Whatever happened to the MMORPG? In the early 2000s, the likes of World of Warcraft, RuneScape, and EverQuest dominated cyberspace, their worlds host to millions of players questing and raiding together. Today, Roblox’s titanic 123 million daily player count dwarfs the combined historical peak of this trio and many other genre stablemates of the time.
That’s not to say the MMORPG is dead. A brand new one, Aion 2, launched just this week and quickly found itself on Steam’s Most Played list. The long-awaited Guild Wars 3 is on the horizon. And many of the genre’s pioneering games continue to run successfully, some even 25 years on from their inception. But that’s become the genre’s norm – ongoing projects built on ageing technology, rather than fresh new blood. The “live-service” game has taken its place, but that controversial industry trend has stolen the crown that the MMORPG forged.
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games were the first live-service games, long before the term had become common parlance. Both formats share a similar definition: at their core, they are online multiplayer games that are continually expanded, evolved, and developed beyond their initial launch, with that process often buffered by microtransactions or subscription models. The one key difference is that the modern live-service game can be anything from a tight 6v6 battle arena to a galaxy-spanning looter shooter. MMORPGs, meanwhile, typically take place in large fantasy or sci-fi open worlds, inspired by (or sometimes set in) the likes of Dungeons & Dragons or Star Wars, allowing players to act out long-imagined fantasies together.
Their replication of a world, with cities to visit and countries to travel across, means there’s an innate communal core to MMORPGs – like in reality, the game’s digital population becomes a community. It’s a notably different feeling compared to the communities of many modern live-service titles, like Apex Legends and Overwatch, which often focus on short, trigger-happy play cycles. People don’t admire Fortnite’s often rebranded islands in the same way they do World of Warcraft’s Nagrand or Stormwind. One is a battlefield, the other is home.
MMORPGs evolved from multi-user dungeons, or “MUDS”. Back in the early days of the internet, MUDs functioned like a virtual chatroom hinged around a fantastical adventure. They were D&D for your desktop instead of your tabletop. As entertaining as they were, multiplayer gaming took a huge step toward how we understand it today in 1997 when Ultima Online launched. It is the game from which the term ‘MMORPG’ came from, coined by Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series. Directed by Starr Long, it was an ambitious spin-off from the mainline Ultima RPG series that gave players something brand-new: a world that could change whilst they weren’t playing.
“The idea you could play in a virtual world with thousands of other people was a pretty novel idea at the time”, Long tells me. “It was like, ‘Wow, I can play D&D with my friends without even needing to be in the same town.’”
“That was the turning point where we realized, while we are the game creators, this is the players’ world,” says Long. “We’re just facilitating it for them.”
The success of Ultima Online was analysed by many, including EverQuest co-creator Bill Trost. “The whole Ultima series was a big influence on me throughout high school,” he recalls. And in 1999, just two years after Ultima Online, Trost, alongside co-creators Steve Clover and Brad McQuaid, launched EverQuest. Its 3D game engine demonstrated just what an MMORPG world could be, and led to EverQuest’s immense popularity.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/how-mmorpgs-built-and-lost-the-live-service-throne
