Many of these mechanics weren't in there during alpha/beta/launch, but came shortly after. But the essential part that was always in there is 'you will die, and get looted' which never happens in modern games.
In the MMORPG area there is today Darkfall which is kind of a spiritual successor to UO in many regards (full loot, anyone can kill you outside cities and so on) but in first and third person 3D. The original game had its issues though and is closed down since mid November because of the release of the now much hyped sequel Darkfall: Unholy Wars (a.k.a Darkfall 2.0), coincidentally coming out on Wednesday next week. It was also greentlit on steam in record time (like within 24h) so there's definitely craving for games like this out there.
Thank you. I was unaware of this. Darkfall did indeed conceptually pick up UO, but the times I tried it it was absolutely terrible (buggy, empty feeling world, terrible launch management by the developer/publisher) and I kinda wish it hadn't used the first person perspective. A neat idea- just terribly implementation by a pretty bad company.
As a game developer, I'd explain this as follows: the whole gaming industry has been following the same path towards casualness. Arrows in FPS games telling you where to go, auto adjusting difficulty, forgiving aiming, tons of quick save checkpoints, the list goes on.
The majority of players prefer these be in place - otherwise, why keep doing it? But there's still a significant segment of the market that pines for the day when games really kicked you in the ass.
So enter DayZ, and some psycho player with an Axe chases you while playing a creepy loop of a seven year old girl singing, and exploits bugs to kill you completely unfairly, there's a small but significant number of players that will fall in love with a game like that.
But you're not going to convert even a large share of Black Ops 2 players with that experience. It would be like making every car an Ariel Atom.
I'm interested in how the hardcore-casual Black Ops 2 market (if we can call it that) was created. It didn't seem by mistake. I remember essentially seeing its rise around the release of the Xbox and Halo. Suddenly real multiplayer FPS gaming was available on a console, but lots of stuff changed too. It wasn't the multiplayer of QuakeWorld. It was something different.
On the other hand, a lot of games now are large and diverse with hours worth of content/art, instead of 5 minutes of content constant replayed for hours until the button patterns are memorized.
Gran Turismo (first version, on Playstation one) was hard. It was good, but it was hard.
Later versions (GT4 especially) were much easier, with many more races and tracks and cars. But is it more fun? Is it fun for advanced players to grind through easy races? (even with weird features to increase difficulty and earnings from races?)
DayZ, yes. The problem however is that its so unbalanced that it destroys the game for so many. I've played it a reasonable amount and actually uninstalled it for now. Some day. Just not now.
Minecraft, no. The majority of Minecraft players have actually never been ganked. It happens, but it isn't a critical part of the game. I've played 50+ hours of Minecraft MP and never been ganked. Fell in lava, but never ganked.
It happens in Eve. Undocking in Eve is permission to be destroyed. One of the first things you learn in Eve is to not fly a ship you can't afford to lose.
Good to know. I've tried Eve a few times but never got past the introduction tutorials really. It always seemed conceptually amazing, and also really deep (or overly complex, depending how you look at it).
