Shawn’s spelled out his vision ad nauseum on his streams, but yea the website is more murky about it . What Shawn has said repeatedly about what his vision means
- slow progress (accomplished easily enough with combat time and xp gain, but also with less dull mechanics including long and in my opinion, interesting quests and pursuit of gear and access keys and special spells that prolong the process. It’s not the same as a lineage style endless grind, is best way I can summarize)
- an emphasis on the leveling experience and not just a flat rush to endgame. Even though degenerates like me will still try to rush, you will get stomped if you don’t spend a bit of extra time trying to equip yourself a bit as you level, esp after lvl 30ish. This also means a disproportionate amount of low level content. I personally don’t like this but I have gotten a lot of pushback on this and it is their vision, so I appreciate them sticking to their guns. You could make 15 characters and the leveling experience will be new every time easily- that’s how much content there is! I know it sounds unbelievableThere’s still a lot at the high end too so I’m good.
- real danger. This just means dying sucks and slows you down, basically. This one I’m mixed about. It ends up feeling like an annoyance or frustration sometimes as you end up just kinda sittin around waiting for a drag or rez, but there will be some larpy stories out there about some high level helping some lowbie getting his corpse and how it enriched the gameplay experience or some crap. But either way there is a real consequence to death and it makes exploration more interesting,
as you can’t just Leroy everywhere most of the time.
Limited raiding - this is looking to be true but it’s honestly stil more endgame content than we are generally used to in MMOs these days. They save a lot of time by not really polishing or qa’ing anything or having much in the way of complex encounter design or visual flairs. So even with their small team they can pump out hp sponges to beat on with your squad. I honestly don’t mind, because the exploration aspect is such a huge part of it and progress is so glacial, that the simplicity of the encounters isn’t necessarily a glaring negative. For example even tho raiding is limited, there’s going to be atleast two raid zones before 1.0, one is an expedition and one is a raid zone of fallen watch- both will be very large.
They are doing a great job meeting those vision points Shawn talks about.
what Shawn doesn’t talk about as much, and which IS the big problem in this game, is combat mechanics and class design, and i think for long term survival he will need to hire an experienced guy to salvage that for him
I don't think anyone is arguing that Shawn hasn't
talked about his vision. The problem is that "I've explained my vision on streams" and "the game has a clearly articulated design philosophy that extends beyond nostalgia" aren't the same thing.
A lot of what you're describing is essentially a list of characteristics
associated with old-school MMOs: slow progression, dangerous death, lots of leveling content, limited raiding, exploration, keys, rare gear, etc. That's a vision in the loosest sense of the word. What I'm questioning is whether those things actually constitute a coherent design philosophy for a modern MMO, or whether they're largely an attempt to recreate the
feeling of playing EQ 25 years ago. And that's an important distinction.
EQ wasn't some brilliantly designed game that everyone eventually figured out was the pinnacle of MMO design - which is exactly why WoW ate its lunch when it released. It was an incredibly
important game that arrived at a
very specific point in technological and cultural history. The internet was still in its infancy, online gaming was relatively novel, persistent virtual worlds were new, and there simply wasn't an established template for what an MMO was supposed to be. That context mattered enormously. But that doesn't make EQ at its core an inherently
good game.
The things people remember fondly about EQ weren't necessarily good design. They were novel and unfamiliar. They were things we'd never experienced before. Spending an hour traveling somewhere felt like an adventure because the entire concept of a persistent online world was an adventure. Having almost no information available about the game made discovering something incredibly mundane feel like uncovering a secret. Waiting around for a group wasn't necessarily "meaningful social gameplay" - sometimes it was just waiting around because the technology, design, and conventions of the genre hadn't evolved yet.
EQ caught fire because it was the right product at the right time. That doesn't mean it wasn't influential or enjoyable, but influence and
good design aren't the same thing - and this is where I think a lot of the old-school MMO crowd gets stuck in the mud.
You can't simply take the characteristics people remember from 1999, reproduce them in 2026, and assume you'll recreate the circumstances that made people love them in the first place. We're not the same players anymore. The genre isn't the same. The internet isn't the same. We've spent 25+ years playing MMOs and other games and have developed expectations about combat, progression, accessibility, encounter design, class mechanics, UI, information, and player agency.
You can absolutely make a modern MMO with slow progression. You can make death matter. You can emphasize exploration and leveling instead of treating leveling as a 40-hour tutorial for the "real" game. Those aren't inherently bad ideas. But the whole, "EQ did it, therefore it must be good" isn't a design philosophy. And that's ultimately my concern with MnM. I don't see enough evidence that they're taking the lessons of old-school MMOs and applying them to a modern game (or in most cases - they're taking the WRONG lessons such as the vision issues). I see a lot of effort being put into recreating the
conditions of old-school MMOs and trusting nostalgia to bridge the gap. That's a dangerous bet.
The irony is that a lot of the people who say "you just don't understand the vision" are themselves arguing almost entirely from nostalgia. "It was like this in EQ." "That's how old MMOs worked." "Shawn has said he wants it to feel like this." Okay - but
why? What does that mechanic accomplish? What player behavior does it encourage? What problem does it solve? What does it add to the game that couldn't be accomplished in a less tedious way? Those are the questions that actually matter. And those are the questions and debates nobody seems willing to have. It's all just, "DON'T YOU REMEMER EQ....MAN?!?!".
"We're recreating old-school MMO design" isn't enough to make a successful MMO in 2026. The market is littered with games that successfully recreated pieces of older MMOs and still failed to build a compelling long-term experience. You can't spend the entire development process trying to make 40-year-old players feel 16 again and then be surprised when the nostalgia wears off. At some point the game has to stand on its own.
And ironically, the fact that they're apparently doing a good job with Shawn's stated vision makes the stuff they
aren't talking about even more important. Slow progression, danger, exploration, limited raiding, etc. are all broad philosophical choices. But combat, class design, encounter design, progression systems, economy, and the moment-to-moment gameplay are what players actually spend thousands of hours interacting with. Not 400 x 400 mile zones and how long it takes to level from 39-40. EQ had fucking massive zones too. How many hours did you spend in West Karana? Or Everfrost? You didn't. You frustratingly passed through them on the way to the stuff that actually mattered.
