You Don’t Remember Your Level 60, You Remember Getting Lost at Level 12

I can still feel it. Level 12, maybe 13, running south of Eastern Karana in EverQuest because someone in /ooc said there was a cool dungeon that way. There wasn’t. Or maybe there was and I never found it. What I found instead was a griffon that killed me in two hits and a corpse run that took forty minutes because I went the wrong direction twice. I remember that night better than anything I ever did at max level. Any max level. Any game.

You know what I don’t remember? Dinging 60. Hitting any cap, really. There’s screenshots somewhere, probably. I’m sure I was excited. But the memory is flat. Procedural. Like remembering that you drove to work on a Tuesday.

The getting-lost part, though. The stumbling into zones with mobs twenty levels above you, the realizing your map doesn’t cover this area, the seeing a player with gear you’ve never seen before just standing at a crossroads like some warning sign. That was the game. The whole game, honestly, compressed into moments where you were a small thing in a place that didn’t care about you.

Modern MMOs have engineered every single one of those moments out of existence.

Think about it. You log into a new MMO in 2026, and within ninety seconds there’s a breadcrumb trail, a zone-appropriate quest hub, a minimap with pulsing icons, and an invisible wall keeping you from walking into content that might hurt your feelings. The world is sliced into level-gated strips like a theme park queue. You follow the rope. You always follow the rope all the way to max level.

And sure, yeah, someone will say this is better design. More accessible. More respectful of your time. I get it. I even half-agree on paper. But something broke when we optimized out the chance of a player accidentally wandering into Kithicor Forest at night and learning, through pure terror, that the world had rules it never told you about.

The incentives are just totally misaligned now. Developers want you progressing along the content pipeline. Efficiently. Measurably. They want you hitting the endgame hamster wheel because that’s where the retention metrics live, where the battle pass kicks in, where the cash shop has all its best hooks. A player lost in the woods at level 12, dying to something they can’t identify, looking for a zone line that might not exist? That player is a churn risk. That player might quit. So you sand down every edge. You light every path. You make sure no one ever feels small.

And then you wonder why your world feels like a hallway.

I remember being afraid of boats in EverQuest. Afraid of boats! Because if you went AFK and missed your stop you could end up on another continent with no easy way back and mobs that would flatten you at the dock. It was stupid. It was inconvenient. It made the ocean feel real. It made geography matter. I talked to people on those boats because we were stuck together and bored and a little nervous.

The best moments I’ve ever had in this genre came from systems that were, by every modern metric, bad design. Incomplete maps. Dangerous travel. Zones you could walk into but absolutely should not. Death penalties that made your stomach drop. These aren’t nostalgia goggles. The friction created consequences, and consequences created stories, and stories are the only thing you actually remember five years later.

Go play Project 1999 (a classic EverQuest private server) for a week. Roll something squishy. Don’t read the wiki. Walk in a direction. Get completely, hopelessly lost. Die somewhere embarrassing. Ask a stranger for help.

You’ll remember it longer than whatever you did at endgame last month. I guarantee it.