This thread is not to bag on SWToR or how to talk about how other games are better. I am here to ask you guys what you think is missing. I know that there are a lot of you who were blown away by Everquest or (insert your first big MMO here). What did they have that brought that sense of amazement?

 

Open world exploration. Simple as that.

 

SWTOR's world is not open, and it's not worth exploring. You have map indicators everywhere you need to go, and there is no hidden gems lurking anywhere to make you want to try and do anything else. Lots of dead ends, though. (obviously not counting datacrons, which are so well documented they dont count as exploring anymore either).

We didn't know how to do anything. It was all new. These days we kinda know how it all works before we even play the game. Fan websites show quest guides before they are even patched in. And I think its all been simplified skills used to be far more complex. You could also be unique. I played ultima online first and it blew me away. Just traveling to another city for the first time was an adventure that took planning and time. Not these days its to fast, to easy. I still love this game though I wish for bigger and slower from it.

I think it was ''wonderous'' because back then(first mmo experience) it felt like a Matrix(the movie).

It was a virtual world you could explore and learn about with your virtual self(player character) that you create and develop yourself.

 

.Also being teenager or a kid basically ,people had tons of free time and no worries or responsibilities adults have,so they can immerse in the game more fully.

Edited May 23, 2013 by Kaedusz

Open world exploration. Simple as that.

 

SWTOR's world is not open, and it's not worth exploring. You have map indicators everywhere you need to go, and there is no hidden gems lurking anywhere to make you want to try and do anything else. Lots of dead ends, though. (obviously not counting datacrons, which are so well documented they dont count as exploring anymore either).

 

Don't look up where datacrons and special things are and it's still wondrous. People just read too much on forums/guides nowdays

The developers of the earlier MMO's used to throw in a lot of "fluff" to bring the world to life. Places to explore, little details and easter eggs, unique monsters and vendors located off the beaten path from which you could get something special, like an armor that looked a bit different or a schematic for some potion that was identical to some other potion, but used frogliver instead of chickenliver, suddenly making those useless froglivers useful to you and giving you an alternative from the overpriced chickenlivers on the market.

 

All that has been streamlined into a single path of progress now. Developers don't spend time anymore designing that special looking armor that may drop from one off-the-beaten-path pack of monsters, your only option is the one that drops from some generic monster located on the standard path of progress. Or just give you an even better armor as a questreward, so there isn't any point to use any dropped item. Which also means there's no point for the developers to include them, since noone will appreciate them anyway. They're downgrades! Nobody is going to appreciate a downgrade!

 

On top of that, YouTube and database/datamining sites happened. Anything left to explore is widely known thanks to all the guides and databases.

Developers sometimes still try to include a "secret" or two, but just look at what happened with the datacrons. Within 2 weeks, there were guides to all the datacrons all over the internet, the non-explorers feel it's mandatory to obtain them, and are now whining how it takes so much "effort" to obtain them. And it gets even sadder.. Some idiots at Bioware are now considering the idea to make them a legacy unlock.. The game world just died a bit more.

OP, I love that you said this. I started eq in '01 and still play. MMOs today should have taken a few ideas from EQ, seriously. Even if it were just one thing, for example: What would Swtor be like if it used the Alternate Achievement system instead of Talent Trees? The time spent online by everyone wanting to become something better and unique would surge. The AAs really stand out to me as the biggest difference and greatest possible improvement. I'd also have to cite massive exploration and crafting as HUGE differences. Edited May 23, 2013 by Paokzu

It's older gamers at the time didn't mind the grind and accepted it as fun

 

Over time each expansion in Everquest took away grind once Luclin came out and u could go anywhere in EQ so fast the world got incredibly small

 

New gamers for most part come rom a have to have now cannot wait instant gratification generation and simply wouldn't like it very much sadly

 

But the reason the game world seemed so large were travel times were absolute huge and vast which gives a sense of wow this is an entire world ... Which is good sometimes

 

Sadly I do not think there are fine wine drinkers that want to savor each sip left in gaming for most part gamers of today would rather shotgun the beer and be done with it

 

 

With all that said ... Even though huge travel times through many zones may seem like an ordeal it presents adventure on the way ... And even though most think they do not like it I think deep down they do and do not realize its what's makes a digitized world seem to come alive... But no developers have the wherewithal to sustain the barrage of whiners if they did ...

 

Just my two cents

 

/applause Agree 100%

Imo class balance and pvp are what ruined MMO's. Everyone has a set path set for them and they cant diverge from it. Plus your toon caps at max lvl and there are no ways to advance them outside of raids. You used to have tons of things you could do and tons of chooices for your toon. But now a days its all "Balanced" to make it "Fair"

It was Everquest for me as well, and I am not entirely convinced that it is impossible to recapture.

 

When I look back on EQ and I compare it to other MMOs, Everquest had more content in it's original release pre-Kunark than what most MMOs now have after 4 years. When they said Massive Multiplayer Online RPG, they meant that the actual game was Massive, not simply that they expected a large number of people. I played Everquest for five straight years and I did not come anywhere near exploring everything, probably not even half the content in the game.

 

Taking a random slice out of the game, if you were playing at level 30 in EQ at launch, you might be in Sol A, Unrest, Highpass Hold, Upper Guk, South Karana, Lake Rathe, Castle Mistmoor, Cazic Thule, or North Karana, with fully viable options for grouping and soloing. And that wasn't the endgame; EQ launched as a 50 level game just like Star Wars. Compare that to SWTOR at level 30. It's pretty much set in stone. Everyone has a linear story with only one real option of place-to-go. In Everquest, we could level from 1-50 five times over and never send a character to the same place. In SWTOR, the planetary missions go from being exciting to rapidly becoming boring and overplayed, because we are going to follow the exact same pre-ordained path every single time. And that's not just SWTOR, but essentially every MMO that launches these days does so without even a quarter of the total amount of content that Everquest had.

 

The second thing that I feel Everquest had that every other MMO seems to fail at is factions. Even later in Everquest, they took on the lazy standards that MMOs use today of running with either the Sesame Street ideals of every single race/class gets along, or the rigid two-faction system of Good Guys vs Bad Guys. Horde vs Alliance, Republic vs Empire, Heroes vs Villains, whatever the MMOs of today call the factions, it doesn't matter. It's terrible when compared to the brilliant system EQ launched with.

 

In Everquest, "faction" literally meant a group of people which had their own reputation. Almost everything you killed had a faction. Murder that Human Guard, you just took a negative hit to your Human Faction, your Freeport Guard faction, and your Merchants Alliance faction, but you get a positive boost with the Crushbone Orcs. What cities you were welcome in, what vendors would sell to you (and even what kind of deals they would cut you), what quests you qualified for, all of that was as a result of the actions you had committed as your character, not just a single two-option selection made at character creation. We were given a feel of a real world because our decisions had consequences. I remember Paladins saying that they refused to kill the Froglok King because he carried Paladin Faction and if they killed him for his great loot, their local trainer would no longer allow them to train in Freeport and they would have to sail across the world to Elf town when they leveled. Decisions had consequences, and that was something that pretty much every other MMO fails to capture.

 

And lastly, in EQ, you could kill literally ANYTHING. "Hello, Mr Backpack Vendor. *Stab!*" You had absolute freedom of choice, understanding that there were consequences in place. A dwarf warrior could walk into the Dwarf King's throneroom and attack him. Immediately dozens of high level dwarf guards would pounce on him and kill him for such an affront, but the player could still attempt the attack if they chose. And if they were powerful enough to be successful, they could kill that King and have their Dwarf faction so utterly destroyed that any Dwarf NPC in the world attacks them on sight. The innkeeper who is helping that player beside you, he'll attack you if you step into his inn because he hates you for being that renown murderer of Elves or whatever.

 

How many of us have been annoyed that we couldn't murder the companion that we hate, or that some obnoxious NPC never gives us the option to stab them. How many of us have some mouthy character insult us when we are five levels higher than them and decked out in raid level gear. I hate the magical energy that makes their name appear in green and prevents me from being physically capable of attacking them. Even if I'm going to lose, having the freedom to make those decisions on our own was part of what made those old games so emersive.

 

Everquest was a real world where you could do literally anything. Everything else since then has been policed by too many invisible rules.

I think a lot of it is how formulaic MMOs have become. Where before MMOs were all about a grand alternate world to explore, the focus has shifted to the mechanical side of the game. How many areas outside of SWTOR's business centers and cantinas are you likely to go to just because it's an interesting place? How many times have you gotten lost and found an incredible adventure that was never just shown to you? How many times have you genuinely felt like you were in another world?

 

I still get this feeling from Maplestory, of all games. It may have turned to crap in a lot of ways, but wonderment still exists.

My first was UO, which I remember fondly. Although largely because I was a non-combatent (I was a master blacksmith) and it was very rare I got 'ganked' and also because I actually got offered a real life job in game by a female elf! (The person involved couldn't contact me by phone as I was dialed up, so logged onto UO, found me and offered me a job from there!)

 

EQ was my favourite though. It was simply the pure size of the place and the lack of fast travel (apart from wizards who could gate you for a price). I created quiet a few characters, leveled them to lvl 11 (where I could use a very basic invisibility spell with a really long cooldown) and then run them from one coast of Antonica to the other. A successful run would take well over an hour (with at least one rest period because night time was so dark you couldn't see a foot in front of you!). And it was very dangerous! The chances of getting through were about 50/50, although most of these characters were disposable as they were made just for this type of run.

 

I found tons of interesting things during these runs. Met loads of interesting people. Got killed in some very interesting ways too. There's nothing that is of a similar size with similar accessability issues or similar reasons to even attempt such a treck these days unfortunately, and the MMO world is a much diminished place for it. I went back to EQ a few years back, only to find that it too had 'shrunk' and had fast travel.

My world died a little that day

Back in the day when MMOs were still pretty new, I got into Everquest and it seemed amazing. The world was huge and had tons of places to explore. There were endless things to do. When you got to endgame, you actually felt powerful, like you had accomplished something. I would print out spell lists and maps and had them organized in a big folder super-geeky style. I took that game as srs bsns.

 

This thread is not to bag on SWToR or how to talk about how other games are better. I am here to ask you guys what you think is missing. I know that there are a lot of you who were blown away by Everquest or (insert your first big MMO here). What did they have that brought that sense of amazement?

 

Was it that we were new to it? Are we just burned out and jaded? Maybe even OLD and jaded? Is there anything that could be brought to SWToR to being a sense of wow (no pun intended) and amazement?

For me I think what's missing are two things I cannot get back:

1) First-time nostalgia

2) Free time

 

I remember how excited I was playing WoW beta and leveling my first character in Vanilla. I remember the excitement of being in my first raid and killing my first raid boss.

 

This isn't ToR's fault... I just don't have the time or drive to raid 4-5 nights a week for 4-5 hours. And even if I did and there was that much raiding content to do... I wouldn't have as much fun. But that's because the "newness" is gone. There's always a little excitement when doing a new operation or killing a new boss, but that's all anymore. Now it's mainly about the people I run the ops.

You aren't a child anymore. Congradulations.

I miss the days when developers made games for the enjoyment of the gamers. They were fun to play.

 

The games sold, made money and had player retention cause they were an enjoyable experience. The money came cause the games were good.

 

Now, it's create a generic game and see how much money we can make.

My first MMO was Star Wars Galaxies, it felt so huge, so open, you could level your skills anywhere it seemed as your character didn't have a level but your skills did. I remember creeping through Dathomir scared a Nightsister would one shot me lol meeting people in cantinas while watching players dance, ah remember when MMOs had non combat classes? Going to Corillia and standing in a long line for a Doctor buff. The game was cool until...I located my first Holocron, then the mindless grind, grind was on...

 

My most memorable moment in any MMO, or heck game for that matter, was while in a cantina on Naboo I learned Master Image Designer and saw..

 

"You begin to feel attuned with the power of the Force. Your Force sensitive character slot has been unlocked." flash across the screen

 

When SWG first came out you were only allowed one character slot, I was excited. I went to the character creation screen and it was like starting all over LOL noob human with noob clothes, only difference was it had green Jedi holocrons floating around the character creation screen.

 

For a while I felt unique as I'd only saw ONE Jedi Initiate and heard about a few Padawans running around. Then I learned about perma-death and found out why no one sees Jedi lol a re-roll later and no one saw me until I was a full template Jedi lol

Back in the day when MMOs were still pretty new, I got into Everquest and it seemed amazing. The world was huge and had tons of places to explore. There were endless things to do. When you got to endgame, you actually felt powerful, like you had accomplished something. I would print out spell lists and maps and had them organized in a big folder super-geeky style. I took that game as srs bsns.

 

This thread is not to bag on SWToR or how to talk about how other games are better. I am here to ask you guys what you think is missing. I know that there are a lot of you who were blown away by Everquest or (insert your first big MMO here). What did they have that brought that sense of amazement?

 

Was it that we were new to it? Are we just burned out and jaded? Maybe even OLD and jaded? Is there anything that could be brought to SWToR to being a sense of wow (no pun intended) and amazement?

 

Remember when CDs were wonderous? And CD-Roms? And a 500mhz Pentium Processor? And a plain old cell phone?

 

As technology advances, wonder wears off and becomes commonly accepted. Same with games, MMO or otherwise.

 

Players tastes are now largely acustomed to what was once wonderous.

 

SWTOR is amazing, for what it is, IMO. Some people agree, some do not. It's amazing if for no other reason then.....there are no elfs, orcs, or trolls (except in general chat and the forum :p )

Edited May 23, 2013 by Andryah

this was my first subscription based MMO,the first time i played it i was using a jedi knight,it was back in february i think,i was a hugeeee noob,i always forgot to buff,i forgot about shi-cho form's existance until something like lvl 10,but the feeling was so different,coruscant,tython,that amazing feeling when i found my first piece of heavy armor (it was trooper armor but who cares it was heavy armor!) while doing the esseles with my friend (who was a lvl 24 vanguard back then),my first warzone was a voidstar,i was a lvl 13 guardian without sprint,lol,we lost but i saw all the kills i did,something like 20 (i tought it was really the amount of kills i did) and i felt powerful.

sometimes when i walk in the senate tower and the music starts i feel like my first days here,this game is still great,and it will be great for a long time,long live swtor.

Nostalgia and first impressions and wonder are powerful emotions.

 

My first where DAoC and while I clearly and vividly remember the annoyances as well, it does stand out for me as the 'best' MMO experience.

And that's partly nostalgia and partly because it was my first experience in MMOs.

For others it was EQ, UO, SWG - heck even WoW for many.

 

Such experiences will always cloud the following experiences and is one of the very difficult things for new MMOs to overcome.

Edited May 23, 2013 by xandax

My first was UO, which I remember fondly. Although largely because I was a non-combatent (I was a master blacksmith) and it was very rare I got 'ganked' and also because I actually got offered a real life job in game by a female elf! (The person involved couldn't contact me by phone as I was dialed up, so logged onto UO, found me and offered me a job from there!)

 

EQ was my favourite though. It was simply the pure size of the place and the lack of fast travel (apart from wizards who could gate you for a price). I created quiet a few characters, leveled them to lvl 11 (where I could use a very basic invisibility spell with a really long cooldown) and then run them from one coast of Antonica to the other. A successful run would take well over an hour (with at least one rest period because night time was so dark you couldn't see a foot in front of you!). And it was very dangerous! The chances of getting through were about 50/50, although most of these characters were disposable as they were made just for this type of run.

 

I found tons of interesting things during these runs. Met loads of interesting people. Got killed in some very interesting ways too. There's nothing that is of a similar size with similar accessability issues or similar reasons to even attempt such a treck these days unfortunately, and the MMO world is a much diminished place for it. I went back to EQ a few years back, only to find that it too had 'shrunk' and had fast travel.

My world died a little that day

 

So much truth here.

 

Just imagine how different this game would feel if we weren't directed to exactly the place we needed to be. If we had to wander around to find mission objectives, the world would grow in wonder. As it is, it's so easy to stay on the main path and ignore everything until you reach the triangle on the map.

 

Bring back the wonder by bringing back exploration.

I remember my first "WOW" moment playing an MMO. I was playing DDO (Dungeons & Dragons Online), I was in my first raid group doing the Vault of Night series and we had just got to the last part of the 6 part series and you step in and your on a platform literally miles and miles above the planet, a large red dragon waiting for you to approach. You step forward and she launches herself in the air above the center of the platform breathing fire contrasted by the blackness of space and stars behind her. It was so over the top and mind blowing visuals. That is what is missing from parts of the game. The story is there but there is at times nothing or not enough visually there to just put you in awe. Make you look around and say "one wrong step and I'm done". Moments that make you feel like you really are a hero so to speak.

Yeah, and Space Invaders seemed "wonderous" on the Atari when it first came out too, lol. If you're looking for something to recapture the magic you felt the first time you started playing MMOs....then that's not going to happen....ever.

I miss the days when developers made games for the enjoyment of the gamers. They were fun to play.

 

The games sold, made money and had player retention cause they were an enjoyable experience. The money came cause the games were good.

 

Now, it's create a generic game and see how much money we can make.

I feel this post is a bit of a flame bait. You're basically complaining that your favorite indie band got big, went mainstream, and sold out.

 

That's how MMO's have become. Back when I watched my friends play EQ I had no interest in the length of time it took them to grind levels or the terrible graphics or the lack of 3rd person view used that in that game. The time you needed to put into EQ to be part of a successful raiding guild was crazy (IMO). So that game catered to those people.

 

WoW was sort of the same way. At first it catered to raiders... but then the market flooded with people who didn't have the dedication or time allotment... and they wanted a piece of the pie as well. So LFR's came around, content made easier (per se). As a WoW developer said, in Vanilla a small portion raided, but now the majority of players raid. And you can't build raids around that small group anymore... not like MC and such where you needed attunements and there wasn't an easier mode.

 

Now these games have a bigger genre with a larger majority being those less dedicated people. Even some of those who were dedicated don't have the same time allotments anymore. I would love a game that catered strictly to raiders and had the policy, "If you're a casual, there's plenty of other games out there for you." But companies don't do that.

 

Just like an indie band... you can stay indie, cater to your small, loyal fan-base, and never make it big... all the while your loyal fan-base will die out as they eventually out-grow your style... or you can go mainstream.