Yeah, every MMO ever is disappointing. They are either pointless theme parks, or you have to basically dedicate your life to them like EVE.
GW2 was sad, I played the beta and it was awesome. The mobs were tuned REALLY tough, so you could barely solo a mob, you had to dive constantly, kite the mob, dive more, kite more and hope you survived. It was dangerous but it was so fun, and the major upside is that travelling out into the world to pick up all the skill points and things was a serious adventure, and getting some friends was really important. But then later beta they tuned it easier, and then another later beta they tuned it easier again. By the last beta phase it was like every other dumbass modern MMO, you press 123 and all the mobs explode.
Turtles was awesome! It was hard though but wasn't everything back then?
I never beat it.
Me either :/ But I was only lil. I got quite far but I think I just got tired of the slog. I often didn't finish games back then though. Also I didn't have a SNES so I played it mostly at someone elses house which made it hard to really get focused on it. And then much later it came out on PC but I didn't feel like doing it all over again.
MMOs had so such potential too. I remember playing UO, Myth of Soma and WoW(Vanilla) and thinking what the future would hold. All those games were sandbox-y, maybe not WoW so much, but it had an epic progression feeling, cool "lore", nice community and it was actually pretty hard at points and required dedication. Vanilla was a great romp, but ironically it was WoW that killed the genre.
We were robbed a great genre imo. UO and EQ were brilliant, but they were early and primitive and basically just RPG's online. The interesting things back then were the idea of "Persistent Worlds", and the idea that people could become genuinely famous or infamous depending on what they did in the game. And also the idea that you could change the game world. Maybe it was just me and my buddies, but I am pretty sure people had really high hopes for MMO's then. We expected future games to have gigantic worlds with towns that you could completely capture with your friends and make it your town, and other people could try to capture your town or mobs would band together and recover towns for the orcs or whatever. And one player would rise up to become the king, and one evil bastard player would kill him and rise up to become the lord of darkness, etc, and player run economies, none of that bind on equip bullshit. But then along came WoW and dumbed everything down into a cartoon loot game and had 14 million people paying a subscription fee monthly, and the entire genre become obsessed with trying to be copy that blueprint. The original ideas just died overnight. There were a few interesting games that happened in the meantime like Shadowbane and Darkfall, but they weren't developed enough and failed miserably. There were others that were good on paper but never even made it to release, Dark & Light where you could slide down hills on your shield, etc.
It is frustrating and sad because what people today think an MMORPG is, is completely different to what people thought of MMOs in the early days. The games today are all just descendants of WoW. It doesn't matter if it is SWTOR, Rift, Archeage, Black Desert, etc.. they are all based on that formula of being casual, accessible, cartoony, cutesy, quest hubs, etc. The first gen games were not like that at all, they weren't gamey, they were virtual worlds and the blueprint and inspiration was MUDS. The gameplay was fitted into that, and it was done in an organic way that gave the players freedom to work out what to do. Most of what made EQ great was 'Emergent Gameplay', so many ideas that the players created that the devs never even imagined. And hardly any of it got nerfed, it just became a part of the game and it was that stuff that people loved the most. Since then, no MMO's have had any emergent gameplay, because they are all finely tuned theme parks.
I still think some day the genre will grow into what it should have been all along, but I think it is currently taking a gigantic shitty generic detour and it is going to take a lot of time to come back around.
