The Invention of the MMO
worksinprogress.news
worksinprogress.news
Nowadays it's mostly Roblox and Fortnite. I saw some 11yo's socialize the other week. One asked the other hey, do you play fortnight? And they swapped contact info that way.
What's the genre of Roblox / Fortnite? Live service games? It would be interesting to have a separate term for them the way we had for "MMOs".
MMOs were also fun from a technical standpoint. One of my big challenges to myself was to make an MMO. I learned a lot about networking that way. When I was 13 I even ended up on the phone with a local business trying to negotiate a dedicated 10 Mbit link. He correctly told me to just wait, that 10 Mbit won't seem so crucial in a few years.
Then there were the MUDs. I'm not sure if it's correct to call them MUDs, but Gemstone and Underlight spring to mind. Underlight especially was a charming little game where you were expected to roleplay in-character whenever you were online. Meaning, no discussion about the real world. It was very addictive for a socially awkward 6th grader to just vanish into this new world.
I wonder what kind of new genres of games people will be talking about in a couple decades. It's tempting to think there's something like "the MMO" that's yet to be discovered, just like the arena shooter was.
They were never not grindfests. EQ, Lineage 1/2, FFXI, and most of that era were almost entirely about the grind. The difference is that you were forced to grind with friends. FFXI in particular was physically impossible to progress without a full party at all times, and there were no ingame mechanics to facilitate that. You had to talk to people and form relationships. Individual servers were real communities with long running rivalries, alliances, reputations, and prestige. That's the heart and soul of the genre that made those games unforgettable, and was lost when WoW took over and introduced dungeon finder and server sharding.
Today, though, it's really hard to sell a game that requires such substantial amounts of time to progress. Lobby games, team shooters, battle royales are popular today because you can sign in, play, and be done in your time with no requirements or expectations. Also, trying to make a successful "live service" game (recurring revenue via subscriptions or microtransactions) is nigh impossible because you're fighting against the biggest hurdle of all: making a game good and interesting enough to convince entire friend groups to switch together.
It's no longer "hey this game looks cool lets give it a try" it's "why would I play that game when I've already got X hours in this and I play with my friends?"
But games that rely on community are thus generally less scalable and profitable than games that don't. WoW was an aberration (partially because it had almost no competition at the time it was building its player base). It set profoundly unrealistic standards for the genre, and the gravity of community building in a contested space kind of killed off the rest of the genre because no one else was able to do it at 'WoW-scale', which was held up as the benchmark for what good looks like.
WoW puts 95% of the game at max level requiring players to invest dozens of hours just for table stakes. A well designed MMO doesn't have to do that, but the game needs to have enough content to have a thriving midgame, which is something that runescape does really well, except RuneScape's issue is to get out of the midgame requires hundreds of hours of grinding to get out of the midgame.
I think the biggest difference between battle royals and team shooters with MMOs is the online shooters are funded mostly by aesthetic packs, and a new and old account have the same gear available to them, while MMOs allow older accounts to unlock better gear. Nothing is stopping you from playing with your friends, while you can still invest into a character.
Unfortunately, it is also known as 'efficiencyscape' as most of the player base is only concerned with doings their daily chores, completing quests as efficiently as possible, etc. The social aspect is drastically diminished.
I think what happened to the MMO genre is mobile games. They siphoned away the casual playerbase, so the old dynamics don't work as well anymore.
>It's tempting to think there's something like "the MMO" that's yet to be discovered, just like the arena shooter was.
It wouldn't surprise me if this was seasonal games like Diablo and Path of Exile. I've thought that seasons like in those games are the future of games like MMOs since they provide a natural hype cycle and jumping on point for the game.
But something entirely new would likely be AI related. Perhaps AI tools in the (far) future will allow so much decent content to be made that games can constantly offer new experiences. Like imagine a near limitless world to explore. That could be interesting.
wow, daoc, runescape, eve, and now planetside 2 are still operating. everquest, the big one missing from your list, is also still online, so is everquest 2.
new expansions are coming out for everquest like clockwork, still.
UO and AC are the only actual dead ones, and they have a ton of community servers.
I have a hunch these things are cheap enough to keep going until the playerbase croaks and there isn't anyone to pay the bills left. I am sure they have very few new players.
In the old days solo was a nightmare, but the changes have made it very viable.
Here's a previous comment that goes into details [1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)#Popular_c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)
I was involved in the campaign to increase TinyMUD capacity from ~64 players to ~256 simultaneously connected players in the mid-1990s. But nobody was calling that "massive" even when it seemed like more than we ever had.
There are other criteria that may be considered for a "massive" adjective. Size of the world, and time to explore. It seems that Habitat was rather expensive by the hour! The MUDs in academic networks were populated by students with a lot of free time, and possibly unlimited access from their CS-related majors.