Am I the only one?
I’ve been catching up on my reading, and I came across some interesting articles. Recently, Ryan Shwayder at Nerfbat wrote about MMORPG nostalgia. One line I find particularly intriguing:
“At some point, every MMO designer who ever played EverQuest back in the day has wanted to recreate that experience word for word. Some have even tried and failed.”
It brings up a point that I feel is worth mentioning: I am the exact opposite. After playing MUDs for many years before Everquest came out, I was sorely disappointed. EQ was setup in a way that made players endure horrible things, and I was eager to see the genre evolve. WoW was a big step forward, but I was still disappointed by the beta since so much of EQ was visible in WoW. I hoped they would have taken a few more steps than they did. WoW just wasn’t what I was looking for at the time.
It’s ironic, because I can probably thank EQ for my current job as a game designer. At the time, I had grown completely jaded due to my experiences on MUDs. I reacted so strongly that it helped drive me, and I believed that the design of an MMORPG should respect its players. It was a good game for its time and its audience, and it was definitely an accomplishment to create… yet that didn’t make it feel any less wrong. There’s something unsettling about the way it treated players and their time. Where other people think back on EQ nostalgically, it sparks my memories of a laundry list of things I never want to place in a game. Time is a finite resource, and the thought of designing systems that waste large amounts of people’s time makes me sick to my stomach.
In case you haven’t read Ryan’s post, it’s about how nostalgia is a dangerous source of inspiration in MMO design (which almost contradicts the entire point of my post!).