple/shrine/port/cairn/stuffed animal and you unlock safe travel to that location. New World and Elder Scrolls Online both charge you currency for fast travel, but it’s such a pittance it’s hardly noticeable.

In the days of EverQuest, the only way to get from one location to the other was to walk. There was no fast travel as we know it. If you wanted to get from the west coast to the east coast of the main continent, you were going to beg people for speed buffs and then run for it, hoping you didn’t die along the way.

Druids and druid artifacts provided a means of faster travel, but the destinations were limited. I think a few classes had an “evac” spell, but that also went to a fixed location. I loved playing a class that either had a speed buff or could use portals, because everybody needed someone like me in their group. That role just doesn’t exist today.

Death Penalties

Today when I fight a boss and lose, I’ll go back to my most recent spawn point (or the nearest fast travel location). In the “hard” games like the Soulslike genre, I’ll lose whatever currency I’m holding, which is lost potential stat improvement. Most of the time, I lose little to nothing. In survival games, I’ll lose the resources I’ve gathered on that trip, but again nothing more.

If you died in EQ, you would lose a percentage of your XP so the higher level you were the more it hurt. You could even lose levels if you died enough. Can you imagine the outrage if people lost levels in a modern MMO? Worse, you’d lose everything you had on you. All your weapons, all your armor, reagents (lacking these could cripple classes like the Necromancer)…gone.

We all had to do “corpse runs”. We’d get sent back to our last bind location and appear there naked. We’d then have to run, naked and defenseless, to the (likely hazardous) location where our corpse lay. A pretty common death spiral happened when you died on your way to get your corpse. Doing these corpse runs made us even more dependent on people who could dole out speed, portals, or invisibility.

People these days don’t know what real fear is. They don’t fear exploring the unknown far away from their bound city. They can just hop on a mount and run/fly to wherever they want to go with little fear of consequences.

Quest Markers

Today we’re all used to finding the NPC with a floating exclamation point above their head. We click on them and we get a quest. The quest is then in a journal that we can use to track and get GPS directions to all of the important locations.

Not so in the past. During the glory days, NPCs had no punctuation floating above them. You couldn’t track your progress on a given quest in an interactive journal. Nope, you had to go up to an NPC and “hail” them. You’d then have to talk to them and enter the right set of commands to get a quest. After that, you’re on your own. If you forget that you can complete a quest 20 feet from you, that’s your loss.

Factions and Choices

Some modern games have factions and alliances and guilds and clans. Some of those can even declare war or allegiance between them. However, none of this ever really has meaningful impact on your character. Back then, “real” MMOs had factions that meant something.

If you were a good-aligned player, you’d be KoS (killed on site) in an evil city, and vise versa. If you started out in an evil city, then you’d need to work to increase your faction with the other cities just so you could get in the front door.

Anybody who started evil in EverQuest remembers having to turn in thousands of Gnoll Pup hides to someone in the woods outside Qeynos just so they could get past the guards (if you didn’t want to sneak in via the sewer). Even then, once you got inside, some vendors would sneer at you and tell you go go away, while others made you pay very high prices. It was commonplace to send a friend into a city to buy something on your behalf because their faction prices were better.

Loot

Can you believe that we used to play with our friends and still not get the loot we wanted? The idea of having people all get “copies” of the same loot (you see this in games like Destiny and its ilk) was non-existent. Worse, there were NPCs that would only spawn on certain timers and they could (unpredictably) drop quest components or valuable combat items.

This led to “spawn camping”, where people would just sit down and wait for the NPC to appear and then destroy it instantly. Because there was often only ever one of these special NPCs, if someone was spawn camping an NPC others needed, they could literally block hundreds of other people from finishing a quest or getting a long sought-after weapon.

End of Rant

In today’s game-rich economy, there are tons of developers making increasingly more niche games that target narrower bands of audiences. If one of these companies decided to make an MMO that actually felt immersive, with real consequences, real challenges, and real fear, I’d gladly go back to paying a monthly fee.

Maybe what I want is a Soulslike/Elden Ring MMO. Elden Ring has maps, but NPCs don’t have bouncing punctuation hovering over them, and even though we get a map, it still hides all kinds of secrets. Choosing a side in Elden Ring can mean changing your ending, so an MMO version could potentially lock you out of some options.