Well, like great sex, logging into a virtual world is never as good as the first time you did it. So it is with MMORPGs. What hooked me the first time was something that will never be repeatable - a true sense of the new and unexplored.
However, that doesn't mean that a game can't come close to simulating the experience. Here are a few things I recall during my first steps in EQ2 (which was my first online world) --
1. Helpful players. When I stepped off the boat and into Graystone Yard, someone with a pink name was using the /say channel to toss out helpful advice. I later learned that a pink name simply meant the player was in RP-mode. At the time, I had no idea. I thought it was perhaps a paid employee; the point, though, is that it was an actual person inhabiting the character and acting within the confines of the virtual world. That's pretty powerful, to me, and it hones in on the idea of what these games are all about (aside from the adventuring, of course.)
2. A true sense of achievment and progression. I remember how excited I was to earn my citizenship; to find and settle into my home as a refuge, to venture into my Oakmyst Forest and help out the wardens wandering by, to earn my class, and then subclass through a series of quests that helped me understand why the heck I was doing any of it, in the first place. There was no big flashy pop-up dopamine hit -- just the usual Ding and the trumpet reserved for Hallmark and Heritage quest completion. I don't view metrics as very meaningful - seeing that I've completed X number of quests, or had a hit that landed for X damage, etc. doesn't do it for me. Being given a real sense of purpose and growth, through a combination of storytelling and meaningful pathways, that means something.
3. I am not all-powerful. There was a quest you could receive around level 18 or so, just as you might begin to feel pretty brave and big in the world. The NPC treated you like dirt. (She's still there, in Windstalker Village, if you want to see her.) She called you out for your patchwork armor, your rusted weapons, your dirty brown clothes. I loved it. It made me feel like I still had so much more to work toward (ahem, Prismatics, Draconic, Fire and Ice.) I didn't wield some giant shiny sword twice my size or wear perfectly clean and shiny plate mail. No. It was pieced and cobbled together from the various mobs and quests I had thus far managed to take down. I had been knocked unconscious 300 times. I sucked. I was no one. And I loved it, because when I DID win an awesome piece of gear, a master upgrade, or make it all the way to the bottom of Runnyeye (not easy to do in January 2005) -- then I DID feel really powerful, because I did it with shite-all to work with - but I DID it.
4. Pretty scenery. Obviously. Adventuring would be no fun without epic mountains, dark catacombs, terrible creatures, and friendly NPCs in distress because they can't manage to fetch the book 25 feet away, or kill that one rat in their cellar.
;)
