The Problem With Modern MMOs

“Nostalgia goggles” is a metaphor often used to describe a person’s distorted view of how something in the past was actually much worse than they believe it was. Let’s use Dragonball as an example.
Back when the Anime was initially licensed for distribution within North America, the Ocean Group was brought on to dub it into English, with a lot of viewers being introduced to Dragonball via that specific cast of voice actors.
Later, when FUNimation acquired the license to dub it into English, even though the FUNi dub ultimately ended up being exponentially more professional and much closer to the original Japanese translation, people were left of the opinion that the Ocean dub was suprerior.
And as such, many people consider fans of the Ocean dub to be under the effects of “nostalgia goggles.”

This also applies to video games – and more specifically – MMOs. You’ve probably heard people continue to reminisce over how amazing “vanilla WoW” or “Aion 1.0″ were. These were games that were released over a decade ago, back when new MMO releases were common and varied quite significantly in terms of quality.
Yet even though there were hundreds of MMOs released between 1995 through 2021, there exist several that truly stood out. That not only captivated the MMO audience, but also went on to stand the test of time.
Games like Meridian 59, Tibia, Ultima Online, EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, RuneScape, Ragnarok Online, EVE Online, Lineage II, MapleStory, Mabinogi, World of Warcraft and more recently, titles like Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy XIV and The Elder Scrolls Online.
These are all MMOs that offered experiences of an entirely separate caliber to what was available at the time.

Which leads me to the topic of this video: Older MMOs are better than newer MMOs. Why? Because developers back in the earlier days of the genres inception cared more about making their dreams a reality. Creating worlds that could stand the test of time.
These days, developers care more about creating a game that “looks pretty” and promises “the world,” yet fails to deliver any of it. This generation is full of bait and switch MMOs. MMOs created with the sole intention of making as much money as they can before ultimately shutting down.
Who here recalls when the free MMO Elite Lord of Alliance shut down? What about when they relaunched as Warlords Awakening, requiring players pay to play the game as a buy to play MMO?
What about Bless Online‘s free business model across Korea, Japan and Russia, yet buy to play business model for us over in the West?
Or Astellia Online being free within South Korea, and launching as a buy to play title over here after it failed to achieve success within its country of origin.

Now I’m under no illusion that there were predatory, or even downright terrible MMOs developed at the same time as the aforementioned titles.
80, maybe even as much as 90% of MMOs were horrid, pay to win messes, much the same as they are now. The only difference was back then we didn’t really know any better.
I started playing MMOs back in 2007 with Tales of Pirates. This was a game that allowed you to purchase Rage Gems, Colossus Gems and other items you could forge into your weapons and armor from the cash shop.
Yes, these were items you could obtain in-game as well, but where it could take players days, weeks even to obtain even a few of these items, you could purchase 100 of them directly from the store for maybe a thousand dollars and be significantly more powerful than most other players on the server.
Yet nobody ever really called “pay to win,” and we continued to play the game, attempting to compete with whales of that magnitude. As that was a PvPvE MMO, it was much more difficult to, granted, and often relied much more on tactics and reaction to really excel.
But pay to advance and pay to win were just so prevalent back then that nobody really cared. That is a type of business model that could not exist in today’s society, where even paying for an XP scroll is considered by a large percentage of players as “pay to win.”
Disregarding the inherent problems with pay to win in Tales of Pirates, you know what the game did right? Everything else.
It offered players a large open world. The only loading screens that were present were if you went through an instance to a dungeon, or needed to travel to another continent via teleport. You could freely run around the entire world on foot, you could even sail to different continents via ship.
There were various different classes, a sense of progression, heck, it even presented one of the greatest types of PvPvE I’ve ever experienced: PvPvE dungeons and raids.
Dungeons and raids were open to all players, allowing for entire guilds to attempt to defeat dungeon and raid bosses while fending off other guilds. This presented so many opportunities for guilds to make alliances with other guilds, formulate strategies to secure raid kills and meant that the community was more important than almost anything else.
Your reputation in that game was your life. If you did something, everyone on the server knew. If you defeated another guild in a dungeon, everyone would know. This was in my opinion, one of the most amazing PvPvE systems I’d ever experienced, and something I’ve not had the pleasure of experiencing since.

Comparatively speaking, MMOs these days don’t do anything remotely innovative like that.
What MMOs have released in the last 4 years? Bless Online, DK Online, Guardians of Ember, Warlords Awakening, SoulWorker, Closers, Kritika, PSO2 New Genesis, Swords of Legends Online, MapleStory 2, Bless Unleashed, Astellia Online, Crowfall, and.. probably a few others that I missed.
But that’s because they left such a negligible impression on me that I don’t even recall their release. Out of all the MMOs released over the last several years, do you know how many of them retain over 10,000 concurrent players? None.
Bless Online shut down, DK Online had a 24-hour peak of 4 players playing, Guardians of Ember shut down, Warlords Awakening shut down, SoulWorker had a 24-hour peak of 5,000 players, Closers had a 24-hour peak of 100 players, Kritika had a 24-hour peak of 200 players, New Genesis had a 24-hour peak of a little shy of 7,000 players, Swords of Legends Online has been struggling to maintain above 4,000 concurrent active players, MapleStory 2 shut down, Bless Unleashed just launched so it’s too early to say, Astellia Online shut down, Crowfall.. well, you can Google around for the drama surrounding that game.
The reason these MMOs have failed is down to the fact that at the end of the day, they’re just.. not doing anything to set themselves apart from the rest of the competition.
Who wants to spend their time in a new tab-target MMO with worse combat than WoW or Final Fantasy XIV, not to mention a fraction of the total content?
Or better yet, who wants to dedicate their life to a game that’s entire “endgame” consists of running the same single raid and 2 dungeons because let’s be honest, new MMOs all have the very same issue when they launch: They don’t really have much endgame content.
MMOs slowly build up content as they continue to exist. Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2, The Elder Scrolls Online. They weren’t all filled with endless time-sinks like they currently possess.
Yet players expect new MMO releases to have the same level of content. I mean, let me impose this question: Would you stick around in a game when there’s nothing to do once you hit level cap? You wouldn’t, right? You’d grow bored rather quickly, and move on to something that can retain your attention.
New MMOs won’t be able to do that, not to the same degree already pre-existing, established games can. Which leaves the games and subsequently, their worlds entirely barren.

But the reason for this is because once again, the MMOs specifically are doing nothing innovative to set themselves apart from the rest of the genre.
If an MMO legitimately provided something exponentially different to anything else available, people would flock to it in droves.
Take Black Desert as an example: Black Desert Online is arguably one of the best looking MMOs in the genre. It also has some of the best action combat within the genre to date. But is a pretty game with fun combat enough to warrant the active participation of millions of players, especially given it’s a buy to play MMO? No.
It’s what BDO offers players concurrently to the combat and appealing aesthetic that truly makes the game a remarkable experience. An enormous world filled with content, varying monsters, things to see, exploration, world bosses, PvP, life skills, sailing.
The sheer freedom to do what you want, at pretty much your own pace without the overwhelming pressure of remaining “competitive” by running weekly raids with groups of players to keep up with the “item level grind” is something more developers should take note of.
By providing players so many unique facets – so many different methods to entertain themselves, they created a game, a world for players to enjoy that is different to the traditional MMO formula.

But the vast majority of MMOs, and by association, MMO developers, no longer seem to possess the same levels of passion that developers from decades ago did.
During the genres inception, every developer wanted to bring their vision to fruition. They wanted to leave their mark on the genre. They wanted to build on it, establish themselves as one of the founder’s, to have their name, their game go down in history.
And many MMOs did. Many developers did. Richard Garriott, Raph Koster, Brad McQuaid, Jeff Kaplan and even the legendary voice of Thrall himself, Chris Metzen are all people that instantly spring to mind.
Their passion, their visions helped shape the entire genre that we’re all a part of today. Take a look at MMOs released within the last decade and tell me how many of the names you recognize.

Now this isn’t a direct attack on new MMOs or current-generation developers. There are some fantastic ideas in place like Blue Protocol, Ashes of Creation, New World, Riot’s League MMO and ArcheAge 2 coming in the future.
These games might revolutionize, might revitalize the genre. They might offer something entirely different that takes the genre by storm, leaving all of the competition in the dust. It’s unlikely, but it’s plausible.
The passion that was once a major selling-point for the genre just doesn’t seem to really be present anymore. Which kind of echoes throughout the playerbase as well. Players are, more or less, sick of new MMOs because they’re just so generic. They last a week, maybe a month if we’re lucky, and fade into memory.
MMORPGs just no longer seem to possess that sense of longevity that they once did. And that’s a shame. In 2021, moving into 2022, the MMOs I’m actively playing are Final Fantasy XIV, which released back in 2013, Guild Wars 2 that released back in 2012, and the odd free MMO here and there merely to obtain footage for videos.
That is the state the genre is in right now. There’s just nothing that really captivates or truly excites players right now, or in the immediate future.
Genshin did for a few months, and while there are still millions of active players playing that game, at the end of the day we all want a new MMO to play.
Blue Protocol? Ashes of Creation? New World? Maybe something entirely new? Yet unannounced? Who knows. But at the end of the day, the reason we’re all playing old MMOs like WoW, RuneScape and Final Fantasy XIV is because they’re just better than their newer alternatives. There’s absolutely no discussion or argument that could prove otherwise.