The secret sauce of Vanilla was the sense of place and sense of community. You don't need the old patch. You need persistent identities and travel time. Small populations, no server or faction transfers, and walking to dungeons is the vast majority of it. I also really miss Vanilla dungeon design, where I felt like I was exploring a dangerous place instead of having a very scripted, linear experience. I loved Blackro…
It bothered me profoundly that the memory usage in the games was proportional to the details of the map instead of the number of players. One guy had built an entire world in the Thad Williams' Memory Sorrow and Thorn universe. It had a great text processing engine but it was built on a fatal use-after-free flaw that was beyond me to fix at the time, and the head of the project understood it less than I did.
Eventually he folded and worked on my second favorite one, which I built a text-deduplication library to decrease their memory footprint by half (there was pushback on expanding the map due to resource constraints). I'm not sure they ever used it. By the time I removed an obvious footgun they'd already said no.
Later I later took a computer graphics class, and when one of the assigments was based on fractal landscapes. I still believe that the right way to run a big world with a small team is to use a generated world as the base, and then have your team carve a civilization into it. The computer makes the river valley, the designers put a town in it. The computer generates a cave, the designers fill it with monsters. The backdrop is cheap as can be from a human and compute resources standpoint, and it's easy to have a big space even before you have enough stories to fit into it. The fourth bit of code I wrote in what became my primary language for years was a fractal map generator, trying to get coastlines and ridgelines that looked organic, but by then I had a real job and had begun to worry about the Skinner Effect in multiplayer games.