N - Nostalgia

We all like to look back and marvel at how much fun we used to have.... but was it really that fun?

I appreciate a lot of the things that they have done to gaming.  One of the things that helped me drift away from Tribes and into EverQuest was the fact that no matter how much I played Tribes, I never had anything to show for it.  Sure, I was a better player, but I didn't have something to hold on to.  In EverQuest, like most MMOs, the time that I invested directly related to how much "stuff" I had.  Whether it was tradeskills, experience, progress in a random collection quest.  Who cared?  You were getting stuff and doing things that would allow you to progress forward.  I hoped beyond hope that they would implement a system that rewarded you for those 10 hour power gaming sessions and those endless nights fragging away.

Now this is a reality.  Most modern FPS games give you levels or ranks and as you climb the ladder and get more kills with a certain weapon or overall you get more "stuff".  You get experience, you unlock weapons, you get cool addons for your guns.  You get STUFF!  It's awesome.  However, there is a very negative side to this.  There is rarely a cap on these kinds of things.  If you don't have the time to dedicate those 10 hour, neverending super awesome killfests... then you lose.  There are no tiered or ranked servers where you won't get asspounded to death.  You're just fucked.  And that isn't fun.  The system is flawed and as much as I wanted it, I wish it could have been done another way.

I sometimes look back on the older MMO games or even the beginning of some of the current ones and think about how hardcore they were or how they had some sort of property that made them somehow better.  I'm pretty sure that I'm wrong.  EQ wasn't fun.  Grinding mobs endless for hours wasn't fun.  Vanilla WoW had a great community and some very fun old school places, but it wasn't as fun or innovative as WoW is currently.  A lot of the old MMO games were pretty shitty, honestly.  Some of the games that have been out for 3+ years now haven't even aged that well.  Part of this is because Blizzard is so good at putting everything together and continuing WoW as not just a game or an experience, but as it's own brand.

Not everything from "back in the day" was good.  A lot of it was a whole lot of fun and looking back we just see all the good times we had.  I don't know why we forget all the great times that we are still having with gaming.