It's starting to feel like MMOs were just a product of the times we lived in, rather than a separate genre of game. In ~2004 I remember at least four MMOs: Asheron's Call, Planetside, World of Warcraft, and Dark Age of Camelot. It seems like only WoW survived, and nowadays I'm not sure the experience resembles the original anymore. Oh, and then there's EVE-Online, Runescape, Ultima Online...
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.
In a lot of ways, World of Wacraft survived because it perfected the genre, and in doing so, kind of killed it. Final Fantasy 14 is successful because it copied a lot of WoW's patterns.
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?"
The barrier to entry was the point, it's what created community. There is really no such thing as a durable community without entry and exit friction.
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.
Yet people put hundreds of hours into their favorite video games and story-based games are still doing really well.
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.
RuneScape is still one of the most popular MMOs out there. Last year it peaked at over 240k people online (concurrent users). It's nowhere near as popular as Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft but it's still doing very well.
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.
worth mentioning there's some indication the 240k peak was massively inflated by bot accounts. but by all means there are many fewer bot accounts this year, and it's still ~150k concurrents frequently. so it's still doing very well, but the numbers are a little different.
>Asheron's Call, Planetside, World of Warcraft, and Dark Age of Camelot. It seems like only WoW survived
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.
Everquest has made a lot of changes over the years that have turned it into an excellent game (solo or group) even if you stick to free play. You can't reasonably reach the top levels that way, but the top level is so much higher nowadays that by the time free play progress gets too slow you will have been able to do plenty of content that in the old days was high end content.
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].
Runescape (as we remember it in the 2000s/2010s lives on in Old School Runescape or '2007scape'. Supported by Jagex, it's the Runescape you remember from 2007 but has routine community polls on new skills/quests/bosses to add.
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 they're daily grindfests now. I hear about people logging in just to do their "dailies" and thats about it. Everything new is instances, which don't capture the MMO village feel at all for me. I miss UO but I'm sure they clunky interface would drive me crazy today.
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.
There are a couple of distinctions here: Habitat is graphical and not merely text-based. "MMO" means "massively multiplayer online [...]" but MUD1 and the minicomputer/Unix MUDs were not "massive" but limited to a few dozen players at a time. It is unclear how many players (registered or simultaneous) were supported by Habitat, but Wikipedia seems confident to call it "MMORPG" without numbers or a cited source.
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.
It's starting to feel like MMOs were just a product of the times we lived in, rather than a separate genre of game. In ~2004 I remember at least four MMOs: Asheron's Call, Planetside, World of Warcraft, and Dark Age of Camelot. It seems like only WoW survived, and nowadays I'm not sure the experience resembles the original anymore. Oh, and then there's EVE-Online, Runescape, Ultima Online...
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.
In a lot of ways, World of Wacraft survived because it perfected the genre, and in doing so, kind of killed it. Final Fantasy 14 is successful because it copied a lot of WoW's patterns.
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?"
The barrier to entry was the point, it's what created community. There is really no such thing as a durable community without entry and exit friction.
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.
Yet people put hundreds of hours into their favorite video games and story-based games are still doing really well.
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.
RuneScape is still one of the most popular MMOs out there. Last year it peaked at over 240k people online (concurrent users). It's nowhere near as popular as Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft but it's still doing very well.
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.
worth mentioning there's some indication the 240k peak was massively inflated by bot accounts. but by all means there are many fewer bot accounts this year, and it's still ~150k concurrents frequently. so it's still doing very well, but the numbers are a little different.
>Asheron's Call, Planetside, World of Warcraft, and Dark Age of Camelot. It seems like only WoW survived
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.
Everquest has made a lot of changes over the years that have turned it into an excellent game (solo or group) even if you stick to free play. You can't reasonably reach the top levels that way, but the top level is so much higher nowadays that by the time free play progress gets too slow you will have been able to do plenty of content that in the old days was high end content.
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].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368588
Runescape (as we remember it in the 2000s/2010s lives on in Old School Runescape or '2007scape'. Supported by Jagex, it's the Runescape you remember from 2007 but has routine community polls on new skills/quests/bosses to add.
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 they're daily grindfests now. I hear about people logging in just to do their "dailies" and thats about it. Everything new is instances, which don't capture the MMO village feel at all for me. I miss UO but I'm sure they clunky interface would drive me crazy today.
UO is still active on the free shards. Second Age shard staying alive for 20 years. Outlands is way more popular but it’s also not really UO.
>"I think they're daily grindfests now."
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.
The interface reminded me of Community in Halt and Catch Fire. Sure enough...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)#Popular_c...
This article ignores the true inventors of the MMO, Trubshaw and Bartle with MUD1 at University of Essex in 1980ish.
There are a couple of distinctions here: Habitat is graphical and not merely text-based. "MMO" means "massively multiplayer online [...]" but MUD1 and the minicomputer/Unix MUDs were not "massive" but limited to a few dozen players at a time. It is unclear how many players (registered or simultaneous) were supported by Habitat, but Wikipedia seems confident to call it "MMORPG" without numbers or a cited source.
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.
I used to play WoW a lot. I don't think I stopped liking MMOs — I just stopped having enough time for them.
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