View on the current state of MMORPG's

It's a shame, really, MMO's used to be my all-time favorite way to pass the time, and in a way, they still are. The problem, though, is that the genre is decaying. World of Warcraft has had quite an excellent hand in that too.

Everyone always thinks back to their first MMO as a reference to how things should be. Everquest was my first MMO, so I naturally want them to return to that type of game. EQ punished you for just about everything. It was hard, and required you to actually play with the people in game to do anything. There were all sorts of minor things within that game that todays' MMO's don't include, and actually adding them all to a list would be very hard to do. I want things to return to how they used to be, and thanks to WoW I doubt that will ever happen.

The size of the MMO community was much smaller during the days of EQ. This was because it was hard for people to meet all the "requirements" of the game. A good enough computer, enough free time to dump into it, and an actual desire to play a game that hated you for everything you did. Because of all this, the people who were attracted to EQ were attracted to everything that game had to offer. If they played, it was fun. Simple, yes?

World of Warcraft threw all of that out the window. Almost any computer can run WoW, you don't have to sink hours of your day away to get something done, and it holds your hand the entire length of the game. This attracted everyone. Even people that weren't gamers were able to play this damn game, and it made Blizzard money - a lot of money. Video games are a way to make profit, and so the majority of the community gets to decide how the game plays, not the minority.

Unfortunately I'm part of the minority. I want a hard game that will challenge me, I want a huge world to be immersed in, and it just isn't happening lately. Each MMO that releases after WoW carries so many of its' traits it's saddening. Hand holding, no punishment for death, the damned quest system, the list could go on. WoW has killed off the veteran gamers, and let in the idiots of the world into my realm.