MMORPGs and... Me?
Disclaimer: Any name I refer to Josh Strife Hayes as that isn’t his public name is a name he used in a video. This is not an attempt to defame perhaps the least bad MMORPG youtuber.
I never wanted to turn this into an MMORPG blog but I kind of think I have to. It’s also the impetus for actually recording these as audio versions for Youtube.
I guess what ended up making this happen was uh. Josh Strife Hayes, kind of. But most youtube coverage of MMORPGs is wildly inaccurate or very tightly focused on specific games, and none of them are the ones I tend to play.
My current MMORPG Rotation is...
CatseyeXI (Final Fantasy 11 private server)
Guild Wars Reforged (Official Guild Wars 1 remaster)
Project Rubi-Ka (Anarchy Online private server)
Josh Strife Hayes likes to claim that MMORPGs haven’t really evolved past “Chat room with a rudimentary RPG attatched” and that’s why they’re dying. He’s partially right. But the blame being on “Oh we have instant messaging and discord so why would you ever use in game chat? Game dead!” that his fanbase misconstrues from his actual points combines with him going from someone who seemed to have a wedge of decorum about the medium to someone who pokes fun at and throws ad hominem attacks at the fanbases or decides it’s his job to do things just because the developer hates them then claim he’s being unfairly picked on as a meanie by people without the context
I’m genuinely surprised his career survived sticking up for PirateSoftware before knowing any of the context because people were being “A little mean and making comments that were uncalled for” because jesus christ.
This isn’t a Josh Dry Elbows hit piece though. This is largely a vent post and a shifting of content. I’ll still talk about retro games, but Rogue Trader is... a lot. The second part of that blog post might go up at some point but for now I’m shifting focus to MMORPGs, mostly private servers, maybe some free to play, maybe some buy to play.
I kind of just want to explore these worlds, this genre, and what it feels like returning to some of them, starting some of them fresh in an unintended circumstance, or just... the potential of the space being what the “Metaverse” was actually advertising without the braindead NFT ideology of “Carrying your owned assets through games” because idiots advertising it don’t understand how engines work
It’s a world you go to to wind down. Maybe you’re in character going to roleplay with a bunch of friends, maybe you’re solo, level grinding while vibing, or maybe you’re just chilling. The point isn’t “Chat room with a simple game attatched”, or an idle game, or whatever. The point is “Hey, this world is fucking huge, and there’s other people here!”
Though Hayes was right, as were most of his ilk, when they say that the novelty of an RPG that is “Online RPG” is no longer the selling point it once was. Or a selling point at all. Even MMORPG youtubers have tried to use that the genre... medium? Isn’t a big money maker as a justification for there barely being any new games for a long time.
The thing is, if they can garner an audience they make steady money. Yeah, World of Warcraft made less than Candy Crush any given year, but it still made an amount of money that justifies its development cost and kept Blizzard’s lights on when they hadn’t really actually developed anything BUT World of Warcraft in a long time.
The problem with MMORPGs and how there’s just no new ones coming out of anywhere in years is... AI, and late stage capitalism.
AI is buying up all the data centers as soon as they become available. Late Stage Capitalism wants ALL THE MONEY THAT EXISTS the literal moment the game comes out or even before. Grand Theft Auto 6... anyone think it’s gonna succeed? Because they want it to make as much money as Grand Theft Auto Online’s lifetime earnings on launch week.
yes that example is pertinent please keep up (I know it’s difficult because I’m a big dumbus galumbus with a beard where my brain should go but fuck come on man)
So the thing that made MMORPGs special from the word go was both player interaction and cohabitation. This lead to something that nobody really talks about in the medium any more without making fun of FF14 night clubs or Goldshire Tavern in World of Warcraft.
Roleplaying.
Games like Everquest, Anarchy Online or Asheron’s Call (The Big Three at the time) didn’t seriously engage with their pages on pages of lore and backstory because the medium wasn’t really there yet, so people would... actually engage with the plot, or in the case of something like Everquest 1 where it was largely disconnected. When I was playing Everquest my uncle was paying my sub fees a couple years before the 13 minimum age for players. I was 11. We lied.
Our guild was Good aligned and had an RP feud going on between it and an Evil aligned guild of mostly Dark Elves doing... forgotten realms exile roleplay. Because the lore was just kind of obscured and not something you could just check a wiki for in 2001. My uncle playing a gnome mage of some sort died in the conclusion of the storyline against a Dark Elf warrior and the rest of our guild rallied and wiped out the evil guild, concluding the roleplay. These weren’t just online friends, either. Afterwards they all got together in real life and partied, with one dude flying out from TEXAS and the rest being local. I got pizza and mountain dew instead of pizza and beer.
Nowadays Everquest is a freemium wasteland having expansions released for the last couple hundred players who are paying out the nose to keep up with the content. Because that brings in more money than keeping it online burns. Tangentially, this is why the shutdown of Everquest Heroes Journey sucks. If they’d not been pretty openly making in excess of 100 grand a year on donations. City of Heroes Homecoming stays online with Nexon's blessing because they do not seek to make a profit on someone else's IP.
I think a big thing missing from MMORPG “culture” these days is... the grind. Because for some reason repeating the same 10 dungeons at endgame isn’t “Grind”, it’s “The real game”. In this case by “The grind” I mean... getting to endgame should be a more significant part of the game than being there.
If you’re looking at something based on an MMORPG and super incredulous that there aren’t many people at max level, or anyone known to have hit the max level or “Seen everything”... then look at the date it was made. If it was made before World of Warcraft then it was probably based on Japan’s very early MMORPG structure of games like Phantasy Star Online, or Korean imports like Ragnarok Online, or crossover hits like Ultima Online and Everquest. Even the good games based on bad properties (Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet comes to mind, having no maximum level, you just keep climbing.) handle that pretty well.
A lot of the problem with the perception of such media in modern consciousness comes from Manhwa and the people who write and read it not understanding or desiring to understand online games.
You can tell there’s a wide variety of MMO and classic gaming stuff I wanna talk about, can’t ya? You’re an astute lttle reader, you are. Using those brain meats to think! 1250 fucking words into a preamble. I should use MY brainmeats to think of a more concise way to say this shit, god fucking damnit.
Anyway this is a lot of disjointed rambling about the oeuvre of MMORPGs when there is no solid, set oeuvre! That’s kind of the problem with discussing a genre or medium where the entire qualifier is “An RPG that is Online”,m with every single bit of “MMO Content” out there basically assuming every game is WoW by default to this day. Josh Strife Hayes trying to boil down the reason MMORPGs are dying as “They’re chat rooms with a simple game attatched, and that doesn’t sell anymore” getting picked up by mainstream commentators who also don’t engage with the medium is one of those major cultural shifts of the blind leading the blind. He even admits several times that the only MMORPG he’s seriously played is Runescape, and that’s... fine! Runescape, even in its current iteration, is... a proximity chat room with a rudimentary RPG system bolted on! So we see where he gets his opinion from, and that’s... fine! The problem is applying that to the entire medium.
And then people with no experience in the medium running with that opinion to the hills to shout it from the rooftops when they have even less experience. But there’s not a lot of impetus to get the experience of a dying genre that only seems to support two major games, a few niche titles, and several dozen ancient games on life support because it’s less expensive than ending support. Everquest and Everquest 2 are sill in active development despite being sparsely populated entirely because it costs peanuts to run the servers and pennies to develop for. Anarchy Online is still online despite Funcom having seemingly forgotten about it, and the devs they fired joke that if they find the server in the closet they’ll unplug it.
Most Korean MMORPGs in the west are on life support/maintenance mode and Gamigo is wringing what money they can from the diehards. The entire MMORPG genre-medium-thing is on death’s door but I do think we’ll have a resurgence after the oncoming AAA crash when GTA 6 doesn’t make ten times the lifetime profits GTA Online did on launch day, because they’re a long term profitable venture in an industry currently tunnelvisioned on slash and burn short term profit.
1656 words whaaaaAAaaaat the fUUuuuck, for the preamble? Am I kidding myself?! bBy ranting about it I’m making it even longer fyuuuuuuuuck.
As you can see, my silliness outpaces even my academic interest in gaming history.
Aaaanyway.
Gonna call this post here. But! I am continuing with this topic in the next post starting with a frank discussion of “MMORPG” themed manhwa, Sword Art Online, and games and shows set inside MMORPGs and their inspirations.
But before that I’m gonna take tomorrow off, maybe work on a side post, and get some snackies and coffee. My brain hurts. !
Fuuuuck.