Remember when MMO's were worlds not games

I don't remember a time where any MMO worth playing didn't have advancement of some kind.

And before that, there was a little game called Ultima Online, no grind except training the skills you wanted and no progression except killing everyone you could.

Still part of the EvE-Online community and for me, it's been my second home. Although you're all in ships 90% of the time, you still feel that it's a real live world...

Sandbox games are the best if you have the imagination to go with it.

You can copy and still innovate. WoW was the perfect example of this. They copied a lot of game design from EQ, but actually made the game FUN for anyone who wasn't a masochist. They changed a hell of a lot from what EQ did. A lot more than TOR did when copying WoW that's for sure.

One of the great things in EQ was; You could login saturday morning, join a group and be with the same group for the rest of the day. You could go have your lunch, dinner, run to the shops, and the group mates would hold your spot.

When you finished one camp, you'd move to the next. You knew each others abilities and failures and helped each other through the day.

There were no real rules. They weren't needed. You just got on with the job (grinding mobs) for hours and then at the end of the day, congratulate yourself on .5 of a level

/shout Need SoW for corpe run !
/shout KEI, bank, 5 mins

Yeah, I must admit, while I do 'really' love a lot of the new games, and have room in my tool belt for at least 'one' theme park style MMO, I currently have a big gaping hole in the loop that should hold the 'sand park' tool.

UO was my original sand park tool.

I tried SWG for a few months, but a few forces and the faulty way I approached the game led me to quit, which I later regretted - not giving it another chance.

I had hopes for FFXIV, but they kicked out the sand park guy and rather than fixing the sand park, loaded up more of a theme park team, with pidgeon holing armor system and holy trinity classes, and who knows what else now, the sand park dream died there.

Interestingly enough, I had 'no' expectations of this being a sand park. I'm having a blast with it for what it is. I have no idea how long I'll play, I don't look that far ahead.

I started reading some articles last year that makes me hopeful, however, that the sand park isn't dead. I think we'll start seeing the pendulum swing.

Not that I want to see it swing so much that theme parks are abandoned. Like I said, I dearly love both.

SWTOR is not a sandbox MMO, it actually has much more in common with a regular RPG than an MMO. for me a persistent world is only good if its a sandbox and the players themselves have an impact on it, otherwise you are paying Bioware 15 bucks a month to play their RPG could you imagine paying a sub for KOTOR? because that's exactly what your doing.

I think if you combined SWG's sand box style and size of planet's with Bioware's story telling and gameplay from SWTOE and you would have the perfect MMO.

World of Warcraft had a fantastic world when it first launched and it was the thing that kept me playing it. Love finding a random quest in the middle of no where and I'm one of the few people who liked the epic multi part quests which had you going from one part of the world to the next.

Cataclysm butchered that experience (although 80-85 was great in parts), the 1-60 world is on train rails. SWTOR is a bit like that too to be fair, I haven't confirmed this as I haven't played enough but from what I've seen it doesn't have the random quests or interesting places that are only accessible by a bit of exploring.

Anarchy Online is/was the best MMORPG I've ever played. Sadly, I have a hard time playing it now because it's so painful to see hundreds of names in my friends list of good friends I made all around the world, who haven't logged on in years.

And you blame SE for this? All they did was respond to their community. All FFXIV really did was prove to me, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the old-school mentality of MMOs is dead, and lives on only through the rosy colored glasses of reminiscence, or the select few who still play some select games going on 10+ years now. Games like EVE are an exception to the rule, and any company w/ a large investor base, simply can't justify that kind of risk.