Thanks guys. I had been online since '94 (10 years old) to 2010 (26 years old, when WoW: Cataclysm was released, which brought an end to the last "old-school" part of WoW). I could not figure out whether my memories of the old Internet were just nostalgia and youth or if it definitely was different then. The comments by many here, some of who I assume are older, have vindicated me.
I have watched the change from the BBS days when I met most of my friends around ten years old and played Doom and Warcraft over modems (after calling them on the phone to arrange it) to the Telnet days when kids at middle school talked about MUDs at the lunch table, America Online in the '90s with all the intense role-playing chatrooms with the flowery language, and the rise of serious online games in the late '90s and early 2000's, with no match-making systems or any of the nonsense today. It was already bad by WoW, as I remember. In the last days of classic, I remember players buying gold with real money and admitting to it was no big deal (this was shocking in Everquest, as I remember), people were running bots and guild leaders did not care about it or about the "reputation" of their guild, or if they behaved badly, either. I had left for WoW from EQ because I saw what they were doing with Planes of Power. Then I left WoW again when TBC was announced (max. raid size cut in half, arenas, resilience, etc.). The Vanguard game that I went to from WoW and then left would look like a paradise compared to today's games (I'm guessing). That was in 2007. In 2008 Wrath of the Lich King had just enough remaining to still enjoy myself with low level characters and the old world. Then in 2010 they killed everything. I amused myself with League of Legends for a while until that went south. As you said, the "fight for the middle" and conformity. Girls play that game. Every person you never thought would play online games does. It changed. Used to be the game was an unpredictable, challenging and thought-provoking exercise where every game was different and you never knew who would be in a lane. Now it is pure formula that is boring and predictable. They had to force roles and structure on the game.
You are right, it all happened with the social media. I remember when I came back to The Burning Crusade in 2007 it felt like a completely different game. People I never thought to hear on voice chat (and voice chat itself was already an oddity that people insisted on it, coming from EQ where that vibe of seriousness and immersion-breaking was not prevalent). The "must have 3 cc" of pick-up groups, and the ultra inanity of "daily quests". Already the formula was being found. I remember all the silly ostentation of WotLK with huge flying mounts and titles that everyone else had (coming off of classic, where being a high warlord or grand marshall made you the envy of a server). Then people started leaving groups without a word after a single wipe. "Pick-up raids" became possible, impossible in classic. Badges, daily quests, farming farming farming. That's another thing--I had the time of my life in classic saving for my "epic mount". I would travel all of the world searching through treasure chests, batting the alliance and exploring new areas. By TBC treasure chests were gone, the game told you how to earn money, it was a formula. Cataclysm was the complete end of an era, though.
Now that I'm 31 I question other aspects of MMORPGs--why are they all about fighting? Why do we need to kill so many creatures to play the game? Why is there no attempt at plot? The poster was right when he said that old people want to "relive" their youth in these games, often against all logic. Someone mentioned Second Life in this thread. That is another game I watched decline. I started in 2007. It was diverse, interesting and thought-provoking (or so I thought). There were thriving role-playing groups. Those groups have now disappeared almost entirely. The areas and players all conform to the appearance of others. Seeing unusual, interesting people in sims used to be the norm. Men often had carefree, simple looks. Now men are all muscle shapes with "six-packs", etc. Everyone has dark skin and dressed in black. It looks like the most boring "virtual world" anyone can ever imagine. And it is. Just like with WoW, most people don't devote serious time to Second Life any more. Just when things get interesting, "RL calls", "gotta go" (sometimes a blatant lie), or vanishing without a word. It's not a personal complaint, it just tallies with the general themes I have watched over the years. My entire 20s was all light college work and endless gaming. I have watched it all, from server first max level guardian in EQ2 to 20 hour days for several weeks getting high warlord in WoW. I am glad to know it is not just nostalgia or naivety on my part. I am not usually susceptible to those things.
As for the future, I often read Wolfshead Online's blog. He comments on these things in well-written language. Sadly the older I get the more my tastes diverge even from my so-called "social outcast" peers. I could design an MMORPG that would blow people's minds, but I often think we are not being realistic here. Gaming had already gotten unwieldy by the '90s. Even back in '82 it was outrageous, with over a thousand games released a year. How can they sell all those in stores? Video game crash of '83, anyone? Here are some facts I collected about budgets in the early '90s:
"In the early 90s, video game budgets were around $100,000 — when Doom was released in 1993 it had cost $200,000 and was touted as one of the most expensive games at the time.
Wing Commander III (1994) - $4,000,000
Wing Commander IV (1995) - $12,000,000
Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992) – $US1 million"
Games were taking years to make in the late '90s even for huge operations like Origin (then bought out by Electronic Arts) , New World Computing (bought out by 3DO), Nintendo, and Sierra. Might and Magic Online was cancelled because of costs in the late '90s. EQ was almost cancelled. Given that, why should we expect much today? As people said and must have been apparent to older folks then, the glut of MMOs that followed EQ was going to bring the industry crashing down. MMORPGs and online games in general were doomed to ruin once all the corporate machines turned their then 3000-games-a-year mentality towards a pasttime where a high turnover rate of games is just offensive and irrelevant. Online games are not single player games. Good ones last years and years. Unfortunately corporations do not like this and would not see to it. A new generation of gamers was courted, related or not. The old ways are gone. The message once again flashes on the screen--3D games are incredibly expensive to make. $12 million dollar budget, 1995--that was when the Playstation and Saturn were released in NA, when Meridian 59 first came out. Online games are buried in a sea of their excess and redundancy. The instant that machine set its eyes on online games rather than single player (which would have been the early 2000s) it was over. Online games have been ruined by their sheer bulk. They have been driven to meaninglessness, irrelevance, and also the rise of digital downloads along with this has contributed to a lost of truth and faith by consumers like me. Again, this all relates to corporations setting their sights on online games as the next frontier. Everquest, UO and some of their successors were not like this, but once the picture became clear, they all changed. Ever wonder why? Why all these incredibly expensive 3-D games suddenly played follow the leader with WoW, even long-standing ones?
As someone else said, simplicity is best--focusing on one game at a time, savoring and enjoying it. For a while, I think, the online gaming industry was this. I remember Age of Empires II, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Everquest, Diablo II--games that seemed they would last forever, and with strong communities behind them. There was not much competition then. The Internet was smaller. Is this nostalgia, or am I right again? But look into the sea of single player games in the late '90s, and how much of that stuff was worth a thing? Just tons of millions plunged into an industry long grown discredible and excessive--a natural development of games, nevertheless, and nothing to be sorry about. The real tragedy is that that wave would soon hit online games, where some of us thought we had set our stakes up for good. At 31 I cannot bring myself to search among all these new games. Saying the old ones should suffice is as obvious as saying that they've changed beyond recognition. So-called niche games like "Tale in the Desert" give hints of "fighting for the middle", having none of that passion and challenge that early online games still maintained, despite all odds and trends in single player games at the time, and all seems lost. Like the arcades, online games seem to have come and gone. Unfortunately there is a very big difference between the two.