When UO and EQ appeared they tended to be played by people that had done some form of role playing in the past, be it DnD or something else.
This meant, at least in the early days, the journey to max level and "lewt" was as important as the end game. People enjoyed spending 3 hours getting from one side of the continent to the other as it was an adventure in itself as well as an achievement to finally get there.
People would take the time to develop and play "characters" with a background as part of the fun, something that is sadly missing more often than not with "toons" in most games now.
Unfortunately at the moment MMOs might as well ship with a /level 50 command to get people to max level as fast as possible. Frankly I don't get the attraction of racing past (and often missing) bucket loads of content to just rinse repeat the same old raids over and over but to each their own I suppose.
The days of reading the background and story to quests is long gone. Now it's about grabbing as many quests as possible in an area, have the quests highlighted on a map so you don't even have to read what it is you're supposed to be doing and go kill everything that moves collecting stuff to complete 3 quests at the same time.
If UO was launched now with up to date graphics etc it would fail on it behind. It's was a sandbox environment, open ended and no obvious way of "winning".
Shame really but I suspect the days of an MMO being a "role playing" game are gone, even on games with role playing servers.
Not necessarily a bad thing, just the way it is. As someone else said, MMOs are no longer online role playing worlds, they are FPS with career progression.
Bah humbug... kids of today....
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