Maybe we just grew old. I recently paid real money just to support a private server of my favorite childhood mmorpg. After playing a couple of days I got bored and never played again.
To be fair it does feel like something changed, online games used to feel a lot more social. As a kid you could just jump into an MMO and make new friends, that seems to have gone away now.
I guess they served as a proxy for what we now have with Discord, and now that we have "the real thing", its kind of naturally gone away. Which is a shame, because meeting people over Discord is much more difficult imo, or at very least not as beginner friendly.
> As a kid you could just jump into an MMO and make new friends
Some of us were past "kid" when UO came out :)
But I do think the key phrase here is "as a kid". I was in university when UO came out, and it became my life. I had some strong social interactions with a bunch of people, although they tended to skew my age or older. However there was an obvious pattern. These were mostly people who did not have to take care children, either they hadn't had them yet for one reason or another, or their kids were already older.
There was a bunch of us who stayed in touch and played other games, but as the main pack of late 20-something & early 30-somethings started to have kids, they faded off. This wasn't the only reason, other types of responsibilities pulled people away, but it was the big one.
It's easy to sink time into things when you don't have huge time sink responsibilities in your life. And when you sink lots of time into social things, you tend to make strong connections.
The problem with re-playing an old game I think is that it's already "solved". There's no sense of adventure or mystery any more, and it just becomes a race to accomplish whatever objectives the player base comes up with. WoW Classic is a great example of this - people had Ragnaros down in like 48 days after launch or something ridiculous.
Even though it's not an MMO, I caught a brief glimpse of that same feeling earlier this year playing through Elden Ring. No one really knew anything and the world was huge and inscrutable at first, it was a lot of fun to explore and sort-of interact with people doing the same thing through messages, ghosts etc.
Same thing happened with me and WoW Classic. I was hoping that classic would recapture the magic I felt playing the game a decade ago but after a few days I was just bored and cancelled my subscription. I guess that feeling is just a moment frozen in time now.
I was hyped for Classic for YEARS and when the release date got announced I booked a full week off work (and with the missus lol) so I could no-life it just like old times.
If the community could have had their memory wiped of Vanilla on launch day it would have been a different experience. But instead we just ended up with a bunch of seasoned veterans min/maxing everything to the extreme and burning through content they'd already solved more than a decade ago.
I still re-visit Classic every now and then, maybe just to level another character up to level 15 or so and re-experience the starting zones I like so much. But it doesn't have the same allure as when it was brand new and that's kind of sad.
The game could return to what it was but the community couldn't. You can't recapture the past like that. Everything has moved on. The game is known, not new again.
Playing "solved" games is not as exiting. The effect is most clear with boardgames I think. Also if you were a kid at the time way more things are exciting in gemeral.
> Playing "solved" games is not as exiting. The effect is most clear with boardgames I think.
While this is probably usually true, a good counter example is Go, which actually become more fun after computers surpassed the abilities of humans. (Because, as it turns out, the boring parts of the game don't actually matter that much in terms of points.)
IMHO the fun drained away when MMO publishers decided to refocus on making money. Ironically this caused most of them to go to a Free 2 Play model (F2P), which requires the developers to implement ever increasing amounts of grind to create a market that can be monetized. To spend creative energy on building elaborate gambling systems to lock away as much of the content as they can get away with from the majority of the playerbase.
