How come in the post WoW era no MMO has ever been even remotely as close as the old MMOs, like Tibia or Ultima, to fulfilling the promise of a shared, persistent, virtual world?
This leads to features being removed to sanitize the world and make it more manageable. The community governance - among the players and between the players and the owner - becomes worse. For the overwhelming majority, making a game more like a theme park is better.
That said, I think 2nd life is still going and mostly delivering this?
It's not nothing, in fact it's quite an achievement to have survived so long as a PVP MMO, but it's never going to take over the world. People who want that very particular blend of nothing happening interspersed by moments of sheer terror and the risk of losing something you've sunk a lot of time/money into know where it is.
I mean, of course it shares certain elements, but it's not a lot of RPG (except parts of the character progression) and just not "fantasy + walking around" makes it a non-starter for a huge part of the classical MMO player base.
In “recent” years I played Darkfall Online and Mortal Online which are very rooted in the early days of persistant virtual world ala UO but sadly they both failed to keep an healthy population.
Have you tried Mortal Online 2? the game just came out and is a true successor to UO in many ways, sadly they had massive problems scaling the game so they had to mirror the main persistent world and added 4 instances of the main world to cope with the demand. The vision is to have a one big persistent world with no instance/loading screen and keep adding more and more continents to spread out the population.
If you liked playing UO I recommend you check it out, its a unique gaming experience which may sadly go extinct in the future!
Tibia and Ultima were brutal games that can't really compete in the sea of choices people have in modern gaming. Just look how many games reduce any sort of grindy or hardcore mechanics they had in an attempt to appeal to a wider, modern audience instead of just the few people who want and have time for a more hardcore experience.
I saw an interview with one of the high level people involved in the modern Pokemon games who said as much when asked about the complaints of the modern Pokemon games being easier and less grindy and less complicated.
Should modern MMOs always cater to a wider audience than a smaller one? Well, just imagine you were the one bankrolling such an expensive, risky project.
I think it's really interesting to look back at UO's design from a modern perspective. The designers have stated over, and over again[0][1] how absolutely wrong their predictions of player behaviour ended up being. It was such an ambitious, pure, and innocent idea. Its gameplay style may not have stood the test of time, however it was undoubtedly an important learning experience for game design as a whole. I'm tempted to say its a shame that games like UO are a thing of the past. However when I look back at my time playing it, the thing that sticks out the most is how much time and effort was spent just avoiding abuse.
[0] https://www.raphkoster.com/tag/uo/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20050214050928/http://looter.4t....