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Comment by mipmap04 | Hacker News Reader

This is why Everquest was so great for me. Leveling took a long time and you really got to explore the world. It would take teaming up with people just to make perilous journeys - this is something I don't think exists anymore in games. Additionally, gear lasted much longer. You could be using the same piece of armor for months potentially as you leveled in EQ. It really felt like you were building your character. Now in MMOs, it often feels like you are just checking boxes to get best-in-slot items so you can be like every other high level $build $class character.

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Some of my very favorite moments in videogaming ever occurred during the EverQuest closed beta. That game was so great. It would get dark at night, to the point where if you didn't have a torch (which cost money) you'd be bumping into the trees in Kelethin in pitch blackness, and shortly get taken down by monsters. I remember spending nearly half of my time playing that game just waiting around in the dark by the town torches of Felwithe or Kelethin, chatting with other players and waiting for the sun to rise again so I could go back out into the world. That game didn't even yet have a minimap, so when you got lost, you got LOST, and it was especially bad when the sun started going down and you still couldn't find a safe haven. The areas were big too, so you'd be playing for hours until you finally started learning how to navigate them. I remember downloading maps and printing them out, and referring to them when I got lost in game trying to figure out where I was.

The lack of a minimap is pretty awesome. There is a careful balance between preserving adventure vs making the game frustrating; between convenient and immersive.

I very much liked the early days of D2 when you had to legitimately watch out to always have scrolls of town portal. Or in D1 when your mana didn't auto-recharge and you had to meter out potions, trips to down for free heal/mana, and just getting in there and doing physical damage because you were out of mana and needed to wait for a potion to drop.

Convenient features always take me out of the world a bit, and stuff where you have to die, try something new, die again, etc to win always makes me feel like I'm actually learning to play better.

Yes! Felt like an actual adventure and less of a roller coaster on rails.

Exactly, I remember the feeling that you needed to have a certain level of situational awareness with what is going on around you.

I agree. In EQ things felt like an accomplishment. And having a significant penalty to death, I often experienced palpable fear in places that newer games haven’t been able to replicate. Those experiences cemented my best memories from EQ in my mind. Heck, I still have memorized the run from Freeport to Qeynos — which was quite perilous for a young level 12.

Speaking of gear, my fondest memory was a 9 hour camp for my toon’s Golden Efreeti boots. When they dropped I was so elated and so happy with all my friends who stayed that long to help me get them.

Played Doom (2016) the other weekend on the new gaming PC, first time I played a game for years and though "man! Old games where hard".

It's a game where destroy everything in sight is the correct strategy, you actually get annoyed when they keep coming and coming.

Engaging and fun.

No grind, microtransactions, idiots on multiplayer, just jump in and fuck shit up.

EQ definitely required a certain degree of situational awareness to it that I haven’t seen replicated to this day.

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