You should try playing some older MMOs: EVE, Anarchy Online, Ultima Online, Runescape. All stuff fundamentally untouched by the WoW design - and they are much better for it IMO. When I've played these games, even 20 years on, I am completely stunned. Makes me realize how psychologically kneecapped we are by WoW.
No love for EverQuest? Any MMO I've played since hasn't held a candle to the world design and enduring sense of mystery and wonder EverQuest was able to spark in my fragile little boyhood heart.
I went back to play in a "static" group on the old school Project 1994 servers a couple years ago. Buncha strangers agreeing to meet online a couple times a week to play, drink some fancy beers and shoot the shit. No wonder lost. That thing is still a place of glory.
WoW was the beginning of the end for the genre, in my opinion. Everything about it was smoothed over in all the wrong places. The art design and worldbuilding were just not good, especially when you consider the lore was a hobbled together mess of inheritance. The Colosseum legionnaires of the Iksar in their jungle and swamped wilds or the truly monstrous trolls selling dwarf bits that could have been pulled straight from some Nordic fairytales: that's some love of the grim imagination.
I've spent a lot of time involved in the EVE space, I was on the DUST 514 version of the CSM, and I've participated in a couple of wars, even though I am very bad at Internet spaceships. Sometimes I wish EVE was just a tiny bit more like WoW... I wish the environment felt more varied than it does today. It really solely differentiates the game over time and area by player politics. Which is definitely fun, but almost in spite of the game, rather than because of it. ;)
(Other games I spent time on, which yes, are newer than WoW: I really enjoyed the moment to moment feel of playing WildStar and Black Desert Online (largely because they replaced casting/cooldowns/calculated damage values with movement and combos), but of course, RIP the first one, and the second one is macrotransactioned to heck, my wallet couldn't take it. SWTOR's early storyline content is insanely well-done, but unfortunately, once you graduate out of it, it literally is exactly the same game as WoW.)
eve online's formula is... controversial. the significant IRL time grind (doesn't necessarily need to be actively played, your skills train even when offline like an idle simulator...) was always a controversial game design point since it meant newer players were permanently less skilled than older players, they could never catch up... but CCP made it so you could just pay to get higher skill points, which isn't great either.
dust failed and it seems like CCP pivoted towards trying to monetize EVE Online harder. And it was already a fairly heavily monetized game (real-money trading was sanctioned even 15 years ago, the game basically required multiple accounts for high-level play, etc)
Doing the FPS + MMO integration was a risky step, but they get points for trying because that was pretty creative back in its time.
Like walking-in-stations, (now in Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous) they seem to be pioneers back in the day but didn't get much credit for it because the execution was so important.
I'm fine with EVE having pay-for-skill points now because you were always able to buy accounts and that was actually scam-free. You'd need to buy a lot of PLEX back then to pay for one with real money though.
I feel like CCP's vision is always ten times that of its capability. Walking in Stations would've been achievable for a larger, more funded studio. But CCP has never been able to put out something on that scope. (EVE itself is simple, in comparison to WiS, from a game development standpoint, and that took over a decade to get where it is.)
I logged into Ultima Online recently and played a bit. Still fun, though the community is a lot smaller now. It is a shame that Origin took so long to try to fix the nonconsensual PvP and other issues (then split the worlds instead of just doing consensual flags), which resulted in lots of people leaving. They really did a very impressive thing with UO, and the original graphics still beat the cartoonish 3D stuff they added later. Again, goes to show that a solid foundation can endure for a long time. Lots of good memories, friends, and immersive play.
