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Many MMOs come out of the woodwork professing to bring back the feel of old-school MMOs. From the recent release of Ember’s Adrift to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen which takes cues from the early days of the MMORPG genre, this is an alluring concept to prospective players.
Many MMO players I speak to feel the genre has lost its way. From aggressive monetization to the themepark design that sees players dashing from one quest marker to the next without any real exploration or brain power, MMOs are vastly different affairs from what they were during the original Ultima and EverQuest days. These MMOs feel, in a sense, like time capsules, suspended in what is now a bygone era in the MMO industry, but one that it feels so many developers and fans of the genre are wanting to recapture.
It makes me wonder, especially as someone with no great attachment to the “old ways” since I really didn’t get my start in MMOs until The Lord of the Rings Online released in 2007 (though I did play quite a bit of RuneScape early on, but mostly just with a single friend), why that is? What is it about the old-school design that in 2022 feels so alluring to some players?
Part of me thinks it’s because these older titles were much more complex and required more thought, exploration and socialization to play to their fullest. You weren’t going to go around soloing everything in the original EverQuest, and even titles like EVE Online or World of Warcraft, both games on the edge of that “old school” era, are best when you’re playing with a group. Nowadays developers have to ensure the content they create is soloable, as the “massive” and “multiplayer” part of MMOs has become less important.
It’s honestly that aspect that makes me yearn for a return to roots, so to speak. I don’t want the dated mechanics of an Ultima, but I want the design that forced groups, that forced interaction with other players, whether it was organically or through the nature of a quest. It’s one major reason why I was really hoping I would like Ember’s Adrift: it is designed to the point where you really can’t solo the MMO.
Some of my most lasting friendships were made in LotRO during the early days when you just could not simply walk into Mordor and take on the hordes of Sauron by yourself. Braving the Trollshaws, tackling the Ettenmoors, and besieging Carn Dum all required a group if you were going to do it properly, and through that I made friends that are as important to me today as they were 15 years ago.
For me, I feel that lost social aspect of MMOs is really want people want back, but I’ll admit having not experienced the heyday of EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot, there just isn’t that lived experience for me to fall back on. Classic servers are showing that there is a desire for that older design, though that could also be massively fueled nostalgia with the old titles being viewed through incredibly rose-tinted glasses.
I want MMOs to progress, move forward and find new ways to engage their users. But I’ll also maintain that they cannot lose the identity and DNA that made them so popular, which in large part was thanks to the groundwork of these old-school design philosophies that are the literal bones of some of the most memorable and influential games of all time.
What are your thoughts, though?
