I definitely relate to you on this. The way I see it, games back in the 2000s had dedicated servers which fostered a community because people would routinely play on the same server. Now, most games just put you into a 'match finder' which puts you in a game with a bunch of random people, and then after the game is over everyone leaves to re-queue and get placed with an entirely different bunch of random people. You'll likely never play with the same person twice, so nobody gets to know each other and no small communities are formed. The best part of gaming for me was the community, the drama, the friendships and the enemies. This is entirely lost now for the most part, nothing is personal. When I think back to when Tribes was still alive and firing up the game, refreshing the server list and Seeing Particle's Custom RPG with 26/64 players I remember the rush as I joined the server to see what was going on, to fight my enemies or talk to my friends. I miss that.
The other thing that put older games including Tribes apart was mods. Being able to create mods caused more communities to form because people would find a mod they like and stick with it. New games generally do not allow mods or they are a much smaller part of the game.
For me, 0 new games interest me no matter how hard I try to get into them, which is sad because I love gaming. The one game I play is World of Warcraft Vanilla (the original version of the game before any expansions- from ~2004). I played this game when I was a kid and at the same time as TRPG, so it holds a lot of nostalgia for me and thankfully there are still servers with thousands of players playing this version (and a Blizzard release coming in a month!!!). Luckily I'm part of a community (my guild) in this game so I still have one game that can fill that void. I would totally recommend trying Classic WoW this August when it comes out!
