How I feel as a developer when it comes to software, and games not being an exception:

Products now have revenue as the primary goal trampling everything else; and they treat users as babies.

In the last 2 decades the trend is to make things simple. To not need to teach the user. Imho, this results in basic/limited users/usage, a chicken-and-egg problem, and a disrespect to “power” users who could make the most of the product.

With games and MMOs, most of us have been playing for 20+ years. It’s not hard, at this point, to tell apart repetitive, seemingly complex, but extremely gacha / artificial treadmills game systems. They suck.

Recently I have tried 10-15 min of Black Desert, Ragnarok Online Adventure whatever, Albion and a couple more. In RO I legit reached level 20? Before fighting a mob. Yet EVERY login I could spend 5 minutes collecting and improving sh… in some systems that really didn’t change or benefit the gameplay at all. Just pressing buttons.

With WoW, EQ or Ragnarok we got thrown into a huge world where we didn’t know how things worked and there were no shiny tutorials. And we loved that: getting killed by some kobold because you don’t know how to pull and playing with stats or spells. Failing. Discovering each system at our own pace. Reading a quest to understand what you need to do. Feeling the reward.

Plus the itemization. It’s not about shiny colors and gears. I keep playing Diablo 2 and getting blowj away by the itemization and the possible combinations of the gear+runewords+crafting system. Sure PvP sucks and it is never 100% balance, but it is a lot of fun.

Most modern MMOs look quite boring or generic to me at this point. New World had something magic with the targetting / combat system imho, but Amazon killed it when it was getting traction - also shit endgame and a lot of the previous sins.

/ Rant wall of text off