Garriot talks about this in the documentary "Get Lamp!", which is about the history adventure games. He talks about the challenges of maintaining a huge MMO, especially how they were broadsided by the challenges of managing an economy because everyone was so greedy. He mentions how the admins came to work one day to find that players had killed every living thing on the planet and could no longer generate income. Kinda like a miniature "dark forest" theory.
Computer games work best with numbers, so RPGs end up being about numbers. So, naturally, people try to min-max because 1) it's something to do 2) you progress that way 3) you can show off to others. Maybe a child would be hesitant to kill a video game creature, but it seems like, since pretty much every video game lets you do violent things, that taboo against violence is erased very quickly. So, all these combine to, what looks like to people who don't play games, a propensity to kill en masse.
It's a shadow of the same situation one encounters in an abbatoir. Maybe killing the first few animals makes you feel terrible, but you get out of it quickly. The human ability to adapt to any circumstance has this disturbing side to it, too.
Which is ironic given the nature of U4 and it's moral system. That game REALLY floored me the summer I spent playing it (literally the entire summer, it was before I was old enough to get a job).
> RPGs end up being about numbers.
For me, this was the final, sad conclusion to computer-based RPGs after nearly 40 years playing them.
In tabletop D&D, a +1 sword is a rarity, and +2 is super special; magic users focused more on creativity because the cost to the caster for Lvl9 spells (if you ever got there, which was never in real games) was prohibitive to use them on a regular basis (memorization, physical aging). In fact, the level tables in AD&D stopped around 10 or 12 I think because that much XP simply didn't happen. Computer RPGs turned it all into numbers games, as you can see in WoW where the top tier armor today has stats like +30,000 attribute, when in the first release, top T3 geat from C'thon was like, +50 key attribute per piece.
A lower variance in peak skills/weapons is a good way to go. Then, you could feasibly have tons of weapon types, with each player picking the type they like. I, personally, have always been partial to the rogue archetype, especially dual-wielding fast weapons. I'd love to play that way. But in some games, like Path of Exile for most of its existence, it's just not in the meta. I'd love to be competitive, even 5-10% below the top tier, if my favorite playstyle was possible. In PoE, you'd be like at 20% of the best builds if you played that way.
Plus, in DnD you have a lot more scope for actually creatively role-playing if skills and gear were less numericized.
> In tabletop D&D, a +1 sword is a rarity, and +2 is super special; magic users focused more on creativity
There were some "low magic" NWN persistent worlds that followed a similar approach, some to the point of not just nerfing, but outright disabling many higher-level spells.
Generally speaking, this was dictated by the setting - e.g. a lore-faithful Middle Earth PW would necessarily be like that.
In Cataclysm DDA you can kill zombie children and it will decrease your sanity. That might sound like an interesting mechanic until you see a run down school and are flooded with zombie children. Your best option is to just burn the whole place down so that you don't have to see the children die again.
Meanwhile in Ragnarok Online special items like "cards" had a 0.01% drop chance. Without a large player base that kills monsters over and over again, those items would never drop.
