What exactly do you have against Everquest, Darth? I no longer play myself, but I'm curious to know what you don't enjoy about it.
I don't have anything against it, it's just not for me.
I found it incredibly grindy and more like hard work than anything else. It's just the wrong kind of old-school for my part.
Then again, I didn't like games like DAoC or SWG much either.
I did enjoy UO because of its sandbox design, but ultimately I had similar problems with that one, too.
Just too much work for too little reward.
Essentially, I played games like Diablo before I played UO and EQ. Which skewed my perspective a little, I suppose.
To me, EQ/WoW/DAoC and all the others are really much the same thing as Diablo - in that they're about progressing your character and giving you a journey of the power fantasy in terms of growth and loot.
The difference is that Diablo can be exhausted in, say, a couple of days - where EQ wanted years of your time - with the journey of progression being drawn out to what I consider the extreme.
As Bilbo said, the traditional MMO of the late 90s and early 2000s was like butter spread over too much bread.
WoW changed things for the better in that way, as far as I'm concerned - even if I'm not really a fan of the themepark approach. But not enough by a long shot.
There's never been an MMO that was made "for me". Most of them have too many issues - and the only reason I play games like ESO is for the cooperative multiplayer aspect.
I would much, much rather play Skyrim or Fallout 4 in cooperative mode than ESO - but I can't have that, so…
But ESO is much, much closer to my preferences - because it's so full of content that I consider meaningful - as opposed to EQ, which just had a ton of work and enforced grouping to accomplish the simplest tasks. No quests to speak of, really. No interesting dungeons - but just wide open dungeons with minimal content. No voice acting, and so on. Just one huge and hollow timesink.
I never agreed with the basic design philosophy of the traditional DikuMUD MMO, like EverQuest - or even WoW.
WoW just took away a lot of the pointless grinding and hard work - and introduced very high quality content that was actually worth working towards, like the (for its time) superb zone design and instanced dungeons.