No Role-Playing: Massively Multiplayer Online Games With No RPG Involved

We have taken quite a few good looks at the world of massively multiplayer role-playing games on the pages of this website – so why not break the cycle for a bit today, and leave the RPG behind? While most MMOs are role-playing games today, there are plenty of them that don’t involve role-playing in the gaming sense of the word. The MMO part in the acronym refers to their “massively multiplayer” nature, meaning that they can host masses of players on their servers. This is a much wider definition of the genre, involving everything from battle royale games, which have seen a massive increase in popularity since the meteoric rise of Fortnite, among others, to FPS games, racing titles, even casual games. Let’s see a few examples from each.

The MMOFPS genre is pretty popular today, although not as popular than battle royale. The acronym covers first-person shooter games that can be played on servers by large numbers of players at the same time. The list of MMOFPS games is pretty short but some games have achieved some impressive feats. PlanetSide 2, for example, a game that ran between 2012 and 2015, recorded the biggest ever FPS multiplayer battle, with close to 1,200 players recorded in a single battle.

The list of notable MMOFPS games includes Hellgate: London, World War II Online, Dust 514, and Firefall.

The real-time strategy genre has lost a lot of its popularity recently but this didn’t stop it from becoming a massively multiplayer phenomenon. These also involve persistent online worlds “inhabited” by hundreds or even thousands of players simultaneously, usually focused on development and city building rather than battles. MMORTS games can be very diverse, covering everything from medieval times to mythology, space exploration, and, of course, warfare.

The list of notable MMOFPS games includes Dawn of Gods, Imperia Online, and Travian, with titles like Blitzkrieg 3, and Society in development.

This is one category of MMO games that might become more proficient if virtual reality becomes mainstream. Virtual worlds go beyond video games in their purpose: they are a combination between social networks and games. They have vast open worlds that are inhabited by large numbers of members that can interact in a variety of ways, from chatting and playing to selling and buying virtual goods, even land. These virtual worlds don’t have a set objective, and lack a “manufactured conflict”.

The best-known and longest-running virtual world today is Second Life, launched in 2003 by Linden Lab, with close to 900,000 “residents” at the end of 2017, and Sansar, also one of Linden Lab’s projects, focused on virtual reality, social interaction, and the creation of spaces and items in 3D.