It is rude to post threads like this without first giving your own idea of what you think it is. It comes off as a trollish thread. Mainly because you pose these questions almost daily. Why is the sky blue? Discuss. Why doesn't water evaporate? Discuss. Why are there only one tootsie roll in a tootsie roll pop? Discuss.
Why does MMOExposed continuously pose these questions? Discuss.
A living breathing world for me is not how many players you can crank into the server or how much players can affect the world around them.
A living breathing world for me is how the world are built, I can see the mobs attacking and moving around, I see wolfs hunting in pacts, Children running around playing in a city, a cat chasing a mouse, NPCs doing their daliy job, NPCs talks, telling jokes, the world is alive.
Only game that comes close to this are Guild Wars 2.
In mechanical terms, a living breathing world is when the content does not depend on the player to happen, can engage the player without the player's choice and has permanent consequences for not being engaged. On top of being actually meaningful.
Ideally for a living world, content patches and expansions would not be announced. They would be stealth added at an (extremely) quick rate, to reward exploration and discovery for players, and to promote word of mouth within the game.
The world always works better before the PC's enter. I mean the passing of the seasons, the dungeons, the wilds, all nice -- then the players enter and ruin everything.
As mentioned earlier, Ryzom is probably the best example of a real world. Ryzom has:
- seasons, where the animals and materials change based on seasons. Some animals migrate to new areas depending on season, and high-grade mats are fought over in the PvP zones when the season changes. Seasons actually matter.
- day/night cycle, where again some mats are available only at night, for example.
- weather also exists, and some mats are only available in the rain, etc.
- mobs have real life cycles, where predators hunt in certain areas, and then return to their dens to sleep. Mobs move around based on season changes.
- no labels floating above the mobs' heads. When you look out at a scene, you see mobs; some of them are friendly, some are not and can 1-shot you. You can only tell the difference by looking at them and recognizing them, not by some kind of green/red label floating above their heads.
So in Ryzom, you have to learn to actually look at the world around you; you have to know what season it is, and whether you can get the mats you want in this season/day-night/weather.
Another feature that helps add to this is that Ryzom is very sandboxy --- there are no classes, for example. No healers, nukers, melee, only people who have skills. There are few quests and no real story line. It is like a survival game, where you pit your wits against the world, with PvP as the main end-game.
Living Breathing World MMO. I know this is figuratively talked about around here.
But what does that even mean in terms of MMOs?
Are there any examples of such a MMO being this "Living Breathing World" that people here been scratching and begging for?
I been thinking about this request, when it hit me. What the heck is a Living Breathing World MMO feature?
Seems like a heavy requested feature, but doesnt really seem to have ever been done before. So I been confused about where this request even started from.
School me on this you all.
To me it's an euphemism for a place that feels like a world with wonder and excitement. A world that feels alive and is not a mechanic or system of a developmental construct. DAoC and Asheron's Call is what I would call living breathing worlds. WoW and pretty much any Themepark are not examples of one, they are more a system used for game design.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
In mechanical terms, a living breathing world is when the content does not depend on the player to happen, can engage the player without the player's choice and has permanent consequences for not being engaged. On top of being actually meaningful.
Ideally for a living world, content patches and expansions would not be announced. They would be stealth added at an (extremely) quick rate, to reward exploration and discovery for players, and to promote word of mouth within the game.
Living Breathing World MMO. I know this is figuratively talked about around here.
But what does that even mean in terms of MMOs?
Are there any examples of such a MMO being this "Living Breathing World" that people here been scratching and begging for?
I been thinking about this request, when it hit me. What the heck is a Living Breathing World MMO feature?
Seems like a heavy requested feature, but doesnt really seem to have ever been done before. So I been confused about where this request even started from.
School me on this you all.
To me it's an euphemism for a place that feels like a world with wonder and excitement. A world that feels alive and is not a mechanic or system of a developmental construct. DAoC and Asheron's Call is what I would call living breathing worlds. WoW and pretty much any Themepark are not examples of one, they are more a system used for game design.
But see that's the thing. The only two games that have ever given me this sense of wonder and magic were Ultima Online (but I played this for only a few months) and World of Warcraft. WoW was a truly amazing game at the time. This whole themepark crap that people came up is to just refer to games which try to clone WoW. However, WoW had an huge amazing world which was full of mystery, magic, wonder and very rich lore. Something that very few MMOs actually have.
I think the vast majority of people loved WoW at launch. It had an epic world which was full of these fun quests and tons of content. The idea of questing at the time was foreign to most MMO players. It was something unique and unheard of to have like 3-4k quests in a game. I think all these WoW clones just served to cheapen the epicness of what WoW was.
But then that links back to the first MMO which people get hooked with. For most people their first MMO is the best and it will remain that way no matter what. By first I mean the first MMO that really hooked you. Sometimes that's not always your first MMO.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
To me a living breathing world is when the game world changes over time, either by the player bases action or the developers.
It's when a world doesn't stay exactly the same all the time and it feels like just a static world.
The best example of a game doing this imo was Asheron's Call.
They would have monthly updates that could range from a simple season changing in game (IE an area in fall would start getting snowfall and overtime it built up to cover the ground/houses/trees) to huge changes that were story-based, like a giant "hive" appearing hovering over the major towns in the game and new creatures out and about in the wildlife, to a major change like the games god appearing in game and fighting against the main villain.
This made the world feel "alive" because it constantly changed and evolved, and most of all unlike the "newer" mmorpgs that have tried this (IE Guild WArs 2) they didn't piggyback it and have it be instanced or reset it, if you MISSED it, you m issed it, there was no flip flopping. You were either there for it or you weren't. That made things feel finite and permanent, which is sorely missing from newer mmo's that try to do this kind of thing and fear people don't want to be able to "miss" them so they have them be instanced or reset (like guild wars 2 "events").
Then there are smaller examples of this, such as Ultima Online and it's famous "undead" attack on the in game city of Trinsic, where the undead attacked it and the players had to band together to fight them off (it was amazing), you had liches, skeletons, etc attacking it and the players were pushing back, there were a ton of them and the players (at least on my server, Lake Superior) made a teleport on top of the bank and used it as a safe haven (the undead couldn't get up there) so players would all rest up there/heal and then rejoin the fight.
Things like that hardly ever happen in mmorpgs today and if they do it's usually just for in-game "holidays" and the major changes are usually something they save for expansions and charge you for...again (since your sub cost is what they used to develop it in the first place).
I wish an mmorpg would take the monthly update approach of Asheron's Call (permanent ONE TIME changes per month) and also run in-game events like UO and the earlier mmo's had (have developers play a role in game, do events, etc).
Asheron's Call had elements of this. You could clear out camps and they would stay clear until eventually stuff came back and it wasn't always the same stuff. They also ran a lot of events in that game.
GW2 has like a giant failure version of it. Where they just run really lame events that are the same on every server that do change the world but in about the dullest way possible.
EQN claims they will be doing it, we shall see though. In theory if you say have your guild slaughter all the orcs in the area eventually those orcs will move to a new area. Thus you can actually drive what is happening in the game if you want. But again we have to see it in action before we can really buy it. GW2 tried to claim they were doing this but really they just had scripted events that run in a cycle so they are the same every time you play.
To me it's an euphemism for a place that feels like a world with wonder and excitement. A world that feels alive and is not a mechanic or system of a developmental construct. DAoC and Asheron's Call is what I would call living breathing worlds. WoW and pretty much any Themepark are not examples of one, they are more a system used for game design.
I don't think that is how most people define it. But to be fair I got more of this feeling from WoW than I ever did in DAOC. WoW felt way more alive to me than DAOC ever did and I never got a sense of awe in DAOC.
It is rude to post threads like this without first giving your own idea of what you think it is. It comes off as a trollish thread. Mainly because you pose these questions almost daily. Why is the sky blue? Discuss. Why doesn't water evaporate? Discuss. Why are there only one tootsie roll in a tootsie roll pop? Discuss.
Why does MMOExposed continuously pose these questions? Discuss.
I don't think it's rude - this is the kind of question one is supposed to ask as a neutral person who wants to encourage discussion. Forums hire people to make this kind of post because it's good for the health of the forum community. Bloggers and journalists also are supposed to be unbiased when asking the community for raw material to base their next blog or article on.
I want to help design and develop a PvE-focused, solo-friendly, sandpark MMO which combines crafting, monster hunting, and story. So PM me if you are starting one.
A dynamic, virtual world. Meaning not much scripted like you see in Rift or GW2 (though they and the fans were busy pointing out it's dynamic).
Xsyon and Ryzom springs to mind. Especially Xsyon. But being an indie one-man-company there are issues to encounter, and the playerbase is not that high. There's a free-to-try option though, so knock yourself out.
Living Breathing World MMO. I know this is figuratively talked about around here.
But what does that even mean in terms of MMOs?
Are there any examples of such a MMO being this "Living Breathing World" that people here been scratching and begging for?
I been thinking about this request, when it hit me. What the heck is a Living Breathing World MMO feature?
Seems like a heavy requested feature, but doesnt really seem to have ever been done before. So I been confused about where this request even started from.
School me on this you all.
FFXI would fit a living and breathing world. At least back in 2004 when I played it did feel that way. I think this largely came from it's regional design and the absence of fast travel at the early levels. Not to mention, all safe and fast travel options were mini social events in design.
To me a living breathing world is when the game world changes over time, either by the player bases action or the developers.
It's when a world doesn't stay exactly the same all the time and it feels like just a static world.
The best example of a game doing this imo was Asheron's Call.
They would have monthly updates that could range from a simple season changing in game (IE an area in fall would start getting snowfall and overtime it built up to cover the ground/houses/trees) to huge changes that were story-based, like a giant "hive" appearing hovering over the major towns in the game and new creatures out and about in the wildlife, to a major change like the games god appearing in game and fighting against the main villain.
This made the world feel "alive" because it constantly changed and evolved, and most of all unlike the "newer" mmorpgs that have tried this (IE Guild WArs 2) they didn't piggyback it and have it be instanced or reset it, if you MISSED it, you m issed it, there was no flip flopping. You were either there for it or you weren't. That made things feel finite and permanent, which is sorely missing from newer mmo's that try to do this kind of thing and fear people don't want to be able to "miss" them so they have them be instanced or reset (like guild wars 2 "events").
Then there are smaller examples of this, such as Ultima Online and it's famous "undead" attack on the in game city of Trinsic, where the undead attacked it and the players had to band together to fight them off (it was amazing), you had liches, skeletons, etc attacking it and the players were pushing back, there were a ton of them and the players (at least on my server, Lake Superior) made a teleport on top of the bank and used it as a safe haven (the undead couldn't get up there) so players would all rest up there/heal and then rejoin the fight.
Things like that hardly ever happen in mmorpgs today and if they do it's usually just for in-game "holidays" and the major changes are usually something they save for expansions and charge you for...again (since your sub cost is what they used to develop it in the first place).
I wish an mmorpg would take the monthly update approach of Asheron's Call (permanent ONE TIME changes per month) and also run in-game events like UO and the earlier mmo's had (have developers play a role in game, do events, etc).
But that Undead siege. How is that different from what goes on in GW2 today? or what about Rift?
Ever log into Rift on one of the abandoned servers in the max level zones. I did before, and it was totally taken over by NPC enemies. But on normal servers this doesnt happen because PLAYERS >NPC always in every MMO.
Players always are better than the hardest PvE NPC.
Imagine people that are masters of Demon Soul/ Dark Soul/ Ninja Giden / DMC, coming into a MMO in masses (50-100 of them) and fighting some super hard PvE NPC content like this that may be trying to take over the world. Those players would wipe the floor with those "Hard" NPC.
Thats why we never really see this anymore. but its still there. Its just players never allow stuff like that to happen now days. MMO gamers are way too skilled.
I cringe to say it but swg was the last one I can think of that was " living and breathing" It's the last time I was in an mmo where people did things because they wanted to. They had house parties or went to explore a cave, or just hung out and talked in a mall.
I don't really consider a quest hub mmo living and breathing. It's just a game you play. SWG you could actually live in there to some extent. It's really hard to explain if you've never experienced it or are not looking for it. Eve is probably like that for the people playing it. There's no real content for them to follow. They sort of live in there and things happen because people do things.
Being a sandbox or having a lot of sandbox features probably has a lot to do with why they're so rare now and why so many of the older games had it and new ones don't.
I think its important not to confuse what constitutes a game with those kinds of features with games that rely heavily on scripted events to give the illusion of being 'alive'. That isn't to say that those things can't be fun, but their only fun as long as they don't repeat too often or people get bored with them occuring, Rift is probably a good example of this, and probably GW2 where there are often 'events' that occur on a seemingly random basis, but follow a fairly linear path as they progress. Only players themselves can breathe life into a world, and its the kind of thing that you only really find with sandbox type games, where players have the tools to do so. Themepark games tend to rely on scripted events which are ephemeral in nature and repeatable, players can interact with them on that basis, but there is no permanence to the outcomes.
Games like 'Drox Operative, Space Rangers, X3 etc' have all spoiled me when people talk about 'living breathing world'.
I don't think there is a single MMO that can do the 'living' part if compared to those.
Although I do recall asking GW2 fanboys about this with 'Dynamic events' and getting shouted at a lot. Looking back, not sure how they could have been so blinded to the short comings of the so-called 'Dynamic events'.
Gdemami - Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
As everyone else has already pointed out, if you're looking for examples of living, breathing worlds, then Eve Online and Guild Wars 2 are the only examples in the current marketplace. Everything else is pretty much static.
The only other slightly relevant example is FFXIV - the town hub in Mor Dhona started as just a camp but has been gaining walls and buildings every other update or so. The rest of the game is rather static, however.
Saga of Ryzom, UO, EVE, any number of smaller Sandboxes like WURM. Theirs alot of concepts From games like Fable that have not been done much because devs just want WOW locusts these days. Spellborn and a few other games not sandboxes but had interesting AI. Maybe Shadowbane to a degree.
It mean the game broad (world) have it own cycle (of life) and not roll around player's action .
For example.
The cycle are 7 days "in game time" or farmer's farm
Day 1 he plan the seeds ,
at day 4 the seeds grow and rats start appears
at day 7 , if he manage to kill the rats , it time for him to harvest .
Base on the cycle there are many possible "future" depend on player's "chose"
Basically it kind of design where the game world roll around independent with players.
It difference with current the world roll around players (main character of the story line)
"living world" are kind of design where the game world still run even if player join it or not . While "hero design" game world "stop" when player don't play it anymore.
I think this sums it up quite well. A living breathing world is a game world that is more like a simulation. It is not static but it does things on its own. The dynamic events in GW2 go in this direction, although in a very rudimentary way that is not well implemented. StoryBricks is promising a lot of this kind of stuff.
What is maybe even more important is that the there are many ways to interact with the game world that don't evolve around combat. Planting weeds is one example. Another key feature world be the ability to place items on the ground like it was possible in UO. It starts with little thinks like sitting in chairs and if there is a plate with food I want to be able to eat it. This is what makes the game world feel responsive and alive.
The epitome of a game world that feels dead is the type of static quest locations that exist in almost every themepark mmo. The game world consist of these small locations that are only build for one specific quest, and once you are finished with it they become completely useless.
And no, it is not simply nostalgia. And the one time events that exist GW2 for example are a neat feature but the don't really make the game world feel more alive for me.
Comments
To the OP...
It is rude to post threads like this without first giving your own idea of what you think it is. It comes off as a trollish thread. Mainly because you pose these questions almost daily. Why is the sky blue? Discuss. Why doesn't water evaporate? Discuss. Why are there only one tootsie roll in a tootsie roll pop? Discuss.
Why does MMOExposed continuously pose these questions? Discuss.
A living breathing world for me is not how many players you can crank into the server or how much players can affect the world around them.
A living breathing world for me is how the world are built, I can see the mobs attacking and moving around, I see wolfs hunting in pacts, Children running around playing in a city, a cat chasing a mouse, NPCs doing their daliy job, NPCs talks, telling jokes, the world is alive.
Only game that comes close to this are Guild Wars 2.
If it's not broken, you are not innovating.
In mechanical terms, a living breathing world is when the content does not depend on the player to happen, can engage the player without the player's choice and has permanent consequences for not being engaged. On top of being actually meaningful.
Ideally for a living world, content patches and expansions would not be announced. They would be stealth added at an (extremely) quick rate, to reward exploration and discovery for players, and to promote word of mouth within the game.
As mentioned earlier, Ryzom is probably the best example of a real world. Ryzom has:
- seasons, where the animals and materials change based on seasons. Some animals migrate to new areas depending on season, and high-grade mats are fought over in the PvP zones when the season changes. Seasons actually matter.
- day/night cycle, where again some mats are available only at night, for example.
- weather also exists, and some mats are only available in the rain, etc.
- mobs have real life cycles, where predators hunt in certain areas, and then return to their dens to sleep. Mobs move around based on season changes.
- no labels floating above the mobs' heads. When you look out at a scene, you see mobs; some of them are friendly, some are not and can 1-shot you. You can only tell the difference by looking at them and recognizing them, not by some kind of green/red label floating above their heads.
So in Ryzom, you have to learn to actually look at the world around you; you have to know what season it is, and whether you can get the mats you want in this season/day-night/weather.
Another feature that helps add to this is that Ryzom is very sandboxy --- there are no classes, for example. No healers, nukers, melee, only people who have skills. There are few quests and no real story line. It is like a survival game, where you pit your wits against the world, with PvP as the main end-game.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
To me it's an euphemism for a place that feels like a world with wonder and excitement. A world that feels alive and is not a mechanic or system of a developmental construct. DAoC and Asheron's Call is what I would call living breathing worlds. WoW and pretty much any Themepark are not examples of one, they are more a system used for game design.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
broken record coming your way...
umm...Wurm Online?
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
I would love to play a MMO that focus on this.
If it's not broken, you are not innovating.
But see that's the thing. The only two games that have ever given me this sense of wonder and magic were Ultima Online (but I played this for only a few months) and World of Warcraft. WoW was a truly amazing game at the time. This whole themepark crap that people came up is to just refer to games which try to clone WoW. However, WoW had an huge amazing world which was full of mystery, magic, wonder and very rich lore. Something that very few MMOs actually have.
I think the vast majority of people loved WoW at launch. It had an epic world which was full of these fun quests and tons of content. The idea of questing at the time was foreign to most MMO players. It was something unique and unheard of to have like 3-4k quests in a game. I think all these WoW clones just served to cheapen the epicness of what WoW was.
But then that links back to the first MMO which people get hooked with. For most people their first MMO is the best and it will remain that way no matter what. By first I mean the first MMO that really hooked you. Sometimes that's not always your first MMO.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
To me a living breathing world is when the game world changes over time, either by the player bases action or the developers.
It's when a world doesn't stay exactly the same all the time and it feels like just a static world.
The best example of a game doing this imo was Asheron's Call.
They would have monthly updates that could range from a simple season changing in game (IE an area in fall would start getting snowfall and overtime it built up to cover the ground/houses/trees) to huge changes that were story-based, like a giant "hive" appearing hovering over the major towns in the game and new creatures out and about in the wildlife, to a major change like the games god appearing in game and fighting against the main villain.
This made the world feel "alive" because it constantly changed and evolved, and most of all unlike the "newer" mmorpgs that have tried this (IE Guild WArs 2) they didn't piggyback it and have it be instanced or reset it, if you MISSED it, you m issed it, there was no flip flopping. You were either there for it or you weren't. That made things feel finite and permanent, which is sorely missing from newer mmo's that try to do this kind of thing and fear people don't want to be able to "miss" them so they have them be instanced or reset (like guild wars 2 "events").
Then there are smaller examples of this, such as Ultima Online and it's famous "undead" attack on the in game city of Trinsic, where the undead attacked it and the players had to band together to fight them off (it was amazing), you had liches, skeletons, etc attacking it and the players were pushing back, there were a ton of them and the players (at least on my server, Lake Superior) made a teleport on top of the bank and used it as a safe haven (the undead couldn't get up there) so players would all rest up there/heal and then rejoin the fight.
Things like that hardly ever happen in mmorpgs today and if they do it's usually just for in-game "holidays" and the major changes are usually something they save for expansions and charge you for...again (since your sub cost is what they used to develop it in the first place).
I wish an mmorpg would take the monthly update approach of Asheron's Call (permanent ONE TIME changes per month) and also run in-game events like UO and the earlier mmo's had (have developers play a role in game, do events, etc).
Asheron's Call had elements of this. You could clear out camps and they would stay clear until eventually stuff came back and it wasn't always the same stuff. They also ran a lot of events in that game.
GW2 has like a giant failure version of it. Where they just run really lame events that are the same on every server that do change the world but in about the dullest way possible.
EQN claims they will be doing it, we shall see though. In theory if you say have your guild slaughter all the orcs in the area eventually those orcs will move to a new area. Thus you can actually drive what is happening in the game if you want. But again we have to see it in action before we can really buy it. GW2 tried to claim they were doing this but really they just had scripted events that run in a cycle so they are the same every time you play.
I don't think that is how most people define it. But to be fair I got more of this feeling from WoW than I ever did in DAOC. WoW felt way more alive to me than DAOC ever did and I never got a sense of awe in DAOC.
I don't think it's rude - this is the kind of question one is supposed to ask as a neutral person who wants to encourage discussion. Forums hire people to make this kind of post because it's good for the health of the forum community. Bloggers and journalists also are supposed to be unbiased when asking the community for raw material to base their next blog or article on.
A dynamic, virtual world. Meaning not much scripted like you see in Rift or GW2 (though they and the fans were busy pointing out it's dynamic).
Xsyon and Ryzom springs to mind. Especially Xsyon. But being an indie one-man-company there are issues to encounter, and the playerbase is not that high. There's a free-to-try option though, so knock yourself out.
Once upon a time ...
It may be "something" but the question is whether it will be entertaining?
If you're really interested in what made MMOs living breathing worlds then read the article I'm providing a link too.
Edit: nevermind with the link. If you want to know you're going to have to find stories about people playing Everquest and AO and FFXI.
Edit: yeah I did find the article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/technology/voyager-to-a-strange-planet.html
FFXI would fit a living and breathing world. At least back in 2004 when I played it did feel that way. I think this largely came from it's regional design and the absence of fast travel at the early levels. Not to mention, all safe and fast travel options were mini social events in design.
But that Undead siege. How is that different from what goes on in GW2 today? or what about Rift?
Ever log into Rift on one of the abandoned servers in the max level zones. I did before, and it was totally taken over by NPC enemies. But on normal servers this doesnt happen because PLAYERS >NPC always in every MMO.
Players always are better than the hardest PvE NPC.
Imagine people that are masters of Demon Soul/ Dark Soul/ Ninja Giden / DMC, coming into a MMO in masses (50-100 of them) and fighting some super hard PvE NPC content like this that may be trying to take over the world. Those players would wipe the floor with those "Hard" NPC.
Thats why we never really see this anymore. but its still there. Its just players never allow stuff like that to happen now days. MMO gamers are way too skilled.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I think its important not to confuse what constitutes a game with those kinds of features with games that rely heavily on scripted events to give the illusion of being 'alive'. That isn't to say that those things can't be fun, but their only fun as long as they don't repeat too often or people get bored with them occuring, Rift is probably a good example of this, and probably GW2 where there are often 'events' that occur on a seemingly random basis, but follow a fairly linear path as they progress. Only players themselves can breathe life into a world, and its the kind of thing that you only really find with sandbox type games, where players have the tools to do so. Themepark games tend to rely on scripted events which are ephemeral in nature and repeatable, players can interact with them on that basis, but there is no permanence to the outcomes.
Games like 'Drox Operative, Space Rangers, X3 etc' have all spoiled me when people talk about 'living breathing world'.
I don't think there is a single MMO that can do the 'living' part if compared to those.
Although I do recall asking GW2 fanboys about this with 'Dynamic events' and getting shouted at a lot. Looking back, not sure how they could have been so blinded to the short comings of the so-called 'Dynamic events'.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
As everyone else has already pointed out, if you're looking for examples of living, breathing worlds, then Eve Online and Guild Wars 2 are the only examples in the current marketplace. Everything else is pretty much static.
The only other slightly relevant example is FFXIV - the town hub in Mor Dhona started as just a camp but has been gaining walls and buildings every other update or so. The rest of the game is rather static, however.
A "Living Breathing" world would not have scripted events on timers. Things would just happen.
EQN is much more in line with what a "Living Breathing" world should be.
Of you hunt
I think this sums it up quite well. A living breathing world is a game world that is more like a simulation. It is not static but it does things on its own. The dynamic events in GW2 go in this direction, although in a very rudimentary way that is not well implemented. StoryBricks is promising a lot of this kind of stuff.
What is maybe even more important is that the there are many ways to interact with the game world that don't evolve around combat. Planting weeds is one example. Another key feature world be the ability to place items on the ground like it was possible in UO. It starts with little thinks like sitting in chairs and if there is a plate with food I want to be able to eat it. This is what makes the game world feel responsive and alive.
The epitome of a game world that feels dead is the type of static quest locations that exist in almost every themepark mmo. The game world consist of these small locations that are only build for one specific quest, and once you are finished with it they become completely useless.
And no, it is not simply nostalgia. And the one time events that exist GW2 for example are a neat feature but the don't really make the game world feel more alive for me.