I was just made to examine my long cycle of MMO affinity. A lot of it happened before this blog came into being, or before I started blogging period, and as a result it’s lost to the mists of time. I still have fond remembrances of games gone by, but specifics are hard to come by.
I used to play a single MMO for months, maybe even years. My first was Ultima Online, back in the days before broadband connections. My friends and I played that game for…I don’t know, two years? I worked with one friend whom I played with, and we would spend all day (at work) discussing plans for the game. We did the same for Star Wars: Galaxies. We tried others, like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot, but over time, my friends fell away from the MMO scene, or were consumed by World of Warcraft.
During the intervening years, I wandered from MMO to MMO, looking for…something. I wasn’t sure what. Maybe it was the unquantifiable power that the earlier games had on me that made me want to play them for so long. I stuck with Anarchy Online for longer than sanity could bear. Same with Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, and both were played through their disastrous launches. I ranged far and wide, into EverQuest 2, The Matrix Online, Earth & Beyond, NeoCron, and even Lineage II and Aion and other foreign imports. All were box-cost-with-subscriptions at the time, so I’ve spent more than my fair share of money on these games in this search for some elusive quality that would ensnare me.
I think the interest hit a low point with Star Wars: The Old Republic. A lot was riding on this one, despite BioWare’s insistence that they only needed a paltry number of players in order to break even. I played for a month…not even, I don’t think, and finally felt that my time spent in this genre was mercifully at an end. SWTOR was a bullet for the suffering horse of my MMO hoboism: If this game was to represent the pinnacle of almost two decades of MMOdom, then the genre was truly doomed, and there was no point sifting through ashes in the hopes of finding the home that once was.
I believe that for a lot of people, there’s so much MMO water under a relatively small bridge that it’s been a veritable orgy of online gaming experienced (relatively) all at once. We’ve had too much in too little time, and considering how long it takes to make these games, there’s no way that each one can evolve from it’s precursors. Like the Dot Com bubble, the MMO bubble saw companies falling over themselves to MMOize their IPs in the hopes of getting a slice of that sweet, perpetual revenue stream. While we were promised revolutions in gameplay, the development cycle measured in years meant that what were were eventually served was stale before we got our hands on it. It’s never really been that the games were bad. Players just get tired of being told that the next product is going to blow their doors off, only to have their doors wobble slightly by a mediocre breeze. One way of looking at it is as a different take on “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”, which in this case could be called “The MMO Developers Who Cried Revolutionary”. We stopped listening, and got angry that we were getting nothing but retreads.
But as a professor once told me “time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana”. At some point, all of the 5+ years-in-development games had to come up for air to check the state of the market. Those who rushed in to get on the bandwagon suffered the most by valuing momentum of the market over the benefits of hindsight. The MMO genre is like a cruise ship: it doesn’t turn easily, or quickly, but it does seem to be turning. The Secret World takes us out of the Tolkien forests and puts in places which look an awful lot like places we’re familiar with. Guild Wars 2 throws traditional questing models out the window in favor of a focused story and a “stumble-upon” system. Subscriptions and buffets are giving way to free-to-play and a la carte, which just a few years ago was seen as the scourge of modern online gaming and a mark of low quality, but which is increasingly being embraced here in the West.
The tide is changing in the genre – slowly, still, but the motion is noticeable. MMOers have been clamoring for change with the misunderstanding that the genre could turn on a dime. It can’t, but I hope that we’re starting to move into an age were MMO designers have decided to stop chasing the idea of a “WoW killer” and have embraced the niche of those underserved by years of high-fantasy focus.
Myself, I’ve stopped chasing down every MMO that appears on my radar. I’ve stuck with a few core titles that I’ve returned to again and again, but by and large have deflected any porch-door pitches made by developer hype videos. Beyond TSW and GW2, I am unaware of any MMO in production. That’s not to say that there aren’t any, or that I couldn’t come up with a few names if I bothered to try, but both TSW and GW2 seem to encapsulate enough “second age” vibe so that I don’t feel the need to keep looking. I started playing in this genre for the long term, and was then dissatisfied with the unrequited search for some undefined ideal. With the benefit of hindsight, I feel comfortable with these choices I have at my disposal, and don’t foresee anything in the near future that would cause me to return to my wandering.