I am mostly posting this article because MMORPGs are one of my favorite genres, despite my lack of time to play them these days. But overall I have been pretty disappointed with the direction the genre has taken. Moving more towards solo-play, story-heavy, and small-scale theme-park style content.
The move towards more solo play is just a natural consequence of players wanting to be as efficient as possible with their time. Needing other people causes downtime, even longer ones if you need them to organize manually.
When New World came out, ignoring all the other issues, a lot of the people who were playing it really wanted mounts. They said it was absurd the game didn’t have it. I missed being able to move faster too, but just by looking at the game I could tell that the only thing stopping me from getting to max level in three days was that it took time to go from point from the quest givers to the quest locations and then back. If it had mounts that would completely break the progression and they would need to make us have to kill a lot more enemies or collect a lot more items to complete quests or get exp.
I heard they added mounts in a recent update. I wonder how they ended up doing it. A couple years later getting to the end game pretty quick is probably no longer an issue so they may have done nothing.
For a deeper look into the way modern MMOs are changing with regards to player interaction, this is a must-read paper
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XfTt_Q795XvZa2t2gAahfF5G3zp56n04oTALPvNAsFM/edit?usp=drivesdk
Of course, and it’s important to keep in mind how much the context changes. Not just in gaming context, but keep in mind:
- MMORPGs are hardly a new genre. Their players nowadays are a different generation of humans than when the genre was young.
- Social context changed entirely between the start of the genre and today.
- In a similar vein, digital socialisation is entirely normal now. We no longer need a very fancy minigame (EverQuest) attached to your online chat room just to socialise.
- Through WoW and then again with the Wii gaming exploded as a hobby, even before mobile games created a somewhat separate but huge extra market. The modern target audience is on a wholly different scale. Just look at the peak subscription counts for EQ1 or DAoC.
It’d in fact be quite noteworthy if default features didn’t change substantially and continuously.
