Yeah I know daybreak basically shut down the private server version of this before releasing their own but at least the P99 devs got paid to do it I guess.
First of all I am not playing this for nostalgia, I have never played EverQuest before but have always been curious and turned away at the thought of needing a group to do basically anything. When I heard this game allowed for solo playing everything including raids I had to jump in.
So one thing this game does great is eliminate the feeling of fomo i get with anything WoW derivative due to the fact that its a bunch of tickbox content and I can barely survive open world games let alone an MMO with thousands of boxes to tick. In EverQuest you aren’t really given a goal any grander than hit max level and get gear, the world is then the sandbox in which you can choose how to achieve such a goal with the idea being to have fun doing it.
I went with a warrior paladin to start, i always play human warrior cos I like to be boring and self healing sounded like a nifty bonus. The goal is to add wizard as my third class with the idea being I can have buffs, healing, casting and tanking all covered as a classic party setup.
I’ve spent around 25 hours in the game so far levelling very slowly, dying a lot, completing quests, grinding dungeons and rep and honestly the fact that there’s no exclamation marks anywhere, no real need for be anywhere other than “i fancy doing this today” has been so very refreshing. And the thing I learned was that an MMO where nobody is forced to play together is actually the exact environment which spurns jolly cooperation. I have had players buff me, trade me loads of gear and money for no reason at all or help me in dungeons which arent instanced unless you choose them to be. General chat is pleasant with people mostly helping each other with the game or discussing experiences. It made me feel like I was playing runescape for the first time back in 2008, chatting to people while mining or just picking some random f2p quest to do.
Like everything blizzard does which is kill entire genres it appears they also killed the mmo by making something tailored entirely towards playing with toxic horrid people for number go up gear progression that felt like a job, oh no i didnt accept the hours of my zero hour contract guild job now ill be on the bench forever. Not that I play wow anymore other than my azerothcore server with bots so I can at least enjoy the lore and dungeons at my own pace without being rushed.
So it seems the best mmo isnt what i said before where the world is static and unchanging but instead one where all content is equal and cooperation is optional for the enjoyment of cooperation, not because half the games content is locked behind interacting with gamer chuds.
Oh and the main joy is it feels like me vs the game. Build crafting at its finest with hundreds of combinations to beat the content, and the content doesn’t seem too easy you have to actually think about your build a little to succeed and there definitely are some poor choices to be made.
Something has certainly made the medium more toxic across the board. Communication on the internet is kind of hitting a low spot culturally speaking in my experience. I know some people attribute that to dead internet theory, but people are literally calling for people to just unplug now.
I'm open to it being something else, but I really do think there is a kind of cultural noncommunicative wave that we're seeing roll out in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Some people are more open to communication, but most of that is in older things (like OSRS and Everquest) where people are more prone to chat via text.
I can't speak to the experience in Arc Raiders, but I can speak to a similar experience in Fallout 76, where there is proximity voice chat. That game is like a ghost town despite its player count having gone up, that community has just opted out from using voice chat, unlike how it used to be in earlier days. I would assume that Arc Raiders will eventually go the same way.
I do agree that some games have made people be the barrier to progress, and your statement on players hating the interaction. Moderation being handed over to automation is one of the worst things I have ever seen happen in games and certainly hasn't helped. But I do think that moderation itself can turn into something sinister, like what we have seen Reddit become.
I don't really have any answers or hard data to back up my assertions, but it has become hard for me to ignore it at this point. I feel like we have crested the hill and are on the way down now.