Absolutely - for me it’s not about making games “scary”, it’s about having “extreme reward/extreme punishment” mechanics which change players behaviors in interesting ways. But specifically, punishing unrealistic behaviours when you are afk and your character is in a scary forest, or when you are in a deadly desert choosing emojis in the chat
Oh, of course in case of two examples I made, there are safe areas, stuff to do if you want to live in peace, etc. In Ultima, only you could unlock the door of your own house so hiding inside would work. And inside towns you could call npc quards (so everyone would have it as a shortcut).
In Eve there are many protected systems, it’s just getting stuff from nullsec (lawless/unowned) systems could be more lucrative, so you learn to take your risks.
I know it’s not always that way - as I see from Rust memes, everyone is just chaotically running around killing new players - but maybe it doesn’t show the real picture
I didn’t say you have to grind. This is exactly what I mean, tou would start thinking differently. You would take someone with you (hire a bodyguard? friends from yesterday’s pve stuff? guild/corporation friends?)
And for why I have to present my opinion - well, you do present yours. People present opinions all the time. Maybe you’re a child, I don’t know - you decided to read something “between the lines”, but were there anything like that, or are you just insecure?
The games with death like that are much better, because they force players to care. From what I played, in Eve online you would really think before doing something stupid, because player killers would wreck your ship without caring that you grinded for 2 months to buy it.
Same was a thousand years ago in Ultima Online where you could get ganked and eaten by an ork bandit. That led to me taking a chance and run through a forest naked, because I had a house deed in my pocket, and I didn’t want to look like an interesting target. It ended up in a bandit chitchatting with me and letting me go with the words: “I wouldn’t walk around in these parts” - yeah, no shit.
Great experiences!
It’s just at some point gamedevs started catering to middle-school kids who would buy in-game stuff with their mom’s card and got upset when it wat taken from them.
Edit: typo (shop/ship)
I don’t understand why can’t they put all the software to different torrent trackers. There are enthusiast seeders who will keep distributing stuff
The market did change in the end of 90s-start of 2000s - before, games were mostly done for “nerds with PCs”, because usually only well-off adults had something decent at home. Then, mass adoption of PCs, PS3and XBox, led to age of an average gamer drop to a teenager, for the first time in history. So many games were, in general, “dumbed down”. Now we see a great picture of market coming back, and there is a shitton of everything engineering/economics.. I’m not saying that middle schoolers don’t deserve to play games - they do, and I did. It’s just, for example, WoW’s “account bound” and “char bound” stuff wasn’t a good thing, but it then became a standard, and started an age of microtransactions (will you argue itcs a bad thing?)