That reminds me, I haven’t experienced a MMO that was successful at fostering a community since asheron’s call for the reason you describe.
The game didn’t have any of the “quality of life” features you can find in modern games, no fast travel, no markets, no difficulty indicator, if you wanted to travel to another region, it was a quest in itself or you’d have to beg top levels players to escort you there or open a portal for you, and since you could only hold a single portal to a location if you were a high enough level mage (I think) it wasn’t that easy to find.
Death was punishing, you’d lose most of your gear and you’d have people begging for help to retrieve it on every village square and because that actually mattered, it’s something you could do out of good will or for a fee.
The only way to get good gear was to get it from player who could craft, and since crafting was bitch to level up, guilds were the only one who could afford it.
Oh and that’s not really a part of the game, but internet was young and games didn’t yet have hords of people dissecting game and dumping every possible details on wikis or at least not as fast. So actually discussing quest, place and strategy with people mattered.
PVP was rough, no level limit, barely any zoning, a level 60 could camp your noob spawn and grief you forever, until you asked your guild for help and it turned into a week long manhunt to punish the griefer.
To be honest I don’t remember if the game has quests, a few I guess, mostly forgettable, most of the good memory I have from the game were from player induced adventures.
The game did eventually end up having all the tools you’d expect a community to build including XP allocation optimiser for cookie cutter built and a large database, which fucked it up, people would race their glass canon to level 60, kill a couple of the highest level monsters and get bored.
I wonder how you could build a game like that nowadays without the community ruining it with a wiki.
That reminds me, I haven’t experienced a MMO that was successful at fostering a community since asheron’s call for the reason you describe.
The game didn’t have any of the “quality of life” features you can find in modern games, no fast travel, no markets, no difficulty indicator, if you wanted to travel to another region, it was a quest in itself or you’d have to beg top levels players to escort you there or open a portal for you, and since you could only hold a single portal to a location if you were a high enough level mage (I think) it wasn’t that easy to find.
Death was punishing, you’d lose most of your gear and you’d have people begging for help to retrieve it on every village square and because that actually mattered, it’s something you could do out of good will or for a fee.
The only way to get good gear was to get it from player who could craft, and since crafting was bitch to level up, guilds were the only one who could afford it.
Oh and that’s not really a part of the game, but internet was young and games didn’t yet have hords of people dissecting game and dumping every possible details on wikis or at least not as fast. So actually discussing quest, place and strategy with people mattered.
PVP was rough, no level limit, barely any zoning, a level 60 could camp your noob spawn and grief you forever, until you asked your guild for help and it turned into a week long manhunt to punish the griefer.
To be honest I don’t remember if the game has quests, a few I guess, mostly forgettable, most of the good memory I have from the game were from player induced adventures.
The game did eventually end up having all the tools you’d expect a community to build including XP allocation optimiser for cookie cutter built and a large database, which fucked it up, people would race their glass canon to level 60, kill a couple of the highest level monsters and get bored.
I wonder how you could build a game like that nowadays without the community ruining it with a wiki.