They only know single player RPGs, codex is MMOmophobic. Only a few people have played MMORPGs and even they only know a bit.
I have had my share with a few years of WoW.
Leaving aside any other consideration, I don't have that kind of time on my hands anymore.
It's because of capitalism. Businesses can destroy competition and sabotage others, they have so much freedom to do that in legal ways. Read the bottom link in my signature, look at all that talent that was 'retired'. Other corporations have since joined in too, what's left is a wasteland. People are slow to figure out why this is. But really it's like, if you went around every business in your country, and shot the secretary in the head, there would eventually be a shortage of secretaries. What happened in gaming is no different, it was just done by paying those people to retire.
It's like ethnically cleansing the talent in the entire industry, and besides that they also deliberately made it so that the top games are $100 million monstrosities that all the kids want and use the latest tech that costs a lot of money. Now any average game studio is fucked, they can't compete with that. So they all died. The middle class of gaming studios have been massacred over the past 20 odd years. Now it's just a handful of AAA shitlords making franchised McCrap for the mainstream masses of idiots while abusing their position and constantly seeing how far they can push it. Or there's a million indie one man band developers who are mostly talentless hacks, roleplaying as indie game developers, but constantly failing to make anything that's even half as good as shareware from 1985.
That's depressing. Hopefully, things will change, sooner or later. They always do.
There was an amazing game but it died due to bugs and failed launch. You learned some spells from a trainer but you learned some from enemies in the world by fighting them. Also as you levelled up you got multiple attribute points you could spend on your character and you could drastically change the character depending on how you spent the points. So a Bard with lots of Con, Sta, Agi was tanky. But if you pumped Str/Dex you could be like a glass cannon. And most classes had the same flexibility. You also had stances that let you focus on a style. The Shaman could do a quest to pray to a patron that changed the class and the pet. Bear shaman was tanky and strong healer, the bird shaman was damage focused, etc. They got a different pet and a bunch of different spells depending on which quest they did.
Sounds like fun. Stuff like that, games getting canceled or failing or turning out complete crap, is what made me decide to avoid getting all hyped for games before they were already out.
EverQuest is the closest thing but that game was great at release and got shitter each year it lived. 24 years later means it's total shit. There is p99 which is closer to the original but it's still shit. They never got close to the original and that too got worse over the years. If you put a map and uber gear in EverQuest then you may as well play World of Warcraft. The whole point of EQ was that it was brutal and unwelcoming and accomplishing anything felt amazing. That whole thing got ruined over the years.
That said p99 is still probably better than anything else.
Not sure I could enjoy it today like you probably did back then.