1999, the Promise of Virtual Worlds Revisited

Kyleran

I was searching the internet and came across this IGN review of Everquest shortly after launch.  

I actually missed it, paying little attention to online games until 2001 or so. Heck, I got most of my gaming news from paper magazines like CGW or PCGamer so probably was a delay of a year or so just to hear about it. 

It's a fun read, and I recalled feeling the authors wide eyed wonder at being in this great 3D virtual world when I first played Dark Age of Camelot.

I also enjoyed this comment, especially as we still struggle with it today despite all of the technical advances.

"Since the first week things have gotten much better and even with all of the problems its still more playable than Ultima Online. This week, as in the beta, the game has rarely suffered from major lag issues now, even on a 28.8k modem"

It seems the promise and wonder is largely gone now, people just play games and no longer desire to inhabit virtual worlds.   

Pity.

https://m.ign.com/articles/1999/03/27/everquest-3

Asm0deus

For myself that feeling we had back then is now in the VR realm for me.   mmo or game back then I felt were like windows into another world/reality...your basic form of escapism to get away from real life and live in another.

I think with VR it bring back some of the amazeballs factor because the immersion can be so much more though I grant there still a long way to go for VR.

Phaserlight

Asm0deus said:

For myself that feeling we had back then is now in the VR realm for me.   mmo or game back then I felt were like windows into another world/reality...your basic form of escapism to get away from real life and live in another.

I think with VR it bring back some of the amazeballs factor because the immersion can be so much more though I grant there still a long way to go for VR.

VR is a game changer (pun intended).

I let my 5 year old try on my Gear VR for a minute the other day, and his sense of wonder was immediate and palpable.  His reaction was more or less I can't believe it... I'm inside Minecraft?

I made him take it off after literally a minute as there are warnings in the owner manual and on starting up the system that it's not for children under 13 due to uncertainty in how it might affect developing eyesight.

Looking forward to the release of the Quest.

delete5230

Kyleran said:

I was searching the internet and came across this IGN review of Everquest shortly after launch.  

I actually missed it, paying little attention to online games until 2001 or so. Heck, I got most of my gaming news from paper magazines like CGW or PCGamer so probably was a delay of a year or so just to hear about it. 

It's a fun read, and I recalled feeling the authors wide eyed wonder at being in this great 3D virtual world when I first played Dark Age of Camelot.

I also enjoyed this comment, especially as we still struggle with it today despite all of the technical advances.

"Since the first week things have gotten much better and even with all of the problems its still more playable than Ultima Online. This week, as in the beta, the game has rarely suffered from major lag issues now, even on a 28.8k modem"

It seems the promise and wonder is largely gone now, people just play games and no longer desire to inhabit virtual worlds.   

Pity.

https://m.ign.com/articles/1999/03/27/everquest-3

   "It seems the promise and wonder is largely gone now"

Just a few years back opening day of Guild Wars 2 I had that feeling.  This is AFTER I thought the feeling was gone.... I think it could be rejuvenated, given the right circumstances 

The Witcher 3.... Off-line but the same feeling when I thought the feeling was gone.

immodium

Asm0deus said:

For myself that feeling we had back then is now in the VR realm for me.   mmo or game back then I felt were like windows into another world/reality...your basic form of escapism to get away from real life and live in another.

I think with VR it bring back some of the amazeballs factor because the immersion can be so much more though I grant there still a long way to go for VR.

Agreed.

You have to feel like you're in the world to want to live in it. When VR is capable of letting me touch, taste and smell then I may want to inhabit a virtual world.

I'm also more likely to live in a single player world as they at present have created them better.

Alverant

Kyleran said:

It seems the promise and wonder is largely gone now, people just play games and no longer desire to inhabit virtual worlds.
Pity.

I don't know. How many among us didn't have one (or more) MMO get sundowned or we lost interest in after a while? We invest in virtual worlds then they get taken away from us. How often does that have to happen before we just give up? What happens when you pick one virtual world that winds up lagging behind in terms of innovation down the road? Graphics will look outdated. Other games will develop better features. Technology continuously improves. It's hard to pick out a virtual world you will want to inhabit for years. Then you have the community that can get toxic or even vanish as they move onto other things. A virtual world of one isn't that exciting.

OTOH you have the virtual worlds of WoW and Eve that still has regular players.

Palebane

The worlds are great. The players that inhabit them these days, tho?

iixviiiix

immodium said:

Asm0deus said:

For myself that feeling we had back then is now in the VR realm for me.   mmo or game back then I felt were like windows into another world/reality...your basic form of escapism to get away from real life and live in another.

I think with VR it bring back some of the amazeballs factor because the immersion can be so much more though I grant there still a long way to go for VR.

Agreed.

You have to feel like you're in the world to want to live in it. When VR is capable of letting me touch, taste and smell then I may want to inhabit a virtual world.

I'm also more likely to live in a single player world as they at present have created them better.

Touch , taste and smell should not be add to normal VR . It cause more trouble than good .

military training and medical under the watch of pro is exception .

Also i don't think MMORPGs are inhabit virtual worlds. Cause it too small to be a world , being a town is best they can be .

But i also likely to live in single player world , cause it less problem and going to be better than an MMORPG world lol .

AlBQuirky

Thanks for that fun trip down memory lane

I had that same exact feeling my first time logging in to EQ (and subsequent logins thereafter). To be honest, it was my first MMORPG, so being grouped with a player from Japan and another from Denmark (all writing English in the chatbpox) added to my amazement

As for the VR comments, VR doesn't make an interesting, breathing, living world, it just puts you there. I had no troubles immersing myself with my monitor. It was the NPCs, the cities, the races & classes, and especially the other players that made it all come alive for me.

Players don't want "living worlds" anymore, though. They want to get in, get out, get lots of loot in the limited amount of time they make for gaming

Kyleran

AlBQuirky said:

Thanks for that fun trip down memory lane

I had that same exact feeling my first time logging in to EQ (and subsequent logins thereafter). To be honest, it was my first MMORPG, so being grouped with a player from Japan and another from Denmark (all writing English in the chatbpox) added to my amazement

Often people say one can only experience the sense of wonder from their first MMORPG but for me this wasn't true. 

DAOC was my 2nd MMORPG,  Lineage 1 being my first and while it had some great qualities the isometric view with tiny non unique avatars still felt very much like "a game" without a whole lot of wonder except perhaps the novelty of playing with other people from around the world and castle seiging. 

DAOC blew me away,  especially when my avatar could be uniquely customized, I could run faster,  slower, jump or fall down hills hurting or even killing myself. 

There were rolling plains, high mountains,  night and day cycle (and dark was really dark back in early days), dense forests, snow covered lands, sea coasts and so much more.

Knights from Camelot, Vikings, the fantasy realms of Hibernia, all added to the great sense of wonder.

Fortunately, about five years later, after boredom had begun to set in during the early days of the WOW clone era,  I decided to give EVE a go.

Once again the magic returned, four different warring corporate factions,  plus multiple NPC pirate factions, player run corporation,  alliances and empires,  it was all just so marvelous. 

EVE was better than DAOC in many regards, with the one big missing element being of course playable avatars.

I really had high hopes for Walking in Stations, shame it never reached its promise but perhaps when / if Star Citzen launches I'll get a chance to rediscover the wonder that should have been.

iixviiiix

AlBQuirky said:

Players don't want "living worlds" anymore, though. They want to get in, get out, get lots of loot in the limited amount of time they make for gaming

"living worlds" is suck , it's because "living" mean there are many restrictions that you don't want to deal with .

What people want was fun park to gather , play alone or play with other . Yet all the parks that was build all have one and only content : roller coaster

So nowadays game developer only know how to build roller coaster and forget about everything else .

sunandshadow

I love the feeling of being in a virtual world, but I feel a lot of single player games deliver that at least as well as MMOs do.  But, maybe I just have a good imagination, since I felt like I was in a virtual world way back when I played Final Fantasy 7 for the first time.  No, even before that, when I played Myst for the first time.

Kyleran

sunandshadow said:

I love the feeling of being in a virtual world, but I feel a lot of single player games deliver that at least as well as MMOs do.  But, maybe I just have a good imagination, since I felt like I was in a virtual world way back when I played Final Fantasy 7 for the first time.  No, even before that, when I played Myst for the first time.

I agree,  Fallout 4 was like that for me, did a great job creating a world,  and the NPCs are more communicative than players are in most MMOs these days.

iixviiiix

For me my virtual world is Skyrim , with all the mod i add , of course .*so lewd*

Vermillion_Raventhal

I always thought games would be like UO or SWG.  I do remember the wonder and hope with games up until after WoW.  At certain point you just understood the game.

Kyleran

Mars_Orbital said:

Kyleran said:

I was searching the internet and came across this IGN review of Everquest shortly after launch.  

I actually missed it, paying little attention to online games until 2001 or so. Heck, I got most of my gaming news from paper magazines like CGW or PCGamer so probably was a delay of a year or so just to hear about it. 

It's a fun read, and I recalled feeling the authors wide eyed wonder at being in this great 3D virtual world when I first played Dark Age of Camelot.

I also enjoyed this comment, especially as we still struggle with it today despite all of the technical advances.

"Since the first week things have gotten much better and even with all of the problems its still more playable than Ultima Online. This week, as in the beta, the game has rarely suffered from major lag issues now, even on a 28.8k modem"

It seems the promise and wonder is largely gone now, people just play games and no longer desire to inhabit virtual worlds.   

Pity.

https://m.ign.com/articles/1999/03/27/everquest-3

You say this, but I'm doing that exact thing in Black Desert Online.  Black Desert housing makes it possible to feel apart of a world, I have a house tht is my central point every time I log in; I rarely log out of the game anywhere but at my house; it is my house with usuable furnishing, In town there's markets, inns and other places where I can get items or sell items. From my house I travel across the lands to  fight monsters in untold stories, and then I head back to my 3 story house in Hiedel. For the past few days I've done farming, fishing , gather ' around my central hub" hiedel.  At this very second I'm brewing beer for my workers.

That is where people miss out in Black Desert in my opinion. People who come from games like WoW assume the game is about the epic gear grind grind grind until they hit the soft cap ( and their faces melt of the effort it takes to become epic ), that is only a small part of the game .

If one doesn't get into thew housing in any game, then yes, your view would be correct, but to generals that we are "all" in this lull of mmos is a person subjective opinion, one for which I don't share, at all. 


This year is year 3 for me in BDO

It sounds good, but from your write up my guess is you interact with other players in BDO only slightly more often than I did in Fallout 4.



If so, the promise of 1999 isn't really being fulfillled.

Azaron_Nightblade

Kyleran said:

It seems the promise and wonder is largely gone now, people just play games and no longer desire to inhabit virtual worlds.   

Pity.

https://m.ign.com/articles/1999/03/27/everquest-3

I still like my virtual worlds.
It's one of the main things I enjoy about BDO. For all of the game's flaws (and lord knows they are many) it has an incredible world. The amazing night and day. The weather effects. The housing. The world with all of its little details and its beautiful vistas... 

Azaron_Nightblade

Vermillion_Raventhal said:

I always thought games would be like UO or SWG.  I do remember the wonder and hope with games up until after WoW.  At certain point you just understood the game.

To be fair, WoW has some nice worlds too.

delete5230

Xodic said:

In 99' I seen the future of MMORPGs being more complex with ambiguous mechanics. Instead I got what could be best described as Clicking with Friends online.

I thought mmorpg's would have gotten better, instead only for the company. 
Never seen that coming.

Kyleran

Mars_Orbital said:

Kyleran said:

Mars_Orbital said:

Kyleran said:

I was searching the internet and came across this IGN review of Everquest shortly after launch.  

I actually missed it, paying little attention to online games until 2001 or so. Heck, I got most of my gaming news from paper magazines like CGW or PCGamer so probably was a delay of a year or so just to hear about it. 

It's a fun read, and I recalled feeling the authors wide eyed wonder at being in this great 3D virtual world when I first played Dark Age of Camelot.

I also enjoyed this comment, especially as we still struggle with it today despite all of the technical advances.

"Since the first week things have gotten much better and even with all of the problems its still more playable than Ultima Online. This week, as in the beta, the game has rarely suffered from major lag issues now, even on a 28.8k modem"

It seems the promise and wonder is largely gone now, people just play games and no longer desire to inhabit virtual worlds.   

Pity.

https://m.ign.com/articles/1999/03/27/everquest-3

You say this, but I'm doing that exact thing in Black Desert Online.  Black Desert housing makes it possible to feel apart of a world, I have a house tht is my central point every time I log in; I rarely log out of the game anywhere but at my house; it is my house with usuable furnishing, In town there's markets, inns and other places where I can get items or sell items. From my house I travel across the lands to  fight monsters in untold stories, and then I head back to my 3 story house in Hiedel. For the past few days I've done farming, fishing , gather ' around my central hub" hiedel.  At this very second I'm brewing beer for my workers.

That is where people miss out in Black Desert in my opinion. People who come from games like WoW assume the game is about the epic gear grind grind grind until they hit the soft cap ( and their faces melt of the effort it takes to become epic ), that is only a small part of the game .

If one doesn't get into thew housing in any game, then yes, your view would be correct, but to generals that we are "all" in this lull of mmos is a person subjective opinion, one for which I don't share, at all. 


This year is year 3 for me in BDO

It sounds good, but from your write up my guess is you interact with other players in BDO only slightly more often than I did in Fallout 4.



If so, the promise of 1999 isn't really being fulfillled.

with an atitude like that, no game will ever be "the game" . might want to stick to single players. I talk and interact with players throughout my time in  BDO and if that is something you aren't activily doing in a gmae that is  I can see where your subjective meandering exist, only in you. Your attempt to draw some conclusion that "no games" fits your standard so the whole genre is shit argument  is old boring and redundant to the 21st century of gaming. 

No one can force you to have an imagination or talk with other player, every point you are drawing up is "on you" . 

But I guess the world revolves around you .... #snooze thread 

Lifed skilled all day in my home town of Hiedel, my "home town" 

Having not played BDO I can't speak to how it is, only go by what I have read which by and large most accounts describe a largely solo experience.

Perhaps you are correct, it's all on them whether or not they are interacting with others, who can say.

You are however building up several strawmen which I never implied and I'm not interested in knocking down today.

Azaron_Nightblade

Kyleran said:

Mars_Orbital said:

Kyleran said:

Mars_Orbital said:

Kyleran said:

I was searching the internet and came across this IGN review of Everquest shortly after launch.  

I actually missed it, paying little attention to online games until 2001 or so. Heck, I got most of my gaming news from paper magazines like CGW or PCGamer so probably was a delay of a year or so just to hear about it. 

It's a fun read, and I recalled feeling the authors wide eyed wonder at being in this great 3D virtual world when I first played Dark Age of Camelot.

I also enjoyed this comment, especially as we still struggle with it today despite all of the technical advances.

"Since the first week things have gotten much better and even with all of the problems its still more playable than Ultima Online. This week, as in the beta, the game has rarely suffered from major lag issues now, even on a 28.8k modem"

It seems the promise and wonder is largely gone now, people just play games and no longer desire to inhabit virtual worlds.   

Pity.

https://m.ign.com/articles/1999/03/27/everquest-3

You say this, but I'm doing that exact thing in Black Desert Online.  Black Desert housing makes it possible to feel apart of a world, I have a house tht is my central point every time I log in; I rarely log out of the game anywhere but at my house; it is my house with usuable furnishing, In town there's markets, inns and other places where I can get items or sell items. From my house I travel across the lands to  fight monsters in untold stories, and then I head back to my 3 story house in Hiedel. For the past few days I've done farming, fishing , gather ' around my central hub" hiedel.  At this very second I'm brewing beer for my workers.

That is where people miss out in Black Desert in my opinion. People who come from games like WoW assume the game is about the epic gear grind grind grind until they hit the soft cap ( and their faces melt of the effort it takes to become epic ), that is only a small part of the game .

If one doesn't get into thew housing in any game, then yes, your view would be correct, but to generals that we are "all" in this lull of mmos is a person subjective opinion, one for which I don't share, at all. 


This year is year 3 for me in BDO

It sounds good, but from your write up my guess is you interact with other players in BDO only slightly more often than I did in Fallout 4.



If so, the promise of 1999 isn't really being fulfillled.

with an atitude like that, no game will ever be "the game" . might want to stick to single players. I talk and interact with players throughout my time in  BDO and if that is something you aren't activily doing in a gmae that is  I can see where your subjective meandering exist, only in you. Your attempt to draw some conclusion that "no games" fits your standard so the whole genre is shit argument  is old boring and redundant to the 21st century of gaming. 

No one can force you to have an imagination or talk with other player, every point you are drawing up is "on you" . 

But I guess the world revolves around you .... #snooze thread 

Lifed skilled all day in my home town of Hiedel, my "home town" 

Having not played BDO I can't speak to how it is, only go by what I have read which by and large most accounts describe a largely solo experience.

Perhaps you are correct, it's all on them whether or not they are interacting with others, who can say.

You are however building up several strawmen which I never implied and I'm not interested in knocking down today.

It all depends on how you define "interacting". If you're looking for the classic dungeon experience, or gameplay where you are forced to group with others to be able do it then the answer is: rarely.

BDO does promote joining guilds for the perks and there are some more social activities that you can do; like taking the guild ship out to sea. Or of course being part of one of the node/siege guilds for large scale PvP.

Generally a bunch of the game is spent "solo" though. Solo grinding or life skilling. Especially if you're trying to get geared for the PvP portion of the game. Doesn't mean you can't talk to your guildies (or neighbors if you're life skilling in town! :P) though.

Mendel

I agree, EQ1 in 1999 was amazing.  But that feeling of an amazing virtual world just never evolved.  Sure, there have been games with much better graphics, but the actual environment hasn't changed very much since the early days.  The amount of interaction with the environment is almost identical.  About the only things that have really been added are the various 'world containers' that serve as either resource collection nodes or random in-world containers that periodically spawn a bit of loot.

Worse yet, the scope of the game world is frequently imbued with technology that takes the multi-player aspects out of the game.  What is the point for having a graphic appear on my screen and not on another person's if it isn't to encourage solo player actions?  Sure, the technology to allow multiple, but different instances of the environment is nifty, another something that wasn't in the 1st generation MMORPGs, but it does more to support single player activity than multi-player.

Even Virtual Reality devices haven't tried to address the fundamental representation of the world you travel in.  Until the computerized environment changes significantly, I don't see a real purpose in VR technology.  If VR intends to use the same models, with the same possible interactions, I'd rather invest my money in a quality monitor, graphics card and precision mouse.

RPG-type games haven't changed enough at several levels.  Certainly not enough to reproduce that same awe as it did 20 years ago.

Amathe

Mars_Orbital said:

You say this, but I'm doing that exact thing in Black Desert Online.  Black Desert housing makes it possible to feel apart of a world, I have a house tht is my central point every time I log in; I rarely log out of the game anywhere but at my house; it is my house with usuable furnishing, In town there's markets, inns and other places where I can get items or sell items. From my house I travel across the lands to  fight monsters in untold stories, and then I head back to my 3 story house in Hiedel. For the past few days I've done farming, fishing , gather ' around my central hub" hiedel.  At this very second I'm brewing beer for my workers.

That is where people miss out in Black Desert in my opinion. People who come from games like WoW assume the game is about the epic gear grind grind grind until they hit the soft cap ( and their faces melt of the effort it takes to become epic ), that is only a small part of the game .

If one doesn't get into thew housing in any game, then yes, your view would be correct, but to generals that we are "all" in this lull of mmos is a person subjective opinion, one for which I don't share, at all. 


This year is year 3 for me in BDO

I'm not going to knock BDO, as I have not played it. And I'm glad for you and for anyone else who has found a game they truly like. 

But just from what you posted, making beer for my workers so they can gather what I need to play house is not the fantasy adventure I am seeking. 

I get that your house is also a jumpoff point to go fight monsters. But it also seems much like WoW's garrison, which I didn't really care for. 

Kyleran

Mars_Orbital said:

Amathe said:

Mars_Orbital said:

You say this, but I'm doing that exact thing in Black Desert Online.  Black Desert housing makes it possible to feel apart of a world, I have a house tht is my central point every time I log in; I rarely log out of the game anywhere but at my house; it is my house with usuable furnishing, In town there's markets, inns and other places where I can get items or sell items. From my house I travel across the lands to  fight monsters in untold stories, and then I head back to my 3 story house in Hiedel. For the past few days I've done farming, fishing , gather ' around my central hub" hiedel.  At this very second I'm brewing beer for my workers.

That is where people miss out in Black Desert in my opinion. People who come from games like WoW assume the game is about the epic gear grind grind grind until they hit the soft cap ( and their faces melt of the effort it takes to become epic ), that is only a small part of the game .

If one doesn't get into thew housing in any game, then yes, your view would be correct, but to generals that we are "all" in this lull of mmos is a person subjective opinion, one for which I don't share, at all. 


This year is year 3 for me in BDO

I'm not going to knock BDO, as I have not played it. And I'm glad for you and for anyone else who has found a game they truly like. 

But just from what you posted, making beer for my workers so they can gather what I need to play house is not the fantasy adventure I am seeking. 

I get that your house is also a jumpoff point to go fight monsters. But it also seems much like WoW's garrison, which I didn't really care for. 

The house is a house. It is on a street in Hiedel with a street number. Insdie I have Cooking  and chemistry all usaable. The top floor is my bedroom I got three beds incase of company.  My workers are real in game world ,npcs that I can spot traveling  to their work areas. 

I just looked at #0# gari/sson , nothing like that all. IO don't "jump off " from house in BDO because that is where I live. It is myty permant house in the game world, it serves as my home in BDO . 

THis is kind of what I'm talking about, the "epic looters" who have no real desire to RP in a MMORPG , but simply gain recognition  because of "fats loots".  People wonder why they will never be happy, it is simply because if you started with #o# or even thought #0# was remotely good you really aren't an mmorgp player imho. 

All kinds of role playing, I never had much use for crafting or setting up a house, too much like real life I guess.

Chasing loot is the strawman you keep building for yourself,  in my case I fancy myself more of a soldier of fortune, explorer or adventurer.

I role played to the extreme as a member of the "kobo" hordes, right down to a special language and a totally communal shared resources society where the clan owned everything, and provided for all of our needs.

Wizardry

I started we had 14.4 modems and even when we hit 56k playing online was not good.I enjoyed UT99 but really only versus other 56k players.Some,a few were able to secure DSL back in 99 wile it was still being installed over time in many areas of the world.
56k versus DSL was no contest,it took an extremely skilled player to beat a DSL player.I was one of the last 56k players,inspired by maybe the greatest 56k gamer ever "Destrukt" as he would constantly prove he could beat a DSL gamer with 56k.

We hung out NO not in Battle.net but in Heat.net a more versatile gaming outlet that also allowed you to create your own private game servers...for FREE.In the chat rooms i constantly had people bugging me to play EQ1,i was like i don't really like much about that game and on 56k would be a nightmare to play.To think anyone would be playing on 28.8 is almost laughable.

Yes heading online was very much so an excitement back then,geesh i remember playing Unreal98 while i was on AOL and my ping would be like 5000 LOL,unplayable but i was so excited to be out there i actually would get in some frags like maybe 4 or 5 in a game up to 30,quite a feat for 5k to  10k pings.

Wizardry

Even funnier is how we hear all the complaints now a days about UI configurations and difficulty of singing up at websites,example Square Enix was a nightmare to register with.

Well back in the 90's we had to configure our sound card,our memory,our computers to actually start up and run to play these games.We had to create batch files,config files because some of our hardware was not fully compatible with that game .The lack of patience i see now,lol most these gamers would quit gaming if they had to go through what we did back then.
The thought of adding the real human element to games was pure enjoyment,NOW..lol people want to get internet,logon to games to play SOLO....say what?