All MMOs are online games, but not all online games are MMOs, yet some people keep trying to INSIST that they are. I fail to see how defining the game you like as an online game, rather than a MMO, takes anything away from the game, but some put forth a lot of energy trying to claim they are MMOs, as if it not being a MMO was some great black mark against it.
I've frequently seen people try to claim that since a lot of people are playing a game online, at the same time, it therefore makes it a MMO, and the old crock about how MMOs have "evolved" over the years, so the old definitions don't fit any more. Although based on such definitions, even something like Skyrim played on Steam for instance becomes a MMO. Some will toss the capacity for multiplayer into their definition, but then it will only need to be an active two player game played online to become a MMO.
It's not how many are playing a game online at the same time, it's how many the game can support playing **TOGETHER** at the same time. Many online games these days limit that to about four, to eight, when there have been arena shooters like the first Unreal Tournament released back in the 1990s, which only had online play capacity, rather than even being an outright online game, that was capable of handling some sixteen, or more people playing together. I'd say at least around 30 players actively playing together in a game would be the minimum count to consider it *massively* multiplayer, rather than just multiplayer.
Online games over the years have become less about large group content, as with so many online games out there, games that try to revolve around large group content don't tend to last, as they can't maintain the required player base. That's the thing that has changed, it's not an "evolution" of MMOs, it's the over saturation of online games on a whole, as more can be released in a period of a few months, or less, than used to exist in total. This is why so many current online games aren't MMOs, just online games, so if you want to put out lists such as this, call the games the more all encompassing term of "online games," not "MMOs," and you won't see these valid complaints any more.
Could the people who say that some of the games on the list aren't mmos, defind what an mmo is?
Just curious what each person's definition is.
It's "massively multiplayer", not "massive + multiplayer". Chess is played by a "massive" number of people (600 million), it is "multiplayer" (2 players), it is online. There's all three boxes for you box-checkers. Must be a MMORPG? Reductio ad absurdum.
It's hard to believe the goalposts have moved so far this must even be a discussion.
That stated, it's not just about how many people are literally simultaneously interacting in a meaningful way; MUDs are a thing, and somewhat distinct from MMORPGs. The term "MMORPG" also has meaningful connotation like:
*A persistent world *Large numbers of people in the same digital space *Progression *Role-playing
Publishing a list like this adds further confusion about what the term "MMORPG" means at a time when many people seem to be struggling with the concept. This is mmorpg.com; you could have used this as an opportunity to showcase some MMORPGs if you needed 5 or so spots to fill, regardless of whether or not they are popular! Perhaps in drawing your community's attention to actual MMORPGs you may even help some of them to become popular.
From your game list:
Rift WildStar TERA EVE Online Lord of the Rings Online Final Fantasy XI Dark Age of Camelot Ryzom Perpetuum PlanetSide 2 Dungeon & Dragons Online Ultima Online EverQuest Lineage 2 DC Universe Online Anarchy Online Dragon Nest World of Warcraft Age of Conan: Unchained Firefall Wurm Online Age of Wushu Vendetta Online Star Wars: The Old Republic Continent of the Ninth Seal Pirates of the Burning Sea Uncharted Waters Online A Tale in the Desert Entropia Universe Mortal Online
I submit that a random selection of any five from there in place of the titles that are not MMORPGs would improve your list.
What some of you and you being the older crowd (as well as people who never read between the lines) don't know is that the definition of mmos has changed quite a bit since the early days of eq, ac and wow.
Who knows, the definition could make some horrible leaps in the near future.
What some of you and you being the older crowd (as well as people who never read between the lines) don't know is that the definition of mmos has changed quite a bit since the early days of eq, ac and wow.
Who knows, the definition could make some horrible leaps in the near future.
No, ALL of these games are MMOs, but what an MMO is has changed greatly since the genre’s inception. And if you disagree, that’s fine. Just make your own list.
Its not fine. One thing is to have different standards/ideas about things and another one is to change the definitions. Definitions are closed structures. Some might have some margin in them but have clearly definited characteristc that must be fulfilled.
Even the friking wikipedia has an "OK-ish" definition of what an MMO is and at least 4 of those in the list dont comply with all the characteristics of that definition.
So no. Is not ok to "disagree".
Is a need, even a duty, to call out someone that is horribly mistanken and ignores the meaning of the words he uses. First to help him improve and second to prevent others from falling into the same ignorance/misuse.
Could the people who say that some of the games on the list aren't mmos, defind what an mmo is?
Just curious what each person's definition is.
I doubt it's even worth discussing at this point. Basically, it sort of goes like this:
This website was the initial website to focus solely on MMORPG's. I've been a member since 2003 or 4 with my first account. Users and autor's on this site coined it as a Large Multiplayer game that is played online in a persistent world. The RPG part is self explanatory and could be replaced with FPS or RTS for the sub-genre. But the MMO genre is just that. It's a battle those of us argued and fought about for years before, it seems, most of us have moved on for the most part from this website to other websites.
Covering only MMORPG's is what made this website unique and worth coming to. We were all mostly fans of MMO games to include games like UO, DAOC, EQ, Shadowbane, and SWG. After WoW, it all sorta went downhill from there on this site.
Since MMORPG.com wants to cover non-MMO's, it now competes with Gamespot, IGN, and the rest. MMORPG.com used to be my one and only website I'd follow multiple times daily. Now I follow Gamespot and check in here a few times a year.
The author's on this site brush the topic aside, which is disrespectful to those of us who've been a part of this community since the industry coined the term and before they were even of age to write an editorial. So when this is brought up, it's a sore subject for everyone.
Geez, people, lighten up. It's not like Bill said these were all MMORPGs, simply "MMOs".
I dunno...."M" (MASSIVE) "M" (MULTIPLAYER) "O" (ONLINE) all seem to fit each of these games. The definition of massive has changed. The days of 1000s of players sharing a single game are mostly gone and if you consider "servers" -- most of which host fewer than 500 players -- these games all fit.
The "new" MMO is 50+ to whatever number of players together in one place. People need to adapt with the times. Someday maybe the more "traditional" version of MMO will come back, but for now, times have changed. It's not 2007 any more.
With all due respect, and I mean that, I used to be a huge fan of your site over a decade ago, but since when can people start changing the definition of something? I mean, if tomorrows generation decides to re-define what we call cars to include anything with wheels as being cars, car enthusiasts everywhere would be up in arms.
You all helped fuel the MMO movement during the EQ, DAoC, and SWG era. So you all know better than most on this site that we're a passionate bunch. People who are mainly MMORPG fans are looking for MMORPG's. Not games kind with online elements. We rank our favorite MMORPG's like fans of a football team do with their teams, and we defend our favorite games and root for them much the same way. By including non-MMORPG's to an annual ranking that we use to not only see how our games stack up against the competition, you've eliminated the chance for actual MMORPG's from getting any kind of spotlight, thus support from possible bored players of other MMORPG's from considering another game. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it's a big deal to us.
It's your site, not ours, so you'll do what you will. And we've swallowed the non-MMORPG coverage because honestly most of us aren't just pure MMORPG game fans, we're also RPG fans aswell, but the annual rankings is a once a year event that we get excited for and this year is blasphemy for us MMORPG purists.
I prefer having a place to come to than to have this place close down. Some of you don't want to live in the real world. There are not enough MMORPGs for this site to survive on them alone. I don't care about definitions. I like coming here.
Geez, people, lighten up. It's not like Bill said these were all MMORPGs, simply "MMOs".
I dunno...."M" (MASSIVE) "M" (MULTIPLAYER) "O" (ONLINE) all seem to fit each of these games. The definition of massive has changed. The days of 1000s of players sharing a single game are mostly gone and if you consider "servers" -- most of which host fewer than 500 players -- these games all fit.
The "new" MMO is 50+ to whatever number of players together in one place. People need to adapt with the times. Someday maybe the more "traditional" version of MMO will come back, but for now, times have changed. It's not 2007 any more.
With all due respect, and I mean that, I used to be a huge fan of your site over a decade ago, but since when can people start changing the definition of something? I mean, if tomorrows generation decides to re-define what we call cars to include anything with wheels as being cars, car enthusiasts everywhere would be up in arms.
You all helped fuel the MMO movement during the EQ, DAoC, and SWG era. So you all know better than most on this site that we're a passionate bunch. People who are mainly MMORPG fans are looking for MMORPG's. Not games kind with online elements. We rank our favorite MMORPG's like fans of a football team do with their teams, and we defend our favorite games and root for them much the same way. By including non-MMORPG's to an annual ranking that we use to not only see how our games stack up against the competition, you've eliminated the chance for actual MMORPG's from getting any kind of spotlight, thus support from possible bored players of other MMORPG's from considering another game. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it's a big deal to us.
It's your site, not ours, so you'll do what you will. And we've swallowed the non-MMORPG coverage because honestly most of us aren't just pure MMORPG game fans, we're also RPG fans aswell, but the annual rankings is a once a year event that we get excited for and this year is blasphemy for us MMORPG purists.
Very much agree, and so simply solved by having two lists, one MMORPG and one Multiplayer Co-op. There is a question of parity here, how do you compare Warframe to WoW? You might as put GTA on the same list of 10 Best Driving Games as Forza because you can drive in both of them.
I would argue that the games on the list ARE MMO"s. They are not all RPG's, but I don't know if they really need to be.
YES, this is an MMORPG website, but honestly... MMORPG's are dying out. Were a long way from the golden days of MMO's, and they've gotta keep the doors open. To drive traffic they need to bring in new games and new ideas in a time where there really just isn't much going on in the MMORPG genera. There are what... Maybe 3 or 4 traditional MMO's being developed right now? Most of the current MMO's on the market are only making a few major updates a year. There's just not that much happening in the MMO-verse.
All the news and new games are MOBA's. Survival-shooters, and weird hybrid games. I'm pretty sure at this point we can all be fairly certain that the genera is moving more towards hybrids and less towards traditional MMO's.
That's not saying there wont be some super-game that'll come along at some-point and push the market in another direction, or some tech break-through will allow a developer to create something that far surpasses anything else on the market like a crazy Litrpg story, but nothing I've seen indicates that's very likely.
We're going to get more games that mix generas, more of the 'old guard' are going to be closed down, and we'll see more games like crowfall, and Star Citizen, and other games that gain a decent following but aren't really MMO's.
Games are changing and observers must change with it, I get that. However, in my humble opinion, I think it would be better to push for invention of new definitions rather than trying to obscure current ones. I assume we can agree that mmo is still short for mmorpg ? That Path of exile is an ARPG and not a mmo, that warframe & destiny are lobby based games and not mmos. They are all great multiplayer games and worth writing about, but they are not mmos. Massively does not mean "a huge amount of players", because if it did then Warcraft 3 would be a mmo, Microsoft hearts would be a mmo, and Clash of clans would be a mmo... and they aren't.
The only ones I played in the list were BDO and FF14. I did try to return to EVE but I think my EVE days are done.
BDO actually gave me the new player feels again. FF14 let me have the old player feels and but in the end I am playing Fallout 4 again so I don't know if any of them can reach the itchy spot for very long anymore.
Also, I wouldn't say PUBG/Fortnite Battle Royale games are "persistent" (part of this site's definition for this list), because they aren't. Nothing about those LEVELS (yes levels NOT worlds) remains the same. Hell they don't even exist between rounds.
I prefer having a place to come to than to have this place close down. Some of you don't want to live in the real world. There are not enough MMORPGs for this site to survive on them alone. I don't care about definitions. I like coming here.
You're right in that there are not enough MMORPGs (nor are there enough MMOs that are not RPGs) for this site to survive on them alone.
They should and do cover many other games that are outside the MMO scope. It's something I suspect most of us who come here on a regular basis enjoy.
But I do care about definitions and I expect the premiere MMO coverage site on the internet to have more gravitas about how they use that definition and what games they include in it.
I also expect that when an obligatory end of year top 10 whatever article is posted for discussion they phrase the title and the article's content in such a way that it focuses the discussion on the relative merit of the items included in the top 10 list.
This article didn't do that. Instead of a discussion about how, for example, PUBG created a new way to do multiplayer battle royales that has become hugely popular, most of the discussion about it has simply been about how you could call PUBG an MMO.
As some have said (jokingly I think) maybe it was just a deliberate miscategorization in order to generate hits and they didn't care about having the PUBG significance in 2017 discussed at all. A cheap tactic unworthy of the premiere MMO discussion site if so.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
@Torval there is no ownership being discussed here. There's clarity, then there's arbitrary and inconsistent "non-definitions" being claimed to generate hype and clicks. Only, as I and others have pointed out, there's no reason for the change.
Cover PUBG, more power to you. No need to try and force it into a genre it's clearly not to do so.
Certainly MMOs have morphed from what they were at the outset; MUDs, PBM, MMORPG - Anything multiplayer. We really need the "next big thing" to inject some life into the genre (No VR isn't it)
I really saw a turn when multiplayer games degerated into "multiple players playing solo games alongside each other." What I always enjoyed in the genre was working and playing with others. Here's hoping some of the upcoming titles will bring that back.
“It’s good to be a Tamriel fan these days.” Any true Tamriel fan would not be a fan of ESO. Broken console game that smacks you in the face as soon as you hit max level. As if max level means anything anyway in this god awful pretend mmo
Geez, people, lighten up. It's not like Bill said these were all MMORPGs, simply "MMOs".
I dunno...."M" (MASSIVE) "M" (MULTIPLAYER) "O" (ONLINE) all seem to fit each of these games. The definition of massive has changed. The days of 1000s of players sharing a single game are mostly gone and if you consider "servers" -- most of which host fewer than 500 players -- these games all fit.
The "new" MMO is 50+ to whatever number of players together in one place. People need to adapt with the times. Someday maybe the more "traditional" version of MMO will come back, but for now, times have changed. It's not 2007 any more.
With all due respect, and I mean that, I used to be a huge fan of your site over a decade ago, but since when can people start changing the definition of something? I mean, if tomorrows generation decides to re-define what we call cars to include anything with wheels as being cars, car enthusiasts everywhere would be up in arms.
You all helped fuel the MMO movement during the EQ, DAoC, and SWG era. So you all know better than most on this site that we're a passionate bunch. People who are mainly MMORPG fans are looking for MMORPG's. Not games kind with online elements. We rank our favorite MMORPG's like fans of a football team do with their teams, and we defend our favorite games and root for them much the same way. By including non-MMORPG's to an annual ranking that we use to not only see how our games stack up against the competition, you've eliminated the chance for actual MMORPG's from getting any kind of spotlight, thus support from possible bored players of other MMORPG's from considering another game. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it's a big deal to us.
It's your site, not ours, so you'll do what you will. And we've swallowed the non-MMORPG coverage because honestly most of us aren't just pure MMORPG game fans, we're also RPG fans aswell, but the annual rankings is a once a year event that we get excited for and this year is blasphemy for us MMORPG purists.
Word definitions evolve over time. There is even a word for studying that, etymology. One attribute of a "dead" language is that it doesn't evolve. Words often have multiple definitions and sometimes they're only related by their word origins and not their daily definition.
Context is everything. Words rarely stand on their own.
See you're not confused by the article. You don't suddenly think Destiny 2, Secret World Legends, WoW, and EVE are all the same kinds of MMOs. You even admitted, it's your sensibilities that are offended. You feel like your special MMO group of gamers isn't being served the recognition and respect it deserves.
I don't want you or others here to feel disrespected but it's a bit presumptuous and narcissistic to think you or your group owns the genre and its evolution. A lot of different types of players like MMOs and want to see MMOs be and do different things and many want to see other genres adopt a more massively multiplayer mentality. That means MMO and an MMO game experience will mean a lot of different things to different people. There is room for everyone to have their MMO style, but their is not room for one MMO style to claim ownership of the entire genre.
There is no evolution here. This is a very small group of people forcing a definition that society doesn't otherwise subscribe to outside of online gaming.
Nowhere in any other context will we see the use of words like "massive" used to describe an increase from the minimum base of 2-4 to 6. Especially not when we already have examples of that increase in the numbers of players in the hundreds and in some cases thousands. As I said in my prior post, We started with a multiplayer game at 2. My console would allow up to 4. So 2 min, 4 max for a multiplayer game. That was 30 years ago. Now decades later, we are going to call an increase from the baseline minimum by a fraction of that number, a massive increase? To force a definition to fit a personal desire to make it fit only within a very small group (Online video game players) is not etymology. This is not a paradigm shift. Not in any other context anywhere else in our society do we see the "evolution" of these terms.
first of all most of the listing are old games, or barely mmo.
then you put destiny 2 on that list which tells me you read a few professional reviews circa september right around the launch honeymoon and havent seen anything about it since...that game is a trainwreck. Stipped out everything everyone loved about Destiny 1 and then got caught in...im not shitting you...at least 7 scummy as hell developer acts most of which were designed to funnel you into the cash shop. I mean they were showing you XP earned on the screen then giving you sometimes as low as 4% of that in reality...because you get cash shop loot boxes every time you level after level cap and they dont want you getting too many freebies...then they apologized and fixed the issue then the next day doubled the XP. Thats just two of the issues.
Anywhoo...can vouch Path of Exile and Warframe are great and had great years
Sad there are zero new mmorpgs on that list because theres been zero mmorpgs made this year (well im sure some buggy indy games and a few ports from asia that probably didnt sit well with anyone)
Geez, people, lighten up. It's not like Bill said these were all MMORPGs, simply "MMOs".
I dunno...."M" (MASSIVE) "M" (MULTIPLAYER) "O" (ONLINE) all seem to fit each of these games. The definition of massive has changed. The days of 1000s of players sharing a single game are mostly gone and if you consider "servers" -- most of which host fewer than 500 players -- these games all fit.
The "new" MMO is 50+ to whatever number of players together in one place. People need to adapt with the times. Someday maybe the more "traditional" version of MMO will come back, but for now, times have changed. It's not 2007 any more.
With all due respect, and I mean that, I used to be a huge fan of your site over a decade ago, but since when can people start changing the definition of something? I mean, if tomorrows generation decides to re-define what we call cars to include anything with wheels as being cars, car enthusiasts everywhere would be up in arms.
You all helped fuel the MMO movement during the EQ, DAoC, and SWG era. So you all know better than most on this site that we're a passionate bunch. People who are mainly MMORPG fans are looking for MMORPG's. Not games kind with online elements. We rank our favorite MMORPG's like fans of a football team do with their teams, and we defend our favorite games and root for them much the same way. By including non-MMORPG's to an annual ranking that we use to not only see how our games stack up against the competition, you've eliminated the chance for actual MMORPG's from getting any kind of spotlight, thus support from possible bored players of other MMORPG's from considering another game. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it's a big deal to us.
It's your site, not ours, so you'll do what you will. And we've swallowed the non-MMORPG coverage because honestly most of us aren't just pure MMORPG game fans, we're also RPG fans aswell, but the annual rankings is a once a year event that we get excited for and this year is blasphemy for us MMORPG purists.
Word definitions evolve over time. There is even a word for studying that, etymology. One attribute of a "dead" language is that it doesn't evolve. Words often have multiple definitions and sometimes they're only related by their word origins and not their daily definition.
Context is everything. Words rarely stand on their own.
See you're not confused by the article. You don't suddenly think Destiny 2, Secret World Legends, WoW, and EVE are all the same kinds of MMOs. You even admitted, it's your sensibilities that are offended. You feel like your special MMO group of gamers isn't being served the recognition and respect it deserves.
I don't want you or others here to feel disrespected but it's a bit presumptuous and narcissistic to think you or your group owns the genre and its evolution. A lot of different types of players like MMOs and want to see MMOs be and do different things and many want to see other genres adopt a more massively multiplayer mentality. That means MMO and an MMO game experience will mean a lot of different things to different people. There is room for everyone to have their MMO style, but their is not room for one MMO style to claim ownership of the entire genre.
Etymology is the study of how words have changed during the course of history, not over a decade. Such a short time span would be meaningless in an etymological sense. Also acronyms are not studied by this academic discipline, to my knowledge. I feel it is necessary to point this out if you are trying to enlist academia to your side of the argument.
But what this is really about, is comparing like with like. Do you honestly think there is anything to be gained from comparing ESO to Warframe? Because that's what you do when you put them on the same list.
My position in a nutshell about the acronym MMORPG is this. There are many new types of multiplayer online games that have come out since MMORPGs began. Putting them all under the same banner without thought to gameplay and content is rather silly. Call them Co-op games, or come up with something better. It should not be beyond the wit of journalists and publishers in the gaming industry to do so.
Knowledge is power, describe things aptly and we all benefit.
Geez, people, lighten up. It's not like Bill said these were all MMORPGs, simply "MMOs".
I dunno...."M" (MASSIVE) "M" (MULTIPLAYER) "O" (ONLINE) all seem to fit each of these games. The definition of massive has changed. The days of 1000s of players sharing a single game are mostly gone and if you consider "servers" -- most of which host fewer than 500 players -- these games all fit.
The "new" MMO is 50+ to whatever number of players together in one place. People need to adapt with the times. Someday maybe the more "traditional" version of MMO will come back, but for now, times have changed. It's not 2007 any more.
With all due respect, and I mean that, I used to be a huge fan of your site over a decade ago, but since when can people start changing the definition of something? I mean, if tomorrows generation decides to re-define what we call cars to include anything with wheels as being cars, car enthusiasts everywhere would be up in arms.
You all helped fuel the MMO movement during the EQ, DAoC, and SWG era. So you all know better than most on this site that we're a passionate bunch. People who are mainly MMORPG fans are looking for MMORPG's. Not games kind with online elements. We rank our favorite MMORPG's like fans of a football team do with their teams, and we defend our favorite games and root for them much the same way. By including non-MMORPG's to an annual ranking that we use to not only see how our games stack up against the competition, you've eliminated the chance for actual MMORPG's from getting any kind of spotlight, thus support from possible bored players of other MMORPG's from considering another game. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it's a big deal to us.
It's your site, not ours, so you'll do what you will. And we've swallowed the non-MMORPG coverage because honestly most of us aren't just pure MMORPG game fans, we're also RPG fans aswell, but the annual rankings is a once a year event that we get excited for and this year is blasphemy for us MMORPG purists.
Word definitions evolve over time. There is even a word for studying that, etymology. One attribute of a "dead" language is that it doesn't evolve. Words often have multiple definitions and sometimes they're only related by their word origins and not their daily definition.
Context is everything. Words rarely stand on their own.
See you're not confused by the article. You don't suddenly think Destiny 2, Secret World Legends, WoW, and EVE are all the same kinds of MMOs. You even admitted, it's your sensibilities that are offended. You feel like your special MMO group of gamers isn't being served the recognition and respect it deserves.
I don't want you or others here to feel disrespected but it's a bit presumptuous and narcissistic to think you or your group owns the genre and its evolution. A lot of different types of players like MMOs and want to see MMOs be and do different things and many want to see other genres adopt a more massively multiplayer mentality. That means MMO and an MMO game experience will mean a lot of different things to different people. There is room for everyone to have their MMO style, but their is not room for one MMO style to claim ownership of the entire genre.
Etymology is the study of how words have changed during the course of history, not over a decade. Such a short time span would be meaningless in an etymological sense. Also acronyms are not studied by this academic discipline, to my knowledge. I feel it is necessary to point this out if you are trying to enlist academia to your side of the argument.
But what this is really about, is comparing like with like. Do you honestly think there is anything to be gained from comparing ESO to Warframe? Because that's what you do when you put them on the same list.
My position in a nutshell about the acronym MMOROG is this. There are many new types of multiplayer online games that have come out since MMORPGs began. Putting them all under the same banner without thought to gameplay and content is rather silly. Call them Co-op games, or come up with something better. It should not be beyond the wit of journalists and publishers in the gaming industry to do so.
Knowledge is power, describe things aptly and we all benefit.
Agreed. Most of us are fans of multiple genres, not just MMORPG's, so I don't think as a whole we're upset about mmorpg.com branching out to keep their enterprise afloat. I manage a business myself, so I do understand. However, it would win a lot of respect and trust from your community if you kept games with their genres when comparing them. I'd love to have a MMORPG exclusive game of the year awards, just as I'd love to see an exclusive CO-OP game list, and one for RPG's, FPS's etc.
Now a website that did all that would have me reading their articles on a daily basis again instead of when I remember that the website even exists.
Comments
I've frequently seen people try to claim that since a lot of people are playing a game online, at the same time, it therefore makes it a MMO, and the old crock about how MMOs have "evolved" over the years, so the old definitions don't fit any more. Although based on such definitions, even something like Skyrim played on Steam for instance becomes a MMO. Some will toss the capacity for multiplayer into their definition, but then it will only need to be an active two player game played online to become a MMO.
It's not how many are playing a game online at the same time, it's how many the game can support playing **TOGETHER** at the same time. Many online games these days limit that to about four, to eight, when there have been arena shooters like the first Unreal Tournament released back in the 1990s, which only had online play capacity, rather than even being an outright online game, that was capable of handling some sixteen, or more people playing together. I'd say at least around 30 players actively playing together in a game would be the minimum count to consider it *massively* multiplayer, rather than just multiplayer.
Online games over the years have become less about large group content, as with so many online games out there, games that try to revolve around large group content don't tend to last, as they can't maintain the required player base. That's the thing that has changed, it's not an "evolution" of MMOs, it's the over saturation of online games on a whole, as more can be released in a period of a few months, or less, than used to exist in total. This is why so many current online games aren't MMOs, just online games, so if you want to put out lists such as this, call the games the more all encompassing term of "online games," not "MMOs," and you won't see these valid complaints any more.
Well... damn, that was well said!
What some of you and you being the older crowd (as well as people who never read between the lines) don't know is that the definition of mmos has changed quite a bit since the early days of eq, ac and wow.
Who knows, the definition could make some horrible leaps in the near future.
Sure did
Its not fine. One thing is to have different standards/ideas about things and another one is to change the definitions. Definitions are closed structures. Some might have some margin in them but have clearly definited characteristc that must be fulfilled.
Even the friking wikipedia has an "OK-ish" definition of what an MMO is and at least 4 of those in the list dont comply with all the characteristics of that definition.
So no. Is not ok to "disagree".
Is a need, even a duty, to call out someone that is horribly mistanken and ignores the meaning of the words he uses. First to help him improve and second to prevent others from falling into the same ignorance/misuse.
I doubt it's even worth discussing at this point. Basically, it sort of goes like this:
This website was the initial website to focus solely on MMORPG's. I've been a member since 2003 or 4 with my first account. Users and autor's on this site coined it as a Large Multiplayer game that is played online in a persistent world. The RPG part is self explanatory and could be replaced with FPS or RTS for the sub-genre. But the MMO genre is just that. It's a battle those of us argued and fought about for years before, it seems, most of us have moved on for the most part from this website to other websites.
Covering only MMORPG's is what made this website unique and worth coming to. We were all mostly fans of MMO games to include games like UO, DAOC, EQ, Shadowbane, and SWG. After WoW, it all sorta went downhill from there on this site.
Since MMORPG.com wants to cover non-MMO's, it now competes with Gamespot, IGN, and the rest. MMORPG.com used to be my one and only website I'd follow multiple times daily. Now I follow Gamespot and check in here a few times a year.
The author's on this site brush the topic aside, which is disrespectful to those of us who've been a part of this community since the industry coined the term and before they were even of age to write an editorial. So when this is brought up, it's a sore subject for everyone.
With all due respect, and I mean that, I used to be a huge fan of your site over a decade ago, but since when can people start changing the definition of something? I mean, if tomorrows generation decides to re-define what we call cars to include anything with wheels as being cars, car enthusiasts everywhere would be up in arms.
You all helped fuel the MMO movement during the EQ, DAoC, and SWG era. So you all know better than most on this site that we're a passionate bunch. People who are mainly MMORPG fans are looking for MMORPG's. Not games kind with online elements. We rank our favorite MMORPG's like fans of a football team do with their teams, and we defend our favorite games and root for them much the same way. By including non-MMORPG's to an annual ranking that we use to not only see how our games stack up against the competition, you've eliminated the chance for actual MMORPG's from getting any kind of spotlight, thus support from possible bored players of other MMORPG's from considering another game. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it's a big deal to us.
It's your site, not ours, so you'll do what you will. And we've swallowed the non-MMORPG coverage because honestly most of us aren't just pure MMORPG game fans, we're also RPG fans aswell, but the annual rankings is a once a year event that we get excited for and this year is blasphemy for us MMORPG purists.
Very much agree, and so simply solved by having two lists, one MMORPG and one Multiplayer Co-op. There is a question of parity here, how do you compare Warframe to WoW? You might as put GTA on the same list of 10 Best Driving Games as Forza because you can drive in both of them.
YES, this is an MMORPG website, but honestly... MMORPG's are dying out. Were a long way from the golden days of MMO's, and they've gotta keep the doors open. To drive traffic they need to bring in new games and new ideas in a time where there really just isn't much going on in the MMORPG genera. There are what... Maybe 3 or 4 traditional MMO's being developed right now? Most of the current MMO's on the market are only making a few major updates a year. There's just not that much happening in the MMO-verse.
All the news and new games are MOBA's. Survival-shooters, and weird hybrid games. I'm pretty sure at this point we can all be fairly certain that the genera is moving more towards hybrids and less towards traditional MMO's.
That's not saying there wont be some super-game that'll come along at some-point and push the market in another direction, or some tech break-through will allow a developer to create something that far surpasses anything else on the market like a crazy Litrpg story, but nothing I've seen indicates that's very likely.
We're going to get more games that mix generas, more of the 'old guard' are going to be closed down, and we'll see more games like crowfall, and Star Citizen, and other games that gain a decent following but aren't really MMO's.
I assume we can agree that mmo is still short for mmorpg ? That Path of exile is an ARPG and not a mmo, that warframe & destiny are lobby based games and not mmos. They are all great multiplayer games and worth writing about, but they are not mmos. Massively does not mean "a huge amount of players", because if it did then Warcraft 3 would be a mmo, Microsoft hearts would be a mmo, and Clash of clans would be a mmo... and they aren't.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
BDO actually gave me the new player feels again. FF14 let me have the old player feels and but in the end I am playing Fallout 4 again so I don't know if any of them can reach the itchy spot for very long anymore.
They should and do cover many other games that are outside the MMO scope. It's something I suspect most of us who come here on a regular basis enjoy.
But I do care about definitions and I expect the premiere MMO coverage site on the internet to have more gravitas about how they use that definition and what games they include in it.
I also expect that when an obligatory end of year top 10 whatever article is posted for discussion they phrase the title and the article's content in such a way that it focuses the discussion on the relative merit of the items included in the top 10 list.
This article didn't do that. Instead of a discussion about how, for example, PUBG created a new way to do multiplayer battle royales that has become hugely popular, most of the discussion about it has simply been about how you could call PUBG an MMO.
As some have said (jokingly I think) maybe it was just a deliberate miscategorization in order to generate hits and they didn't care about having the PUBG significance in 2017 discussed at all. A cheap tactic unworthy of the premiere MMO discussion site if so.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Cover PUBG, more power to you. No need to try and force it into a genre it's clearly not to do so.
I really saw a turn when multiplayer games degerated into "multiple players playing solo games alongside each other." What I always enjoyed in the genre was working and playing with others. Here's hoping some of the upcoming titles will bring that back.
Seaspite
Playing ESO on my X-Box
I really dont appreciate a clickbait title on a article.
Please dont mix mmo and mmorpg in the same list its just confusing and unfair to compare them to eachother .
Im not gonna argue if some of the games is mmo game or not.
But im sure as blood can argue that mmo and mmorpg game shouldnt be on the same list.
-Semper ubi sub ubi!
always wear underwear
The game quest line is great tho..but then the rest fails.
and btw its a shitty list
Nowhere in any other context will we see the use of words like "massive" used to describe an increase from the minimum base of 2-4 to 6. Especially not when we already have examples of that increase in the numbers of players in the hundreds and in some cases thousands. As I said in my prior post, We started with a multiplayer game at 2. My console would allow up to 4. So 2 min, 4 max for a multiplayer game. That was 30 years ago. Now decades later, we are going to call an increase from the baseline minimum by a fraction of that number, a massive increase? To force a definition to fit a personal desire to make it fit only within a very small group (Online video game players) is not etymology. This is not a paradigm shift. Not in any other context anywhere else in our society do we see the "evolution" of these terms.
first of all most of the listing are old games, or barely mmo.
then you put destiny 2 on that list which tells me you read a few professional reviews circa september right around the launch honeymoon and havent seen anything about it since...that game is a trainwreck. Stipped out everything everyone loved about Destiny 1 and then got caught in...im not shitting you...at least 7 scummy as hell developer acts most of which were designed to funnel you into the cash shop. I mean they were showing you XP earned on the screen then giving you sometimes as low as 4% of that in reality...because you get cash shop loot boxes every time you level after level cap and they dont want you getting too many freebies...then they apologized and fixed the issue then the next day doubled the XP. Thats just two of the issues.
Anywhoo...can vouch Path of Exile and Warframe are great and had great years
Sad there are zero new mmorpgs on that list because theres been zero mmorpgs made this year (well im sure some buggy indy games and a few ports from asia that probably didnt sit well with anyone)
But what this is really about, is comparing like with like. Do you honestly think there is anything to be gained from comparing ESO to Warframe? Because that's what you do when you put them on the same list.
My position in a nutshell about the acronym MMORPG is this. There are many new types of multiplayer online games that have come out since MMORPGs began. Putting them all under the same banner without thought to gameplay and content is rather silly. Call them Co-op games, or come up with something better. It should not be beyond the wit of journalists and publishers in the gaming industry to do so.
Knowledge is power, describe things aptly and we all benefit.
Now a website that did all that would have me reading their articles on a daily basis again instead of when I remember that the website even exists.