Totally, me and my friend used to share an EQ account in school. His parents paid for it so he got to play during the day, and I would play at night from midnight until 6am, then I'd go to school. It was profoundly unhealthy, which is why that game earned the name "Evercrack".

Last weekend I played a beta game called "Monsters and Memories" that's trying to be an EQ clone, and it's very faithful in that it's carried forward all the terrible parts of EQ.

Just the amount of sitting around waiting that you have to do in EQ that I had forgotten about is incredible. Managing your water and food levels, having to go find your corpse when you die and it taking 5 hours just to get there, pitch black nights so you're forced to walk around with a lantern, camping a spawn with 100 other people trying to get the same items as you to complete the same inane quests, broken quests that you can't even complete to progress the game forward...

And yeah, one weekend was enough. I got real shit to do, I have time for nonsense, but not THAT kind of time.

It was also at the perfect moment in time where you couldn't just pull up the game's wiki on a second monitor and have fully detailed maps and quest details on hand. You actually had to learn things for yourself by exploration and trial and error. You had to learn things from other people by talking to them in game.

In my mind back then, I was in awe of people that even had the knowledge of how to get across certain zones safely. You know it took effort/skill for them to gain that knowledge. You couldn't just look it up.

I've been thinking how you could possibly replicate a similar thing nowadays, but unless the world constantly randomly changes over time, rendering any created guides/maps/etc moot, I think that window has closed.

I hated EQ for me the reason was it was not UO nor was it even trying to recreate the vibrancy & real world that UO's designers had gone for. *BUT* I also recognized that EQ represented a game that was much more aligned to what a normal gamer would want, one could already see that path being forged in UO as time went on. And then of course WoW came along and perfected the art.

I still lament how UO played out. It quickly became apparent that most players binned into one of two categories, and neither category really fit in with the original UO vision. And of course, one of those two categories drove away the customers in the second category. The rest is history.

The inter-city travel was my favorite part of EverQuest. (The rest of the game, I didn't find too interesting.) The level of challenge was about right: if you looked at maps and planned your route, you could generally get to where you wanted to go, but it was hazardous.

I wonder if there's a game that focuses on that sort of travel experience.

My first memory of EverQuest was leaving the tutorial quest, running along a road at night, and being eaten by a lion.

I had no idea what I was doing but I was hooked on figuring out.

Oh my, that long journey is one of my fondest memories of the game as well. Absolutely terrifying as a low level with barely any information on how to pull it off, having to ask strangers for help. The fear of losing all of your stuff on the way and having to run all the way back. Magical. I was just a humble human paladin on the Mithaniel Marr server.

I agree with everybody else commenting here, it was a truly unique experience that I would love to be able to re-live, but our expectations as players have moved on a long while back, you can no longer capture that magic because it's now all rote and routine. In 1999 it was the first time many of us had ever experienced anything like it, it flooded the senses and it felt like a world full of interesting people and epic adventures. It was the frontier at the time.

i remember doing the staff of the wheel quest as a newbie level 16 wizard who had barely seen any of the world

i met so many people who helped me get into some really scary places (lguk at 16 is terrifying) as i wondered in all sorts of climates and places, what a fantastic place!

looking back the world felt so different and huge and alive with life

i will never get that experience again

I played Runescape back when it was just Falador and Varrock, and it all started because I saw a kid at the public library playing it.

And not long after that I was waking up at 2am to mine or grind some skill before I had to go to football practice at 5:30am.

I wonder what kind of permanent damage that did.

Player vs environment is indeed the normal definition of PvE [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_versus_environment

Likewise. My first introduction to scripting was automating EverQuest. I learned the basics of path resolution writing a script to grind misty thicket picnics. I wrote my own HUD-style UI overlay to replace most of the default windows. And I learned about pointers and disassembly and jumps disassembling hack plugins from shady sites.

It could be anything, but it resonates with people for a very good reason. Many people feel the negatives of technology and social media and miss the time before it. I know how sentiment will skew here, and I know it's easy to take for granted the advantages of having a fully capable pocket computer. But I also understand what we have given up for it.

Yeah, I never understood why that was necessary. I get diminishing rewards as an addiction mechanic, but they all switch gameplay dramatically from adventure and exploration (and combat) quest based character growth to raid fueled gear treadmills. Some people live for the latter it seems like? But there were never any that focused on character growth all the way. It wasn't like they weren't adding content continuously anyway. It would have been possible. Or turn it rogue alike with top levels earning benefits or unlocking other options for additional playthroughs. With the number of mmorpgs made one of them would have tried it if it would jave worked I guess?

Yeah, people should know that https://project1999.com/ exists.

Game addiction hits the same part of the brain as gambling does. In fact, it’s my understanding that gambling addicts and video game addicts have nearly identical similarities in terms of how the addiction progresses and “sets in” as it where.

As an aside, and really I am sorry for this tangent, and I have no issue believing any of this, but this comment somehow feels LLM (ChatGPT) generated to me and I can’t put my finger on it, as I like to default to being wrong about such things.

I know it’s an aside but it has become such a big issue on many forums now.

Sorry for the tangent!

Reflecting a bit, I really see not plausible justification why say one account should be let to be logged in for more than 3 hours/day (say specially during workweek). Even if you really have no job, at that point I don't think it's adding to your wellbeing.

I myself really enjoyed a game (Tibia, very popular here in Brazil) during my childhood, and, living in a large metropolis (and at the time quite violent too) and with limited opportunities for play, it was a saving grace in some ways. It really served as a playground analogue to the real world, where I could talk to people from other cultures all over the world, practice a foreign language (english), practice commerce, planning, and lots of really nice things I think it's fair to say. I think excesses of gaming were already in common consciousness at the time, and the occasional warning from my parents (in no way prohibitive) was a great reminder -- me and my older brother did check whether we were getting something good out of the experience. Specially as the dial-up internet cost was very large! (later replaced by broadband to the relief of my father). I'm also glad it didn't overwhelm my childhood.

That game has since added soft limits (already in 2006 according to the wiki), which I think are better than nothing, but probably there should be some hard limits as well (even if you're really conservative about limits... surely at least something like 8 hours a day could be universally agreed upon).

There are valid objections to those kinds of limits because there are all sorts of exceptions: bedridden people that need an activity, people that just use the game as a chatroom (quite common) to keep in touch with friends, etc.. I think those people can find other activities and other media to fill their time and chat.

It's also probably unlikely that those limits are going to be voluntarily enforced by all companies. I think regulation in this area is important -- in a way, those limits are actually good for the medium: they allow a minimally healthy baseline to exist and the market not be dominated by the worst, most damaging grindfests. But also probably just regulation has limits, and it's important for individual/collective conscience, education and cultural awareness to exist, so people pay attention that each activity is adding, to their lives, being meaningful (this includes social media usage, all sorts of games, etc. -- but could apply to doing anything too much like watching TV or talking to friends even). Boredom is the instinctive response that encourages taking other activities, but unfortunately adversarial design and dark patterns (and even just too captivating activities) have found ways to override this response simply to generate profit.

Moreover, as a game designer, we should be really be thinking about bringing worthwhile experiences into this world, things that teach (in all sorts of ways), move, challenge, captivate, inspire and connect us. Here's a heuristic I like: take your favorite memories and feelings and try to replicate, extend and generalize them in various ways for others.

World of Warcraft had this in Booty Bay. There was a hilarious achievement where you first got your reputation to max with the Booty Bay guards by killing the nearby pirates, then the other half was to kill the guards until the Bloodsail Buccaneers faction exalted you; a 2.5x reputation grind that took weeks. And when you were done you couldn’t enter Booty Bay anymore because the guards killed you on sight.

The things we do…

> players hung out in tunnels shouting their wares.

The Luclin bazaar from EQ is still one of the coolest/most unique game features I have ever seen. Park your character to open up a shop with selected items from your inventory. Browse everybody's wares by walking around and clicking them to see their shops!