Originally Posted by
Jibjub
This theory certainly does explain all the people currently playing WoW Classic and loving every minute of it... Oh wait, no it doesn't.
While I agree a new MMO developed by people who understand why people love MMOs would be great (and not this crowd-funded garbage), the appeal of Classic is not some mystery. Nostalgia plays a large part, but it's not the only thing. There are a few things:
1. Community. This is currently manifesting as 75% game design and 25% camaraderie from "persecution" (i.e., all the people who struggled for years asking for Classic and now finally getting it). But... it's mostly game design. Everquest, in my opinion, was awesome because there was very little you could do by yourself. Sure it made it annoying when you wanted to just play for a bit and couldn't find a group, but that pain was FAR outweighed by the times where you got a group and had tons of fun with other folks. Here's the thing. MMOs are shitty single-player games. By design, they can never be as great as a game like Skyrim or Zelda. But all modern MMOs are designed to be shitty single-player games hoping to allure millions of players, instead of being EPIC multi-player games that only caters to a few hundred thousand players.
2. Slower pace. This is not a matter of old versus new. It's a matter of design. I always scratched my head when people disparaged "tab-target" when a new MMO came out as if action combat was "the future" of MMOs. No ... they are just two different choices. It's not a matter of old tech versus new tech. A lot of people actually enjoy the slower nature of combat.
3. RPG elements. Adventure and Quality of Life cannot co-exist. Or they can, but they live on a spectrum. Adventure on one end and QoL on the other. The more QoL elements you add (e.g., removing ammo and reagents), the less of an adventure you get. Frodo could have been given some QoL things, like a flying mount, but that would have made the adventure really lame. “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” - GK Chesterton