I continue to be amazed to this day at the depth of content and immersive environment that Everquest has. To your point most games are captivating for days or weeks, rarely a game is captivating for months, EQ is the only game I've ever seen that is captivating for years. To the point where there is internal conflict of if you should engage knowing the time sink it will inevitably become (by choice/desire). With that said I never migrated to WoW, I walked away from intense gaming for a couple of decades after my first EQ live stint.
The flip side to that is that in order to achieve that level of depth a game almost inherintly has to be very unfriendly to new comers. Part of the beauty of EQ is that there is so much content in the game that requires deep exploration to discover (think back to how it was to experience things for the first time back in 1999, not the current gamestate where there is a veritable encyclopedia britannica worth of EQ specific info available). I know I have to consult the wiki multiple times per day to get information to make game play effecient, and that's 26 years later! Most things that you can achieve are not obvious or intuitive and are often learned through shared knowledge, not individual effort.
The problem is there is so much competition for eyeballs and as time goes on people become more and more conditioned to instant gratification and shorter form content (shorter attention spans). These two forces compete as games that have a large barrier to entry are likely to turn off the vast majority of potential player bases. And games that require large time commitments, especially real-time gameplay where you can't hit a pause button is severly limiting the target audience.
Put all that together and you realize that games like EQ have the largest investment in development and really only capture a neiche market. Highest cost for lowest return isn't a model that a for profit business finds ideal. Even the development of EQ itself was effectively cancelled multiple times and barely saw the light of day (see pantheon for a more modern version of the challenges of getting a game like this to market).
One example I could think of is Diablo 4 (I only played the beta than found P99 while waiting for full release and never went back). I thought they did a great job of taking what historically has been a single player game and adding in sprinkles of MMO content like world bosses and the ability to interact with players in the world, however, you have to balance that as for little gain you now eliminate any ability to play the game offline.
GTA V is probably a good example too where a historically single player game now has a robust community of content creators that have put together online roleplaying servers that have transformed the game world into new and exciting content.
It seems the future is really focused around a low barrier to entry, hybrid type of game play that pulls in elements from the MMO legends of the past while focusing on a more casual and expanded player base. I also have always thought that offer the ability for users to create custom content is one of the simplest things a developer can do to give their game a lot more legs. Blizzard did a great job with this early on in the warcraft and starcraft series where a fairly limited single player scenario based gameplay expanded into so much more with custom maps and online competition.
And that's all from the perspective of a PC gamer which is a dying artform in itself. More and more everything is being developed for mobile as younger and younger generations may live in a world of never having/needing a PC.
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