(Saw this question asked on another popular link aggregation website and it got me thinking)
If you could play one game for the first time all over again, what would you choose? This might be because you want to do it all again, or because you don't think you got enough out of it the first time. It could be experiencing the game exactly as you were back then, or experiencing a game with what you know now.
For me, it's Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, experienced exactly as I was back in 1991.
Nothing comes close to how jaw-droppingly amazed I was by that opening sequence. The epic orchestral score, the cinematic rainstorm, creeping around in the dark... it was a generational leap above anything I'd played on 8-bit computers and consoles, and even the Megadrive. I'd love to play it again without thirty plus years of Nintendo/Zelda knowledge, or without knowing about the dark world.
I was just thinking that, but you'd have to rewind the whole world, not just your own experiences.
What made WoW amazing at the beginning was that it was new to everyone, not just you. MMOs in general were new. The Internet was relatively new. People didn't know about data mining, and those who did weren't used to being able to share everything they knew with every other player out there. Also, sharing video was brand new. YouTube itself launched in 2005, and Justin.tv (which became Twitch in 2011) would only launch in 2007. Theorycrafting didn't really exist, so people just relied on their experiences and went with the bigger numbers, or sometimes ignored the numbers and went with the cooler looking weapon.
So, you were left with figuring out a lot of stuff on your own. Realm firsts were a big deal because it was mostly people on your own realm you interacted with, and you got to know them, and if another realm had done something first, you might not even have heard about it. If your realm had a certain way of handling a PvE fight, or a strategy for a certain battleground, it might just be a quirk of your realm. There was just a lot less information available outside the game, and so you had to figure things out inside the game.
A friend of mine (hunter, naturally) didn't know about equipping new gear until he hit level 30 or so. There was no armory page to inspect him, no gear score, no typical DPS expectations for a level 30 toon. It took one of us randomly right-clicking on his dude when he was next to us to notice all his gear was greys, and to ask him about it in voice chat (Teamspeak? Roger Wilco?) to find out he'd just been stuffing his new greens in his bag and forgetting about them.
Now, people just don't play MMOs the same way. Devs know that everything they add will be datamined and everyone will know the new stuff as soon as it's available in the game. There's one well known strategy for every boss. There's one well known talent build. If you choose to go in and face a raid boss blind, it's because you chose to do that, and chose not to watch the hours and hours of boss kill videos there are from the competitive guilds that killed the bosses in beta.
What about Everquest back in 99. Man that was a game especially on the pvp servers.
I didn't play it, so I don't know, but I assume it's the same. The only way to really play it again like it was then would be to have everyone else forget everything they've learned about MMOs for the last 24 years.
Not the same. Everquest was less "user friendly" and left you with way more stuff to figure out and / or using online resources, and printed(!) maps in the first years. Also, a lot of raid content that was absolutely not 2-3 groupable when it came out - talk about coordinating 40+ players. Then, quite unforgiving in terms of corpse runs, and originally no instanced content. It was hard(!) and we loved it for that.
My choice, but PvE ;) I only started in 2001 post Velious, but wow that game has taken me for a ride - and I have made lifelong friends through it and seen places (London, Nottingham, Copenhagen) thanks to it.
I played on Rallos Zek where if someone is annoying you can stick a pointy stick in em, steal the pants off the body (1 item loot on kill) and watch them run off in a loin cloth. I met my wife just after the turn of the millennium. We lived on opposite sides of the country at the time. We got married in game and then later in real life and still are.
Pvp may SEEM harsh but it was a lot of fun. I still remember going to war with an entire guild spending nearly 24 hours running into a dangerous area sniper style and then exiting and cycling in for another run. I ended up dueling their guild leader and barely losing. Their entire guild had a party on my corpse. When I woke up it was still going on.
Not to mention you'd need to give me all that free time back.