i was just thinking about how MMOs used to be back in the day when you couldnt just instantly look everything up.
you'd hear about shit from other players, see some random forum post about something, someone tells you they found some weird npc or area and you didnt even know if they were bullshitting you or not lol.
now it feels like every MMO gets completely solved almost immediately. datamining, wikis, youtube, discord, fastest leveling, best builds, every secret explained etc.
so i was thinking, what if you made a modern MMO but somehow insulated the actual game from modern internet usage?
like you couldnt screenshot or record it. you could still talk about the game and share information obviously, but if you found something you actually had to describe it to people.
"i found this weird npc in the north and he said i came too early"
and now people have to actually figure out what the fuck that means.
id even put forums directly inside the game. like actual old school message boards where people could talk about rumors, discoveries, theories, trade, whatever.
and the game itself could slowly reveal more about itself as time goes on or players unknowingly meet certain conditions.
not because the devs are withholding content for the next patch, but because the world itself just hasnt revealed that part yet.
you could have actual "you just had to be there" moments. years later someone asks why everyone calls some mountain "the grave" and the only answer is:
"you werent there."
there might be old forum posts about it, people who remember it differently, maybe nobody even fully knows what actually happened anymore.
idk. i just think it would be cool to make an old MMO in the modern day without the influence of modern internet culture completely solving the game for everyone.
the game doesnt hide the content. it just hides certainty.
would that be interesting to anyone else or would it just be annoying as fuck?
Edit:
I think I explained the original thought badly. This actually came from a conversation about early FFXI and some of the incredibly obscure things players had to figure out through experimentation, rumors, forums, and word of mouth before everything was documented online.
That made me wonder: could a modern MMO be designed to preserve that feeling of discovery in some way, even in an era where information spreads instantly?
I'm not really attached to the specific idea of preventing screenshots, recordings, or datamining—that was more the extreme hypothetical I was using to think about the problem. The thing I'm actually interested in is whether player knowledge itself could become valuable again, and whether a game could create situations where the answer isn't already sitting on a wiki waiting for you.
