I am mostly posting this article because MMORPGs are one of my favorite genres, despite my lack of time to play them these days. But overall I have been pretty disappointed with the direction the genre has taken. Moving more towards solo-play, story-heavy, and small-scale theme-park style content.

  • Carighan MaconarEnglish
    1•2 years ago

    Of course, and it’s important to keep in mind how much the context changes. Not just in gaming context, but keep in mind:

    • MMORPGs are hardly a new genre. Their players nowadays are a different generation of humans than when the genre was young.
    • Social context changed entirely between the start of the genre and today.
    • In a similar vein, digital socialisation is entirely normal now. We no longer need a very fancy minigame (EverQuest) attached to your online chat room just to socialise.
    • Through WoW and then again with the Wii gaming exploded as a hobby, even before mobile games created a somewhat separate but huge extra market. The modern target audience is on a wholly different scale. Just look at the peak subscription counts for EQ1 or DAoC.

    It’d in fact be quite noteworthy if default features didn’t change substantially and continuously.