Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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Wow, ok, I'm out. This sounds like a casual bitchboy, drooling zoomer game. Where's the hardcore?!
I get the sentiment, the sense of danger and discovery in those old zones felt incredible at the time. But a lot of what people remember as "risk vs reward" was really inconvenience vs patience. The tension came less from meaningful stakes and more from logistics: time sinks, corpse runs, and arbitrary gating that punished the wrong things. But none of it was the result of deep systems. They were the result of lack of systems.
Those late-night Fear raids, or saving someone's corpse in Sebilis wasn't designed. It was emergent, born from a lack of modern systems and the sheer novelty of being online together. That kind of social alchemy was lightning in a bottle and it can't just be recreated by reintroducing tedium and calling it "risk."
Modern games can and should have risk and consequence, but the design has to be intentional. That's why Souls games are pretty much the blueprint in the "modern" gaming era for games that have real stakes, but they balance that risk with clarity, learning, and iteration, not by forcing you to spend 40 minutes running back to your body. That's the difference between challenge and friction for friction's sake.
And yeah, even Souls games have their own bits of "friction for friction’s sake." The difference is that the rest of their design is so tight that it fades into the background. With M&M, friction is the design. There's no rhythm, no lesson, just a checklist of outdated pain points dressed up as "old-school charm."
“Sure, it’s tedious, but hey, remember when we were fifteen and this was all new, just like Everquest!?”. At this point I think more of you are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome than nostalgia.
