This is a followup to @[email protected] ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
I’m playing FFXI at the moment completely solo, I wish I could be more social in it but I don’t have the time out commitment to do so. I know I’m missing out, but my goal at the moment is to just absorb as much of the story as possible before it inevitably gets shut down
I revisit FF11 every couple of years and I appreciate what it is now, where most of the content is kind of a museum you can travel through and then the endgame still has a small but very dedicated player base. But then FF14 is also set up that way, where the only content that you actually need to talk to other players to do is endgame content, and I just don’t think an MMO with a huge playerbase that it still getting major expansions should be designed like that.