I have been challenged a lot by MMORPG's in the past.
I have been challenged by :
- mindnumblingly boring combat. - mindnumblingly repetitive character progression grind. - insane goldsinks. - accepting that most new content enters through cash shop. - my favourite class being nerfed in a way that they managed to suck out all fun of that class. - game killing bugs. - multiple deaths by lag.
I never was able to beat those challenges. I know, I must sound entitled to you.
Did you stumble in here from singleplayerconsolegames.com forums?
PvP is just a gank fest in MMOs or a zerg fest. No skill. Real PvP is FPS games, RTS/strategy games...call of duty takes MORE skill than any PvP MMO. Call of Duty you can't be overpowered or/and zerg rush everyone, you actually have to have skill...and CoD is the shittiest easiest FPS game out there. That tells a lot of how crap PvP is in MMOs.
PVE DOES kinda take more skill and is actually far more skill than PvP, but only in small groups. As soon as huge raids open up or huge zergs of players in the world (like GW2) it becomes too easy. A huge raid in EQ1 and EQ2 is far easier than a smaller group raid in WoW. Why? Because in a huge raid, I can kinda slack off and let others take up the mantle. In WoW, every single person is pretty equally important. DPS less so, but still important part of the cog machine.
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
The first wave of MMORPG's (Think ultima online, the original everquest, etc. Note that WOW is not included in this). Anything after that is not. Basically, anything released after 2003.
Has there ever been a challenging MMORPG by the standards of the golden age (1975-1985)?
Are they all effeminate and degenerate?
If so, are there any MUDs that aspired to the standards of the golden age?
How can there be ANY mmorpg by the standards of your so called golden age 75-85 if there were never any mmorpgs during that time period to set a standard?
Ah yes this thread again... the good ole MMO version of in my day we had to walk to school in the snow, uphill both ways.
I've always been curious too... who gets to define the golden age dates? And why is it always 10 years? Can't it be 1973-1979? Are golden showers more common in a golden age? So many questions...!
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
There is a difference between challenging and punishing. Just because a game has perma-death doesn't mean it's necessarily challenging.
Some of the newer MMORPGs definitely have challenging aspects to them. Healing group content in Everquest 2 was a very challenging experience, usually only surviving by narrow margins. This was especially true in Wildstar - even the low level group content was very challenging. PvP encounters can be very intricate, with a lot of nuanced interactions between the various spells.
I think new MMORPGs offer a lot more ways of presenting challenges. Games in the 80s-90s had a narrower palette of game systems to choose from. One thing that is currently under-represented is challenge of story content. That's an area that MUDs did well in my opinion. The ability to discover storylines and interact with them in a challenging way. Secred World comes close to that description, but the large majority of other MMOs don't seem to bother.
I never found the old MMO/MUD's challenging to be honest.
Back in the day of text based games, you could AFK script your way up levels, and most combat was pretty standard, nowhere near as engaging as modern MMO's are, where you have to put in an active role into movement and interaction with the environment.
In comparison to the MUD's of 70's and 80's.. or worse, those "Chatroom" RPG's.. Ugggghhh.. Modern MMO's are a thousand times more dynamic when it comes to actual game-play. Not so much on the social drama tho.. which.. in my book.. that's also a plus.
Ah yes this thread again... the good ole MMO version of in my day we had to walk to school in the snow, uphill both ways.
I've always been curious too... who gets to define the golden age dates? And why is it always 10 years? Can't it be 1973-1979? Are golden showers more common in a golden age? So many questions...!
I'm a bit confused by the OP's dates as well. 75-85 is pre PC. PC's didn't exist in 75. Looking back the first IBM PC was released in 1980 and it was a green screen piece of shit. Clones started appearing not long after but didn't really get going until 83. 8 bit crap 8086's until the 286 arrived and we got 16 bit, woohoo.
My first PC was the NEC v20 8088, which ran at 10 Mhz, not the standard 8Mhz. I could switch that thing on and go and make a cup of coffee and still be back at the keyboard before it got to the DOS prompt.
I remember when the 80386 was released by Intel in October 85 and that was probably the first PC I owned that ran decent games. Before that they were pretty bad. In fact it was my 386 that first ran Doom when it came out, the first game that I also played over a LAN IPX network. Before that it was all null modem cables or dial up to BBS.
Then you have to look at the graphics. CGA and EGA were terrible. VGA didn't arrive until 87 and we got 640 x 480 resolution. Makes you laugh when you think how bad it was but at the time 640 x 480 was amazing.
Any "Golden Age", a phrase that implies not only the past but also a period of excellence, would have to start in the mid 90's when we had DX4-100's and Pentiums paired with Voodoo cards for extra grunt for graphics.
And then look at the dev houses from the 90's. EA made games rather than publishing them. Bullfrog, Westwood Studios, Ioads of great dev teams making great games, all gone now. Either sold out, quit or bought out and destroyed by corporate greedy bastards.
Shit, I'm making myself depressed just thinking about it. The gaming industry has turned to shit. Bring back the 90's!
EQ, UO, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, Daoc, to name a few.
The challenge in these MMO's was real, and I am not just talking time invested. These games were all challenging in their prime, especially if you tried to play solo. You can max level in most of today's MMO's without dying once. You didn't make it to level 5 in older MMO's without dying. I suspect the posters saying MMOs were never challenging started playing MMOs in the past 5 years.
Has there ever been a challenging MMORPG by the standards of the golden age (1975-1985)?
Are they all effeminate and degenerate?
If so, are there any MUDs that aspired to the standards of the golden age?
How can there be ANY mmorpg by the standards of your so called golden age 75-85 if there were never any mmorpgs during that time period to set a standard?
I simply assumed he was talking about MUD's, which were the predecessor to MMO's. And there were quite a few of them to honest, if you looked at the game list in old style AOL start ups, they would show a series of MUD's people could play, which were designed to be time sinks to keep players logged in (Read: Paying by the Minuit to Play). If you thought 20 a month was bad, imagine getting a 200 dollar bill from AOL.
Often time the games were designed with no Max level to keep players endlessly grinding, but often having soft caps to skills and levels, where you could gain more levels and ranks or whatever, but get very little gain, for a whole lot of grinding.
The PvE was pretty bland and could be AFK scripted using a text prompt program, set and forget, go to bed or whatever. It was often that simple.
However, One aspect that was very common among these games was that they were Full Loot/Open PvP, along with the ability to steal from other players. Which meant, that anyone could come along rob and/or kill you and then take all your stuff.
So there was a lot of PvP, along with Guilds being formed on message boards, bounties being put on people, etc, etc, and all in all, a lot of drama.
Couple that with the GM (Game Masters, What we call Dev's today), often did not care what happened to you, and would only addressee game bugs/hacking, someone killing you, stealing your stuff, or any of that, was fair game and not something they would deal with,. it was part of the game.
Now take that environment, and add in some very punishing death penalty, like needing a cleric to be raised, or else you lay around as a corpse and lose levels/ranks, as you rot, or for some games, the punishment could include perma-death.
Gamers back then viewed this as "Challenging" and some even thought that smorgasbord of suck was the "Golden Age" of MMO's.. more the "Golden Age of Trolls" if you ask me.
Anyway, yes there are Open World PvP/Full Loot MMO's out there, so, for those that view that as a challenge, it's still around, one of the most famous PvP centrist MMO's out there is EVE.
But there are others, like Gloria Victus, and there are more, Darkfall, and now Darkfall 2..
And if killing other people is what gets your blood pumping, there is a slew of MOBA's for people who just want to kill other people.
EQ, UO, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, Daoc, to name a few.
The challenge in these MMO's was real, and I am not just talking time invested. These games were all challenging in their prime, especially if you tried to play solo. You can max level in most of today's MMO's without dying once. You didn't make it to level 5 in older MMO's without dying. I suspect the posters saying MMOs were never challenging started playing MMOs in the past 5 years.
I have to disagree on DAOC, I did all of my grinding solo in that game. The hardest part about it was dealing with the atrocious UI/controls.
That said, I think people consider different things challenging. I haven't found most AI in MMOs to be a challenge.. WHile I may not be able to beat a mob (be it old game or new), it's usually not due to challenge as much as by design, due to levels, stats or how many it's designed to be taken down by.
Being beaten by design like that isn't a challenge as it's not strategy that came into play. You're designed to lose if you're weaker than it and don't meet the DPS and mitigation needed. Challenge implies a competitive encounter, where your skill wins or loses a battle for you. WHen you can simply beat or lose to something by meeting a criteria or not in numbers, that's not challenge IMO.
This essentially applies to MMO's both old a new, and I've been playing them since 2002, far more than five years.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
EQ, UO, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, Daoc, to name a few.
The challenge in these MMO's was real, and I am not just talking time invested. These games were all challenging in their prime, especially if you tried to play solo. You can max level in most of today's MMO's without dying once. You didn't make it to level 5 in older MMO's without dying. I suspect the posters saying MMOs were never challenging started playing MMOs in the past 5 years.
I have to disagree on DAOC, I did all of my grinding solo in that game. The hardest part about it was dealing with the atrocious UI/controls.
That said, I think people consider different things challenging. I haven't found most AI in MMOs to be a challenge.. WHile I may not be able to beat a mob (be it old game or new), it's usually not due to challenge as much as by design, due to levels, stats or how many it's designed to be taken down by.
Being beaten by design like that isn't a challenge as it's not strategy that came into play. You're designed to lose if you're weaker than it and don't meet the DPS and mitigation needed. Challenge implies a competitive encounter, where your skill wins or loses a battle for you. WHen you can simply beat something by meeting a criteria in numbers that's not challenge.
For me DAoC PvP is where the challenge came into play. Im not saying the people I faced. Im talking about the depth of the Relic and Keep system. Still hands down the best PvP I have ever played and never have I seen players as invested in their faction as DAoC. Mythic did a good job about setting things up so people cared about their factions standing in RvR. Would love to see that captured in a modern MMO.
EQ, UO, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, Daoc, to name a few.
The challenge in these MMO's was real, and I am not just talking time invested. These games were all challenging in their prime, especially if you tried to play solo. You can max level in most of today's MMO's without dying once. You didn't make it to level 5 in older MMO's without dying. I suspect the posters saying MMOs were never challenging started playing MMOs in the past 5 years.
I have to disagree on DAOC, I did all of my grinding solo in that game. The hardest part about it was dealing with the atrocious UI/controls.
That said, I think people consider different things challenging. I haven't found most AI in MMOs to be a challenge.. WHile I may not be able to beat a mob (be it old game or new), it's usually not due to challenge as much as by design, due to levels, stats or how many it's designed to be taken down by.
Being beaten by design like that isn't a challenge as it's not strategy that came into play. You're designed to lose if you're weaker than it and don't meet the DPS and mitigation needed. Challenge implies a competitive encounter, where your skill wins or loses a battle for you. WHen you can simply beat something by meeting a criteria in numbers that's not challenge.
For me DAoC PvP is where the challenge came into play. Im not saying the people I faced. Im talking about the depth of the Relic and Keep system. Still hands down the best PvP I have ever played and never have I seen players as invested in their faction as DAoC. Mythic did a good job about setting things up so people cared about their factions standing in RvR. Would love to see that captured in a modern MMO.
I consider PVP to be a different subject entirely, as it's not AI that provides the challenge there, it's having a thinking opponent, which steps outside of the games's designed challenges. I do agree about the PVP in DAOC though. ALthough I'd say in SWG people were just as die hard about their factions in PVP.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Has there ever been a challenging MMORPG by the standards of the golden age (1975-1985)?
Are they all effeminate and degenerate?
If so, are there any MUDs that aspired to the standards of the golden age?
How can there be ANY mmorpg by the standards of your so called golden age 75-85 if there were never any mmorpgs during that time period to set a standard?
Well, There were SSIs Neverwinter nights (not to be confused with later similarly named games), while it didn't release until 1993 it used the same mechanics as Pool of radiance and Heroes of Krynn from late that period so while it didn't release until 8 years it is the closest we can get.
It was a turned based MMORPG and possibly the only we could even compare with those games.
But I certainly wouldn't start any golden computer game era until at least '83 when more then a few rich students owned home computers. 78-82 was the era of arcade games and I don't think we really could compare anything to those games (even though they certainly were fun, some still are).
75-77 are weirder, there were Pong and a few other rare machines together with some games for super computers but if it was a golden age for anything it was for mechanical flipper games back then.
Also, even the golden era games had easier and harder games, not to mention a few time consuming (Mission impossible was the first I tried but I think I spent most time with Microproose pirates and Bards tale 2). Some games I completed rather easy, like Montezumas revenge and Rambo. Some were harder like the Rockford games and Commando while some were close to impossible like Ghost and Goblins and Megaman. At average they were way harder then modern games, if you weren't there or got access to a C-64 later you have no clue how hard they really were.
But I started playing anything besides a few arcade games in 1984 when I got my C-64 so I am a bit fuzzy on earlier stuff.
Well, There were SSIs Neverwinter nights (not to be confused with later similarly named games), while it didn't release until 1993 it used the same mechanics as Pool of radiance and Heroes of Krynn from late that period so while it didn't release until 8 years it is the closest we can get.
Was '91. SSI Published, Steamfront developed, AOL ran the servers from 91 to 97. Development began in 87. Only 4 years.
Even my memory on it escaped, had to dig a little.
Link me to that Magelo with your pimped out toon! EQ was so easy you must have had all the uber gear!
Gear is one of the worst shows of challenge, as that's mostly a show of persistence more than anything else (camping and repetitive tries) as well as a bit of luck (getting the drop). I wouldn't call challenging one's patience a very well thought out game mechanic.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I fail to see how any MMO is "effeminate", or why this is even something that was needed to be included. Is it weak or "girly" for a game to be dumb down, or simplistic? Lol this is insane...
Link me to that Magelo with your pimped out toon! EQ was so easy you must have had all the uber gear!
Gear is one of the worst shows of challenge, as that's mostly a show of persistence more than anything else (camping and repetitive tries) as well as a bit of luck (getting the drop). I wouldn't call challenging one's patience a very well thought out game mechanic.
Take a raid down to The Sleeper and let me know how easy it was.
I've had some of the most challenging gaming experiences of my life in MMORPGs. Across both PvP and PvE and across multiple games. Those good old 8+ hour trial and error raiding sessions are unforgettable. Of course MMORPGs can be difficult. You just need to look for it.
I will say something like Super Meat Boy also offers some great challenge and good times, but my most memorable challenges in gaming come from MMORPGs (probably because of the team effort and success).
I have similar fond memories about roguelikes like Moria (literally the first game I played off of my uncle's floppy disk) or beating games like Ninja Gaiden when I was young. Again, there is something special about accomplishing difficult things with other people and MMORPGs are a great place to do that.
Doing anything in the world is time consuming even being here on this very forum and writing the above. Yes, there were and are challenging mmorpg like FFXI and it's related to time cause back then even WoW was challenging vs WoW now.
Comments
Did you stumble in here from singleplayerconsolegames.com forums?
PvP is just a gank fest in MMOs or a zerg fest. No skill. Real PvP is FPS games, RTS/strategy games...call of duty takes MORE skill than any PvP MMO. Call of Duty you can't be overpowered or/and zerg rush everyone, you actually have to have skill...and CoD is the shittiest easiest FPS game out there. That tells a lot of how crap PvP is in MMOs.
PVE DOES kinda take more skill and is actually far more skill than PvP, but only in small groups. As soon as huge raids open up or huge zergs of players in the world (like GW2) it becomes too easy. A huge raid in EQ1 and EQ2 is far easier than a smaller group raid in WoW. Why? Because in a huge raid, I can kinda slack off and let others take up the mantle. In WoW, every single person is pretty equally important. DPS less so, but still important part of the cog machine.
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
How can there be ANY mmorpg by the standards of your so called golden age 75-85 if there were never any mmorpgs during that time period to set a standard?
I've always been curious too... who gets to define the golden age dates? And why is it always 10 years? Can't it be 1973-1979? Are golden showers more common in a golden age? So many questions...!
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Some of the newer MMORPGs definitely have challenging aspects to them. Healing group content in Everquest 2 was a very challenging experience, usually only surviving by narrow margins. This was especially true in Wildstar - even the low level group content was very challenging. PvP encounters can be very intricate, with a lot of nuanced interactions between the various spells.
I think new MMORPGs offer a lot more ways of presenting challenges. Games in the 80s-90s had a narrower palette of game systems to choose from. One thing that is currently under-represented is challenge of story content. That's an area that MUDs did well in my opinion. The ability to discover storylines and interact with them in a challenging way. Secred World comes close to that description, but the large majority of other MMOs don't seem to bother.
Back in the day of text based games, you could AFK script your way up levels, and most combat was pretty standard, nowhere near as engaging as modern MMO's are, where you have to put in an active role into movement and interaction with the environment.
In comparison to the MUD's of 70's and 80's.. or worse, those "Chatroom" RPG's.. Ugggghhh.. Modern MMO's are a thousand times more dynamic when it comes to actual game-play. Not so much on the social drama tho.. which.. in my book.. that's also a plus.
I'm a bit confused by the OP's dates as well. 75-85 is pre PC. PC's didn't exist in 75. Looking back the first IBM PC was released in 1980 and it was a green screen piece of shit. Clones started appearing not long after but didn't really get going until 83. 8 bit crap 8086's until the 286 arrived and we got 16 bit, woohoo.
My first PC was the NEC v20 8088, which ran at 10 Mhz, not the standard 8Mhz. I could switch that thing on and go and make a cup of coffee and still be back at the keyboard before it got to the DOS prompt.
I remember when the 80386 was released by Intel in October 85 and that was probably the first PC I owned that ran decent games. Before that they were pretty bad. In fact it was my 386 that first ran Doom when it came out, the first game that I also played over a LAN IPX network. Before that it was all null modem cables or dial up to BBS.
Then you have to look at the graphics. CGA and EGA were terrible. VGA didn't arrive until 87 and we got 640 x 480 resolution. Makes you laugh when you think how bad it was but at the time 640 x 480 was amazing.
Any "Golden Age", a phrase that implies not only the past but also a period of excellence, would have to start in the mid 90's when we had DX4-100's and Pentiums paired with Voodoo cards for extra grunt for graphics.
And then look at the dev houses from the 90's. EA made games rather than publishing them. Bullfrog, Westwood Studios, Ioads of great dev teams making great games, all gone now. Either sold out, quit or bought out and destroyed by corporate greedy bastards.
Shit, I'm making myself depressed just thinking about it. The gaming industry has turned to shit. Bring back the 90's!
The challenge in these MMO's was real, and I am not just talking time invested. These games were all challenging in their prime, especially if you tried to play solo. You can max level in most of today's MMO's without dying once. You didn't make it to level 5 in older MMO's without dying. I suspect the posters saying MMOs were never challenging started playing MMOs in the past 5 years.
I simply assumed he was talking about MUD's, which were the predecessor to MMO's. And there were quite a few of them to honest, if you looked at the game list in old style AOL start ups, they would show a series of MUD's people could play, which were designed to be time sinks to keep players logged in (Read: Paying by the Minuit to Play). If you thought 20 a month was bad, imagine getting a 200 dollar bill from AOL.
Often time the games were designed with no Max level to keep players endlessly grinding, but often having soft caps to skills and levels, where you could gain more levels and ranks or whatever, but get very little gain, for a whole lot of grinding.
The PvE was pretty bland and could be AFK scripted using a text prompt program, set and forget, go to bed or whatever. It was often that simple.
However, One aspect that was very common among these games was that they were Full Loot/Open PvP, along with the ability to steal from other players. Which meant, that anyone could come along rob and/or kill you and then take all your stuff.
So there was a lot of PvP, along with Guilds being formed on message boards, bounties being put on people, etc, etc, and all in all, a lot of drama.
Couple that with the GM (Game Masters, What we call Dev's today), often did not care what happened to you, and would only addressee game bugs/hacking, someone killing you, stealing your stuff, or any of that, was fair game and not something they would deal with,. it was part of the game.
Now take that environment, and add in some very punishing death penalty, like needing a cleric to be raised, or else you lay around as a corpse and lose levels/ranks, as you rot, or for some games, the punishment could include perma-death.
Gamers back then viewed this as "Challenging" and some even thought that smorgasbord of suck was the "Golden Age" of MMO's.. more the "Golden Age of Trolls" if you ask me.
Anyway, yes there are Open World PvP/Full Loot MMO's out there, so, for those that view that as a challenge, it's still around, one of the most famous PvP centrist MMO's out there is EVE.
But there are others, like Gloria Victus, and there are more, Darkfall, and now Darkfall 2..
And if killing other people is what gets your blood pumping, there is a slew of MOBA's for people who just want to kill other people.
I have to disagree on DAOC, I did all of my grinding solo in that game. The hardest part about it was dealing with the atrocious UI/controls.
That said, I think people consider different things challenging. I haven't found most AI in MMOs to be a challenge.. WHile I may not be able to beat a mob (be it old game or new), it's usually not due to challenge as much as by design, due to levels, stats or how many it's designed to be taken down by.
Being beaten by design like that isn't a challenge as it's not strategy that came into play. You're designed to lose if you're weaker than it and don't meet the DPS and mitigation needed. Challenge implies a competitive encounter, where your skill wins or loses a battle for you. WHen you can simply beat or lose to something by meeting a criteria or not in numbers, that's not challenge IMO.
This essentially applies to MMO's both old a new, and I've been playing them since 2002, far more than five years.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
For me DAoC PvP is where the challenge came into play. Im not saying the people I faced. Im talking about the depth of the Relic and Keep system. Still hands down the best PvP I have ever played and never have I seen players as invested in their faction as DAoC. Mythic did a good job about setting things up so people cared about their factions standing in RvR. Would love to see that captured in a modern MMO.
I consider PVP to be a different subject entirely, as it's not AI that provides the challenge there, it's having a thinking opponent, which steps outside of the games's designed challenges. I do agree about the PVP in DAOC though. ALthough I'd say in SWG people were just as die hard about their factions in PVP.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Well, There were SSIs Neverwinter nights (not to be confused with later similarly named games), while it didn't release until 1993 it used the same mechanics as Pool of radiance and Heroes of Krynn from late that period so while it didn't release until 8 years it is the closest we can get.
It was a turned based MMORPG and possibly the only we could even compare with those games.
But I certainly wouldn't start any golden computer game era until at least '83 when more then a few rich students owned home computers. 78-82 was the era of arcade games and I don't think we really could compare anything to those games (even though they certainly were fun, some still are).
75-77 are weirder, there were Pong and a few other rare machines together with some games for super computers but if it was a golden age for anything it was for mechanical flipper games back then.
Also, even the golden era games had easier and harder games, not to mention a few time consuming (Mission impossible was the first I tried but I think I spent most time with Microproose pirates and Bards tale 2). Some games I completed rather easy, like Montezumas revenge and Rambo. Some were harder like the Rockford games and Commando while some were close to impossible like Ghost and Goblins and Megaman. At average they were way harder then modern games, if you weren't there or got access to a C-64 later you have no clue how hard they really were.
But I started playing anything besides a few arcade games in 1984 when I got my C-64 so I am a bit fuzzy on earlier stuff.
Link me to that Magelo with your pimped out toon! EQ was so easy you must have had all the uber gear!
Was '91. SSI Published, Steamfront developed, AOL ran the servers from 91 to 97. Development began in 87. Only 4 years.
Even my memory on it escaped, had to dig a little.
Gear is one of the worst shows of challenge, as that's mostly a show of persistence more than anything else (camping and repetitive tries) as well as a bit of luck (getting the drop). I wouldn't call challenging one's patience a very well thought out game mechanic.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I fail to see how any MMO is "effeminate", or why this is even something that was needed to be included. Is it weak or "girly" for a game to be dumb down, or simplistic? Lol this is insane...
Take a raid down to The Sleeper and let me know how easy it was.
I will say something like Super Meat Boy also offers some great challenge and good times, but my most memorable challenges in gaming come from MMORPGs (probably because of the team effort and success).
I have similar fond memories about roguelikes like Moria (literally the first game I played off of my uncle's floppy disk) or beating games like Ninja Gaiden when I was young. Again, there is something special about accomplishing difficult things with other people and MMORPGs are a great place to do that.
This thread makes me want to go play Everquest again.
I've played a ton of mmo's since then - and Everquest was the only one that truly challenged me.
Doing anything in the world is time consuming even being here on this very forum and writing the above.
Yes, there were and are challenging mmorpg like FFXI and it's related to time cause back then even WoW was challenging vs WoW now.