I don't see why people can't just look at the features and make that determination. "It's an mmorpg."
great ... you look, oh wait it only supports 35 people per world, not my thing, move on.
great ... you look, supports hundreds of people in one world. My thing.
There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
People can, and do. They just see things differently from each other so the features that define them varies between persons.
Saying the world is flat does not make it flat no matter how many morons say it is.
It effectively does with no hard evidence to the contrary, for in the absence of such there is no reason to believe perception doesn't equate to reality. There are many things once believed to be so before evidence otherwise was found. Some beliefs still remain because they are beyond proof to the contrary.
MMORPGs have no evidence as to their nature to discover so as to define them for they have no nature at all. They do not exist beyond what they are perceived to be and the perception of what they are varies between persons. They have no truth other than what each of us contrives for them.
I will never accept a philosophy that can be used as an excuse for inactivity, lawbreaking etc; indeed I could draw a line between this sort of philosophy and self identification and indeed to alters. We live in societies based on our shared conception of reality, if we want our societies to function efficiently we must up to a point insist on that, though still leaving a lot of leeway. If you want to go off and live the life of a hermit who thinks life is a dream or whatever then good luck to you.
The problem comes in on definitions. The most obvious and the elephant in the room is the 'M' in MMO. Until the pixel world can agree what number should represent the 'M', There will always be forum battles. Until we can agree, the MMO wars will continue.
It's not the only part of this subject that needs a clear definition in the pixelsphere, that needs defining, but it's obviously the biggest.
DEFINITIONS FTW! 1. MMO = WAN = WIDE AREA NETWORK = THE ENTIRE PLAYERBASE IS FROM EVERY STATE IN THE UNITED STATES. 2. FPS = LAN = LOCAL AREA NETWORK = YOUR TEAMMATES OR PLAYERBASE IS PICKED FROM YOUR LOCAL TOWN OR STATE.
This user is a registered flex offender. Someone who is registered as being a flex offender is a person who feels the need to flex about everything they say. Always be the guy that paints the house in the dark. Lucidity can be forged with enough liquidity and pharmed for decades with enough compound interest that a reachable profit would never end.
Generally LAN is limited to a single building, everything else is WAN.
Can't really define scale by those standards.
I'm sorry. I will try this again.....
DEFINITIONS FTW! 1. MMO = WAN = WIDE AREA NETWORK = THE ENTIRE PLAYERBASE IS FROM EVERY STATE IN THE UNITED STATES. 2. CONSOLE - XBOX/PLAYSTATION FPS GAMES = LAN = LOCAL AREA NETWORK = YOUR TEAMMATES OR PLAYERBASE IS PICKED FROM YOUR LOCAL TOWN OR STATE.
Is that better?
This user is a registered flex offender. Someone who is registered as being a flex offender is a person who feels the need to flex about everything they say. Always be the guy that paints the house in the dark. Lucidity can be forged with enough liquidity and pharmed for decades with enough compound interest that a reachable profit would never end.
A lot of people here are utterly wrong, many are confused. Some are close.
For one, we know what the first M in MMO stands for. Wtf is with the "we don't know" argument? It's massively. It's always been.
Massively multi-player online.
Massively is an adverb. In this case it is quantifying the multiple portion of the world multi-player. It's saying the number of players are massive in scope.
None of the definitions of any of the words in MMO have changed. There are right people, and there are wrong people.
Another point is persistence is not required for an MMO. You can have a 30 minute fps match with 1000 players and it will still be an mmo once it resets. Persistence is something that is required for an MMORPG. Not for MMO in general.
An mmo is a game that has the ability to to host a massive quantity of people concurrently in one shared virtual world. Not a bunch of little instances. People can argue whether 250+ is mmo, or whether 500+ is mmo. But it doesn't change the fact of what an MMO is.
A weird argument I see special people make is that because a game like World of Warcraft has raids, then games without any MMO portions are now mmos because they have raids. Wtf kind of logic is that?
I firmly believe the confusion started with World of Tanks when they started falsely advertising their 30 vs 30 matches as mmo. It didn't help that an ex editor on this very site said "there is an argument to call league of legends an mmo" (Bill). Plus, this site's own game list used to be worse than it currently is. They once had Diablo labeled as an mmo....
Generally LAN is limited to a single building, everything else is WAN.
Can't really define scale by those standards.
I'm sorry. I will try this again.....
DEFINITIONS FTW! 1. MMO = WAN = WIDE AREA NETWORK = THE ENTIRE PLAYERBASE IS FROM EVERY STATE IN THE UNITED STATES. 2. CONSOLE - XBOX/PLAYSTATION FPS GAMES = LAN = LOCAL AREA NETWORK = YOUR TEAMMATES OR PLAYERBASE IS PICKED FROM YOUR LOCAL TOWN OR STATE.
Is that better?
Already showed you examples in videos of players on consoles playing FFXI, FFXIV and ESO from all over the world earlier in this thread. You're completely wrong that Consoles cannot connect from all over the world to servers in any part of the world. There are not only LAN.
Those games have players connecting to servers in North America , Europe or Asia. They are on consoles and they are playing across countries.
If you look at the many discussions on this topic, you've also gotta remember that there are people in every community, like ours, that like to see the world burn. They simply add fire to debates and enjoy watching. Makes a difficult problem so much harder to gain consensus.
For myself, I've begun self editing myself. For instance, during discussions, I don't use 'themepark/sandbox' I put everything under the umbrella of 'structured' 'more structured...less structured...' I'm hoping to not get those discussions brought back up
Generally LAN is limited to a single building, everything else is WAN.
Can't really define scale by those standards.
I'm sorry. I will try this again.....
DEFINITIONS FTW! 1. MMO = WAN = WIDE AREA NETWORK = THE ENTIRE PLAYERBASE IS FROM EVERY STATE IN THE UNITED STATES. 2. CONSOLE - XBOX/PLAYSTATION FPS GAMES = LAN = LOCAL AREA NETWORK = YOUR TEAMMATES OR PLAYERBASE IS PICKED FROM YOUR LOCAL TOWN OR STATE.
Is that better?
Already showed you examples in videos of players on consoles playing FFXI, FFXIV and ESO from all over the world earlier in this thread. You're completely wrong that Consoles cannot connect from all over the world to servers in any part of the world. There are not only LAN.
Those games have players connecting to servers in North America , Europe or Asia. They are on consoles and they are playing across countries.
When I log into my Xbox and choose multiplay, it literally says the word LAN on top of my screen. If I play any COD or FPS, it says connecting to LAN network. I don't know if PlayStation got better servers or if fault tolerance sites are now hosting a games player base better with actual quality servers, but it still says LAN on the top of my screen. Maybe I should upgrade to a newer console.
Like DarkZorvan stated above: "This very site used to require your game hold a minimum of 500 players in a shared world space (server, shard, etc...) before it would even be listed as an MMO, and FPS lobby games didn't count."<---not one FPS lobby holds 500 people. You enter an instance with around 16 to 20 people. You never have 500 plus people in an instance. Thats why it isn't considered an MMO. Mobile games do the same thing. Name one mobile with 500 plus people fighting each other? I'll be impressed at technology if you can. All 500 people have to be in the same zone.
This user is a registered flex offender. Someone who is registered as being a flex offender is a person who feels the need to flex about everything they say. Always be the guy that paints the house in the dark. Lucidity can be forged with enough liquidity and pharmed for decades with enough compound interest that a reachable profit would never end.
Generally LAN is limited to a single building, everything else is WAN.
Can't really define scale by those standards.
I'm sorry. I will try this again.....
DEFINITIONS FTW! 1. MMO = WAN = WIDE AREA NETWORK = THE ENTIRE PLAYERBASE IS FROM EVERY STATE IN THE UNITED STATES. 2. CONSOLE - XBOX/PLAYSTATION FPS GAMES = LAN = LOCAL AREA NETWORK = YOUR TEAMMATES OR PLAYERBASE IS PICKED FROM YOUR LOCAL TOWN OR STATE.
Is that better?
Already showed you examples in videos of players on consoles playing FFXI, FFXIV and ESO from all over the world earlier in this thread. You're completely wrong that Consoles cannot connect from all over the world to servers in any part of the world. There are not only LAN.
Those games have players connecting to servers in North America , Europe or Asia. They are on consoles and they are playing across countries.
When I log into my Xbox and choose multiplay, it literally says the word LAN on top of my screen. If I play any COD or FPS, it says connecting to LAN network. I don't know if PlayStation got better servers or if fault tolerance sites are now hosting a games player base better with actual quality servers, but it still says LAN on the top of my screen. Maybe I should upgrade to a newer console.
Like DarkZorvan stated above: "This very site used to require your game hold a minimum of 500 players in a shared world space (server, shard, etc...) before it would even be listed as an MMO, and FPS lobby games didn't count."<---not one FPS lobby holds 500 people. You enter an instance with around 16 to 20 people. You never have 500 plus people in an instance. Thats why it isn't considered an MMO. Mobile games do the same thing. Name one mobile with 500 plus people fighting each other? I'll be impressed at technology if you can. All 500 people have to be in the same zone.
It is not the Play station or Xbox server, when your console is connected to the internet it can connect directly to the game servers hosted by the game company on their servers. You're not connecting to the Xbox or Play Station networks. You link your Elder Scroll account with Bethesda which you open separately same with FFXI and FFXIV where you create the account with Square Enix and your console.
FFXI was released on Playstation 2 in 2002 and later in 2006 to the Xbox. I was living in Singapore and I was playing FFXI with Playstation players from all over the world including Japan and United States in 2002. So you're not using LAN for these MMORPGs. You pay a subscription then directly to the game company. All you needed was the ability to connect your console to the internet and to link the account to your console.
Everquest Online Adventures was another MMORPG you connected to the then Sony Online Entertainment servers on your PlayStation 2 in 2003. So people have been playing MMORPGs on their consoles for over 20 years.
I suppose you're unaware as you were not playing any of these games when they came out. FFXI is still going even today. In 2008 there were 500,000 subscribers who connected to play on the FFXI servers and each server could hold 5,000 people from all over the world.
Tanaka: We’re planning a server capacity of about 5000 simultaneous connections per server. In our beta tests, we had 4 servers in total, so many thousands of players could join. Right now we basically have zero worries about server load. And one thing I want there to be no misunderstanding about: you don’t need a broadband connection to play FFXI. We’re designing the game to be a stress-free experience, even with normal dial-up.
Imagine that normal dial-up. The best thing was I was on my PC and my Japanese group mate was on their PS2 and we used the in game translator to have conversations and partied for hours. It was an amazing experience. I truly loved FFXI.
The reality is the definition got watered down because MMORPGs (true ones) have become largely irrelevant to the gaming industry.
Think about the past year, what has released, where the attention in the industry goes.... The only places reporting on expansions for GW2 or WoW are niche gaming sites like this one. And even a site called MMORPG.com has had to expand their scope because there's just not enough meat on these MMORPG bones to support even a niche site. The rest of the industry, customers included, don't give a shit at all about the genre. Why would they? MMORPGs haven't offered anything beyond what can be had in regular multiplayer titles in almost a decade now. Most of the time, those smaller, more focused titles actually do the gameplay far better than these 10-15+ year old MMORPGs that are still the leaders of the pack.
WoW's battlegrounds were kind of cool, until MOBAs dropped and elevated the battle arena gameplay far beyond what WoW has ever offered.
DAoC sieges were cool, until Chivalry 2 and games like it elevated medieval siege warfare gameplay.
Open-world PvP was a fresh experience, until games like Hell Let Loose and Battlefield expanded their gameplay to include 100 players per match or more with far more exciting moment-to-moment gameplay and maps that feel just as large as any MMORPG zone. Then, it became evident how little thought developers actually put into open world PvP combat in MMORPGs.
Small-party dungeon delving was awesome, until it was done better by games like GTFO, Deep Rock Galactic, etc. That's why DRG, an indie product much older than New World, has been able to average close to the same number of players over the past few months. Dark and Darker is taking the mask off completely, basically combining MMORPG-style dungeon delving with PvP to great effect. If they add some combat refinement and depth, it will be as popular as DRG or more.
And contrary to popular belief, it isn't even about "respecting the gamer's time" by adding convenience. You die in Dark and Darker, you lose everything you brought into the match or looted during the match. It's just that MMORPG devs have done a piss poor job making gameplay engaging enough to make customers want to spend time playing the game for the sake of the enjoyment, rather than for the sake of chasing a carrot and FOMO. MMORPG moment-to-moment gameplay just isn't that fun anymore, comparatively speaking. They haven't kept pace with other genres in terms of improving and refining their loops. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that we have veritable fossils still leading the genre in terms of player numbers. You can only repaint a house so many times; eventually, even the freshest paint job can't hide its age.
Other genres have worked hard to leverage the benefits of larger or deeper multiplayer gameplay. MMORPGs, on the other hand, have done their best to cut out others.
Another aspect and reasoning as to how we got to where we are on identifying MMORPG comes directly from a concerted effort by Publishers of adding the moniker of MMO and/or RPG to games strictly to tap into a market that had exploded following WoW success , lead up to by the UO and EQ .
So they were adding these identity labels to games that were not MMORPGs intentionally to grab sales and increase a targeted demographic.
The result is we have an entire generation of gamers now that think games like Fortnite are MMORPGs.
The reality is the definition got watered down because MMORPGs (true ones) have become largely irrelevant to the gaming industry.
Think about the past year, what has released, where the attention in the industry goes.... The only places reporting on expansions for GW2 or WoW are niche gaming sites like this one. And even a site called MMORPG.com has had to expand their scope because there's just not enough meat on these MMORPG bones to support even a niche site. The rest of the industry, customers included, don't give a shit at all about the genre. Why would they? MMORPGs haven't offered anything beyond what can be had in regular multiplayer titles in almost a decade now. Most of the time, those smaller, more focused titles actually do the gameplay far better than these 10-15+ year old MMORPGs that are still the leaders of the pack.
WoW's battlegrounds were kind of cool, until MOBAs dropped and elevated the battle arena gameplay far beyond what WoW has ever offered.
DAoC sieges were cool, until Chivalry 2 and games like it elevated medieval siege warfare gameplay.
Open-world PvP was a fresh experience, until games like Hell Let Loose and Battlefield expanded their gameplay to include 100 players per match or more with far more exciting moment-to-moment gameplay and maps that feel just as large as any MMORPG zone. Then, it became evident how little thought developers actually put into open world PvP combat in MMORPGs.
Small-party dungeon delving was awesome, until it was done better by games like GTFO, Deep Rock Galactic, etc. That's why DRG, an indie product much older than New World, has been able to average close to the same number of players over the past few months. Dark and Darker is taking the mask off completely, basically combining MMORPG-style dungeon delving with PvP to great effect. If they add some combat refinement and depth, it will be as popular as DRG or more.
And contrary to popular belief, it isn't even about "respecting the gamer's time" by adding convenience. You die in Dark and Darker, you lose everything you brought into the match or looted during the match. It's just that MMORPG devs have done a piss poor job making gameplay engaging enough to make customers want to spend time playing the game for the sake of the enjoyment, rather than for the sake of chasing a carrot and FOMO. MMORPG moment-to-moment gameplay just isn't that fun anymore, comparatively speaking. They haven't kept pace with other genres in terms of improving and refining their loops. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that we have veritable fossils still leading the genre in terms of player numbers. You can only repaint a house so many times; eventually, even the freshest paint job can't hide its age.
Other genres have worked hard to leverage the benefits of larger or deeper multiplayer gameplay. MMORPGs, on the other hand, have done their best to cut out others.
This is an interesting perspective and one that does explain the popularity of different parts of an MMORPG finding favour and success. The survival genre has done very well and people are enjoying coming together and playing them.
I do enjoy MOBAs myself except for the rather toxic community of LoL I would still be playing it. Unfortunately I am rather thin skinned.
I have enjoyed the survival aspects of some of the survival games but the fear of PvP has scared me off and playing alone on a server totally defeats the whole idea of the game. I'd get bored too quickly.
Some games I have looked at are in first person that gives me a headaches and nausea so those are out too.
A lot of people here are utterly wrong, many are confused. Some are close.
For one, we know what the first M in MMO stands for. Wtf is with the "we don't know" argument? It's massively. It's always been.
Massively multi-player online.
Except, instead of “massive “ pertaining to the amount of people who simultaneously share a game world some companies use it to mean “massive amount of people who can simultaneously access the game.”
So the definition hasn’t changed it’s just what it’s referring to.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
I think the reason for the confusion around "massively" is that from a technology perspective a true MMO is incredibly hard to do. What's crazy is the few games that actually solved that technology problem did so decades ago. Anyway as companies wanted to jump on the MMO bandwagon but lacked the technical know how to build a true MMO you got this shift in the definition from "massive amounts of players in the same play space" to "massive amounts of players in the same game but in different instances".
Words that used to have a meaning are abused to take advantage of that meaning, even when it isn't true. My favorite example is:
"Special offer! Get a second one FREE! (just pay a separate fee)."
They use the word "free" because it means something that people think is good. But it isn't actually free, they just say that to get more attention.
Same with the word MMORPG. When the first ones came out, they were amazing. Nobody had ever seen anything like it before. Morrowind, with hundreds of players? AMAZING! So MMORPG became a word that people think means something good, like "free" in the last example.
But very few are real MMORPG games, they just use the word to get more attention. Now the word means basically nothing.
MMO-RPG, MMO-ARPG, if its massively multiplayer online MMO can mean many things. If you have people in race cars in a massively multiplayer online environment. Its a MMO.
A lot of people here are utterly wrong, many are confused. Some are close.
For one, we know what the first M in MMO stands for. Wtf is with the "we don't know" argument? It's massively. It's always been.
Massively multi-player online.
Except, instead of “massive “ pertaining to the amount of people who simultaneously share a game world some companies use it to mean “massive amount of people who can simultaneously access the game.”
So the definition hasn’t changed it’s just what it’s referring to.
Not to nitpick, but those are literally two different definitions.
I don't see why people can't just look at the features and make that determination. "It's an mmorpg."
great ... you look, oh wait it only supports 35 people per world, not my thing, move on.
great ... you look, supports hundreds of people in one world. My thing.
There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
People can, and do. They just see things differently from each other so the features that define them varies between persons.
Saying the world is flat does not make it flat no matter how many morons say it is.
It effectively does with no hard evidence to the contrary, for in the absence of such there is no reason to believe perception doesn't equate to reality. There are many things once believed to be so before evidence otherwise was found. Some beliefs still remain because they are beyond proof to the contrary.
MMORPGs have no evidence as to their nature to discover so as to define them for they have no nature at all. They do not exist beyond what they are perceived to be and the perception of what they are varies between persons. They have no truth other than what each of us contrives for them.
I will never accept a philosophy that can be used as an excuse for inactivity, lawbreaking etc; indeed I could draw a line between this sort of philosophy and self identification and indeed to alters. We live in societies based on our shared conception of reality, if we want our societies to function efficiently we must up to a point insist on that, though still leaving a lot of leeway. If you want to go off and live the life of a hermit who thinks life is a dream or whatever then good luck to you.
Philosophies aren't subject to your acceptance. You can of course disagree with them.
There is no shared conception of reality.
We have similar enough conceptions within cultures for varying societies to function, and in some cases for them to have favourable relations. In other cases those underlying conceptions vary so strongly they lead to societal hostility instead.
That which doesn't exist can't be insisted on.
I do live the life of a hermit for the most part. As such it is largely what I make it, dream and nightmare both. If I had good luck it may have been otherwise. Vae victis.
If you look at the many discussions on this topic, you've also gotta remember that there are people in every community, like ours, that like to see the world burn. They simply add fire to debates and enjoy watching. Makes a difficult problem so much harder to gain consensus.
For myself, I've begun self editing myself. For instance, during discussions, I don't use 'themepark/sandbox' I put everything under the umbrella of 'structured' 'more structured...less structured...' I'm hoping to not get those discussions brought back up
If there was genuine consensus it would have long since been arrived and discussions such as this would no longer occur. They do so there isn't.
It's not even a problem never mind a difficult one, save perhaps for those entirely new to MMORPGs and thus have no genre familiarity on which to draw in making assessments.
That blissful ignorance won't last long if such spend any time on MMORPG related forums, as this issue has more discussion durability than a zombie with a bullet-proof brain.
Comments
It's not the only part of this subject that needs a clear definition in the pixelsphere, that needs defining, but it's obviously the biggest.
MurderHerd
1. MMO = WAN = WIDE AREA NETWORK = THE ENTIRE PLAYERBASE IS FROM EVERY STATE IN THE UNITED STATES.
2. FPS = LAN = LOCAL AREA NETWORK = YOUR TEAMMATES OR PLAYERBASE IS PICKED FROM YOUR LOCAL TOWN OR STATE.
Someone who is registered as being a flex offender is a person who feels the need to flex about everything they say.
Always be the guy that paints the house in the dark.
Lucidity can be forged with enough liquidity and pharmed for decades with enough compound interest that a reachable profit would never end.
Generally LAN is limited to a single building, everything else is WAN.
Can't really define scale by those standards.
DEFINITIONS FTW!
1. MMO = WAN = WIDE AREA NETWORK = THE ENTIRE PLAYERBASE IS FROM EVERY STATE IN THE UNITED STATES.
2. CONSOLE - XBOX/PLAYSTATION FPS GAMES = LAN = LOCAL AREA NETWORK = YOUR TEAMMATES OR PLAYERBASE IS PICKED FROM YOUR LOCAL TOWN OR STATE.
Is that better?
Someone who is registered as being a flex offender is a person who feels the need to flex about everything they say.
Always be the guy that paints the house in the dark.
Lucidity can be forged with enough liquidity and pharmed for decades with enough compound interest that a reachable profit would never end.
For one, we know what the first M in MMO stands for. Wtf is with the "we don't know" argument? It's massively. It's always been.
Massively multi-player online.
Massively is an adverb. In this case it is quantifying the multiple portion of the world multi-player. It's saying the number of players are massive in scope.
None of the definitions of any of the words in MMO have changed. There are right people, and there are wrong people.
Another point is persistence is not required for an MMO. You can have a 30 minute fps match with 1000 players and it will still be an mmo once it resets. Persistence is something that is required for an MMORPG. Not for MMO in general.
An mmo is a game that has the ability to to host a massive quantity of people concurrently in one shared virtual world. Not a bunch of little instances. People can argue whether 250+ is mmo, or whether 500+ is mmo. But it doesn't change the fact of what an MMO is.
A weird argument I see special people make is that because a game like World of Warcraft has raids, then games without any MMO portions are now mmos because they have raids. Wtf kind of logic is that?
I firmly believe the confusion started with World of Tanks when they started falsely advertising their 30 vs 30 matches as mmo. It didn't help that an ex editor on this very site said "there is an argument to call league of legends an mmo" (Bill). Plus, this site's own game list used to be worse than it currently is. They once had Diablo labeled as an mmo....
Those games have players connecting to servers in North America , Europe or Asia. They are on consoles and they are playing across countries.
For myself, I've begun self editing myself. For instance, during discussions, I don't use 'themepark/sandbox' I put everything under the umbrella of 'structured' 'more structured...less structured...' I'm hoping to not get those discussions brought back up
of a youtube personality calling a non MMO (Vindictus) calling it a MMO..
you agree that not having a definition for these terms can create confusion, right?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Like DarkZorvan stated above:
"This very site used to require your game hold a minimum of 500 players in a shared world space (server, shard, etc...) before it would even be listed as an MMO, and FPS lobby games didn't count."<---not one FPS lobby holds 500 people. You enter an instance with around 16 to 20 people. You never have 500 plus people in an instance. Thats why it isn't considered an MMO. Mobile games do the same thing. Name one mobile with 500 plus people fighting each other? I'll be impressed at technology if you can. All 500 people have to be in the same zone.
Someone who is registered as being a flex offender is a person who feels the need to flex about everything they say.
Always be the guy that paints the house in the dark.
Lucidity can be forged with enough liquidity and pharmed for decades with enough compound interest that a reachable profit would never end.
It is not the Play station or Xbox server, when your console is connected to the internet it can connect directly to the game servers hosted by the game company on their servers. You're not connecting to the Xbox or Play Station networks. You link your Elder Scroll account with Bethesda which you open separately same with FFXI and FFXIV where you create the account with Square Enix and your console.
FFXI was released on Playstation 2 in 2002 and later in 2006 to the Xbox. I was living in Singapore and I was playing FFXI with Playstation players from all over the world including Japan and United States in 2002. So you're not using LAN for these MMORPGs. You pay a subscription then directly to the game company. All you needed was the ability to connect your console to the internet and to link the account to your console.
Everquest Online Adventures was another MMORPG you connected to the then Sony Online Entertainment servers on your PlayStation 2 in 2003. So people have been playing MMORPGs on their consoles for over 20 years.
I suppose you're unaware as you were not playing any of these games when they came out. FFXI is still going even today. In 2008 there were 500,000 subscribers who connected to play on the FFXI servers and each server could hold 5,000 people from all over the world.
Tanaka: We’re planning a server capacity of about 5000 simultaneous connections per server. In our beta tests, we had 4 servers in total, so many thousands of players could join. Right now we basically have zero worries about server load. And one thing I want there to be no misunderstanding about: you don’t need a broadband connection to play FFXI. We’re designing the game to be a stress-free experience, even with normal dial-up.
https://shmuplations.com/ffxi/
Imagine that normal dial-up. The best thing was I was on my PC and my Japanese group mate was on their PS2 and we used the in game translator to have conversations and partied for hours. It was an amazing experience. I truly loved FFXI.
Think about the past year, what has released, where the attention in the industry goes.... The only places reporting on expansions for GW2 or WoW are niche gaming sites like this one. And even a site called MMORPG.com has had to expand their scope because there's just not enough meat on these MMORPG bones to support even a niche site. The rest of the industry, customers included, don't give a shit at all about the genre. Why would they? MMORPGs haven't offered anything beyond what can be had in regular multiplayer titles in almost a decade now. Most of the time, those smaller, more focused titles actually do the gameplay far better than these 10-15+ year old MMORPGs that are still the leaders of the pack.
WoW's battlegrounds were kind of cool, until MOBAs dropped and elevated the battle arena gameplay far beyond what WoW has ever offered.
DAoC sieges were cool, until Chivalry 2 and games like it elevated medieval siege warfare gameplay.
Open-world PvP was a fresh experience, until games like Hell Let Loose and Battlefield expanded their gameplay to include 100 players per match or more with far more exciting moment-to-moment gameplay and maps that feel just as large as any MMORPG zone. Then, it became evident how little thought developers actually put into open world PvP combat in MMORPGs.
Small-party dungeon delving was awesome, until it was done better by games like GTFO, Deep Rock Galactic, etc. That's why DRG, an indie product much older than New World, has been able to average close to the same number of players over the past few months. Dark and Darker is taking the mask off completely, basically combining MMORPG-style dungeon delving with PvP to great effect. If they add some combat refinement and depth, it will be as popular as DRG or more.
And contrary to popular belief, it isn't even about "respecting the gamer's time" by adding convenience. You die in Dark and Darker, you lose everything you brought into the match or looted during the match. It's just that MMORPG devs have done a piss poor job making gameplay engaging enough to make customers want to spend time playing the game for the sake of the enjoyment, rather than for the sake of chasing a carrot and FOMO. MMORPG moment-to-moment gameplay just isn't that fun anymore, comparatively speaking. They haven't kept pace with other genres in terms of improving and refining their loops. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that we have veritable fossils still leading the genre in terms of player numbers. You can only repaint a house so many times; eventually, even the freshest paint job can't hide its age.
Other genres have worked hard to leverage the benefits of larger or deeper multiplayer gameplay. MMORPGs, on the other hand, have done their best to cut out others.
So they were adding these identity labels to games that were not MMORPGs intentionally to grab sales and increase a targeted demographic.
The result is we have an entire generation of gamers now that think games like Fortnite are MMORPGs.
I do enjoy MOBAs myself except for the rather toxic community of LoL I would still be playing it. Unfortunately I am rather thin skinned.
I have enjoyed the survival aspects of some of the survival games but the fear of PvP has scared me off and playing alone on a server totally defeats the whole idea of the game. I'd get bored too quickly.
Some games I have looked at are in first person that gives me a headaches and nausea so those are out too.
So the definition hasn’t changed it’s just what it’s referring to.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
Philosophies aren't subject to your acceptance. You can of course disagree with them.
There is no shared conception of reality.
We have similar enough conceptions within cultures for varying societies to function, and in some cases for them to have favourable relations. In other cases those underlying conceptions vary so strongly they lead to societal hostility instead.
That which doesn't exist can't be insisted on.
I do live the life of a hermit for the most part. As such it is largely what I make it, dream and nightmare both. If I had good luck it may have been otherwise. Vae victis.
It's not even a problem never mind a difficult one, save perhaps for those entirely new to MMORPGs and thus have no genre familiarity on which to draw in making assessments.
That blissful ignorance won't last long if such spend any time on MMORPG related forums, as this issue has more discussion durability than a zombie with a bullet-proof brain.