On MMO stickiness and (happily) living in the past

The PC that I am typing this on is quite capable of playing modern games.  It cost a lot more than I would ever spend on one strictly for home use because I mainly use it for work. But when I am not doing things for my job with it, what do I play in my spare time?  Well let's see, since July 2025 I have been playing LoTRO. Before that it was SWTOR, and before that the most time was spent in DDO, EQ II and Guild Wars.  Yes, the original Guild Wars that came out in 2005. 

My problem, if you want to call it that, is that the only games I find "sticky" are MMORPGs. There was a whole back and forth about what that actually means that got me a nice little traffic bump a couple of years ago.  But in short I would define a MMORPG as a shared world with crunchy roleplaying game mechanics, where the mechanics are used at least in  part to help the world feel more "real", and that at the very least has some public areas where lot's of people can hang out together and socialize. I just don't find other types of games compelling for more than maybe a month at a time, regardless of how awesome they are.

For example, to my tastes Cyberpunk 2077 looks like the best offline game anyone has ever made or thought about making.  It's got a jaw-droppingly beautiful world you can run around in. It has deep storylines that play out differently depending on what choices you make.  It's set in a genre I love.  I even loved the PnP game it's based on back in the 1990s, and the cartoon prequel on Netflix is also  wonderful.  Perhaps most winningly, the RPG mechanics let you try out builds that do all sorts of stuff, from "kick down the doors and shoot everyone", to a close combat assassin, to someone that talks or hacks their way around most obstacles.  I would have been over the moon to play it when I was a console jockey in my 20s. 

But do I play it? Nope, of course not.  Once they ironed out all the launch issues, I bought the "all of it" edition for like $20 and installed it on my PS5.  It runs very well, and looks great on a TV I would have killed a busload of orphans for in the 90s/ early 2000s.* However,  I have played it for all of six hours.  Just long enough to confirm that it absolutely was just as awesome as I thought it would be.  I then immediately went back to whatever fugly decade+ old MMO I was playing at the time. Probably DDO.

For me the biggest issue with offline games is that they don't feel as "real" to me because none of the other NPCs are being run by real people.  The way that I play MMOs, this is also a genuinely stupid, or at least odd, concern.  For all the interaction I have the with other players they may as well be run by a computer. If world chat has something particularly interesting going on, or someone needs a pointer, I may pipe up there occasionally.  However, in general that's as much direct socializing as I do.  I mean why not play an offline game and hang out on discord or something?

I don't because direct social interactions are not really the point for me.  To me a MMO is like alternate digital universe that me and everyone else playing has decided to inhabit.  Other people being there makes it seem more alive and "real." Just seeing what outfits other players have on when I head into town is a delight.  I also love the indirect interactions I have with everyone on the server in the auction house.  "What can I get for this? Are there any crazy bargains on cosmetic pets today?"  Even if I never do it, I like the fact that if I cared to I could indeed group up with some people and have "an adventure."  It doesn't matter that I won't, as long as I could. 

Perhaps the most important thing for me is one that's also kind of subtle.  A player run character is hard to predict in the same way that real people are hard to predict.   NPCs tend to just stand around waiting for me to interact with them.  They feel like part of the graphics.  PCs on the other hand are always clearly doing their own thing, and don't really care what I am doing the same way that people in a grocery store don't.  I can interact with them if I want to. But they haven't been placed there by a developer for me to interact with, or as window dressing.  Only a very few offline games have tried to mimic that, and with generally limited success in my experience.  A team of developers with even the most expansive imagination can't really capture that feeling of a world inhabited by other people with their own individual intents.  That one small detail makes these worlds really pop for me.

In some ways my predilection is also a bit unfortunate.  It's not a style of game that is really growing or attracting a lot of attention any more.  For example, almost no-one is putting even moderate budgets new games in the MMOPRG genre.  Nor should they if I'm honest.  The market to support it isn't there anymore.  For example, the last really big one we got kind of just fizzled out.  I am not sure how many players it ended up with, but clearly New World did not have the kind of success needed to justify the budget that Amazon put behind it, or even to keep the servers running.  

It's gotten to the point that whenever I see someone get a Kickstarter for "the next big thing" in MMORPG space off the ground, I'm not really all that excited.  I just feel a little sorry for everyone that desperately wants this new thing to thrive.  If this guy couldn't do it, and I am sorry to say things are not looking promising for Star's Reach, whoever this new person no-one has even heard of that just "won" Kickstarter almost certainly can't.  It doesn't help much that kickstarted games are also often chasing nostalgia for other games that are still alive and playable.  If I am looking for that experience, I will just play the original game.**  

Beyond few teams having the needed expertise, budget to build something truly ambitious, or goals that don't put them in direct competition with games that are still going, the broader issue is that an online space where you can hang out with other people just isn't a novelty any more. Many many more games that allow you to do that than were available when I fell in love with this genre are available now.***  There is so very little that makes MMORPGs really stand out any more. 

Even if you want crunchy roleplaying mechanics  along with your shared digital social spaces, there are survival games that have you covered pretty well.*! And that is a genre that does seem to be thriving. There are numerous survival games that have crunchy RPG mechanics.  They also often arguably do an ever better job than a typical MMO of simulating a real world, and let you hang out with characters run by other real people.  So why am I not playing more of those? 

I think it basically comes down to two issues.  One is that many of them are a little too grounded.  One of the things I love about MMOs are gob smacking experiences like exploring the Mines of Moria, flying into Coruscant, or participating in the Battle of Helm's Deep.  Games like Valheim or even Ark just don't tend to include set pieces like that, experiences that make you lean back and say "Wow, I can't believe I am here!"  Even if they do they generally don't have a anywhere near the variety that a 10+ year old game that's been under constant development can.  You just don't generally get something like the 800+ zones of Everquest, or the dozens of planets in SWTOR.   Beyond that, even if they did, a game where you manage a private server for thirty of your closest friends just doesn't  feel the same to me.*$  It feels more like a really well realized fantasy neighborhood or town than an Alternate World. 

However, in the end this issue doesn't really require this level of analysis.  This post is a really long-winded way of saying that offline games, and even online multiplayer survival RPGs that on paper do almost everything I like about MMORPGs better, don't suck me in and hold my attention like MMORPGs do. Dying genre or not, I doubt any other type of game ever will ever be as sticky to me! 

*That is, of course, my idea of a joke. 

**In fact, I have been getting a slight urge to fire up EQ again.  I often miss it, fugly graphics and all. 

***If you stop by here regularly, you will likely have noticed me going on and on and on about it!

*!At least if you are prepared to make every single thing you own out of digital rocks and sticks :-)  

*$While doing research for this post, I discovered that this may be a bit unfair.  In fact bespoke servers that host up to 1000 players at a time are actually out there.  30 is the maximum number of players on a default GTA 5 / GTAO server

The State of Gaming in 2026

 Via slashdot, Microsoft has hired a really influential analyist Mathew Ball (who I had never head of personally*) to get their X-Box division out of its slump.  They certainly need to do something, because the X-box is clearly getting its rear end handed to it on a plate by the PS5 and Switch 2.  However, that's not what I found interesting enough to put up one of my rare posts.  

The article links out to his slide presentation on the state of gaming in 2026.  I highly recommend it if you haven't seen it yet, it's absolutely fascinating.  Among other things, it explains why layoffs are happening all over the US gaming development sector despite gaming revenue being at an all time high globally.  

My major takehomes from it:

1. US developers are getting crippled by their myopia. Developing games only for peaple with the very highest end hardware in the Mobile and PC space, or that can afford a modern console,  is really short sighted because it cuts you almost entirely out of the markets that are growing the fastest (hint, it aint here in the US).  There are also entire popular genres of game (like the erotic dating sim/ shooter) doing really well I personally have never even heard of, and I am pretty sure are not being developed here.

2. Many peaple enjoy setting piles of money on fire.  A lot of the money that peaple used to spend on games is now getting farted away in various kinds of gambling sites, such as prediction markets, sports betting and straight up internet gambling.  I guess it's the same concept as gacha games, just with the game in the middle cut out . . .

3. Invest in Roblox! 

Edit: But not right now!

https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/filing-national-pension-service-sells-791197-shares-of-roblox-corporation-rblx-2026-05-31/

Also, I promise I will be posting about MMOs again at some point :-)

*No actually, I had heard of him through Wilhem.  For example, a recent post here.  However, while I have looked at the slides he has posted from his 2025 presentation with interest, I never apparently even considered filing the name of the person that made the slides anywhere!

Project Genie: Make your own world with a prompt?

Via slashdot, this is the first time I have heard of Google's project Genie.  Apparently it will let you create an interactive world with a series of prompts.  Stocks of AAA video game companies are dipping based on the news. However, it's clearly just a tech demo at this point.

I watched some video demos, and it certainly looks interesting.  You enter a text prompt to create a world, and then another one for the character you wish to create. There is a check box for first or third person camera view, and then you get to explore the world using either arrow keys or classic WASD controls. You can also refine the world as you go.  The whole video honestly gave me slight Star Trek Holodeck vibes. 

It's certainly not seemingly up to the task of making a full featured game right now.  For one thing, as far as I can tell there is no way to do more than walk around the environments, for the most part.  One demo does show someone painting a wall.  But the limits of object interaction are really unclear, and I doubt you can (for example) set up rules for some kind of character advancement or combat.  Give it a year or two, and the ability to save and distribute links to the worlds you generate, and yeah it might be in the running for letting plebs like me design games without having to learn a 3D engine or the like.

I would love to play around with it, but right now it's locked behind a Google AI Ultra plan, which has currently been "generously" discounted to only $124 per month.  I don't get enough value out of any AI platform I have played around with to want to pony up even $15 a month, much less more than I generaly spend on some utilities.  Still, I will be quite interested to see where this goes.  

In a completely unrelated topic, Project Gorgon is finally live, as anyone reading this is almost certainly already aware.  I definitely plan to purchase it over the weekend just to support the peaple behind it.  But I probably won't stick my head in until the second fresh start server goes up.  Apparently they also managed to break peak concurrency of 1000 today.  I really hope the game prospers, I have been rooting for them for a while.

It's a Christmas Miracle! UI Scaling comes to LoTRO

Just noticed this on my normal daily Reddit check in.  UI scaling is finally coming to Lord of the RIngs Online, and is already up on the test server.  You can find the full patch notes here.  Apparently the patch also includes a pretty hefty amount of new group content for an old MMO with a budget in the range of a nice public soup kitchen.

LoTRO is an amazingly pretty game considering its age.  The character models are only so so, but it has some of the most natural looking landscapes of any MMO I have ever played.  This basically comes down to two creative decisions.  First off, transitions from one ecosystem to another in adjacent zones are depicted very carefully and gradually.  Secondly, the zones themselves are scaled to such a size that it makes gradual and unnoticable landscape transitions possible in the first place.  A large regions like North Downs can take roughly the same amount of time to cross on horseback that a continent takes in some other MMOs.  For me personally, these two design choices give the wilderness areas of LoTRO a much stonger illusion of being a real place than many games it competes with.

However, for a long time the game has been held back by a UI that couldn't easilly be scaled up to modern screen resolutions.  That means that you are almost always forced to run the client at a screen resolution that would have been pretty good . . . ten years ago.  You can crank the resolution way way up to 4k of course, and it makes the game look noticably better.  However, it also reduces the UI elements to tiny boxes that are extremely hard to use.  This is an incredible welcome change.

So far as I know today is the first hint we have had that this is coming.  Likely the team had some solution in mind that they were not sure would work.  Or maybe they just wanted to give us a pleasant surprise.  Regardles, reports so far are that the feature still has some rough edges to smooth out, but overall works quite well at 4K resolutions.  

LoTRO just became a lot easier to recommend to a modern player. Hopefully the same thing will be coming to DDO soon. 

Note: I'll be adding some pictures to illustrate my points about LoTRO landscapes soon, but I still have much  to do this evening and didn't want to wait 24 hours to post to good news.  Happy holidays :-)

Are MMORPGs an evolutionary dead end? What is an evolutionary dead end anyway, and how to torture an analogy (part II)

 This is part two of a post I put up yesterday.  I orginally put up both parts at once, but after sleeping on it I decided to break it up.  Even for my blog , where my readers must be unusually patient with long-form rambling, it was a likely a very TLDR inducing post :-)

Having set the stage, I can now move into the idea that motivated this garrulous post duology.  I speculate that MMORPGs were the first games to occupy the shared digital world product niche, and by getting there first they perhaps had more success than they really could maintain.  We can think about an analogous process in organic evolution, where there are all sorts of ecological niches that will get filled by some organism given enough evolutionary time and opportunity.  When we look in the geological record of various time periods, or sometimes in different regions during a given era, we see different groups filling those roles. Often the later species to fill a given niche are more complex organisms that members of earlier lineages that filled the same role would have trouble competing with.

 

Pterygotids, also known as "sea scorpions."  Some of these species were the top predators of their ecosystems, and the largest arthropods known to have existed. This and following images via wikmedia commons. I guess I could have used AI for these, but I actually wanted accurate images.

For example, one niche that is particularly dramatic and easy to think about is the "top predator" niche.  In any given ecosystem there are usually a few species near the very top of food webs, that as adults can prey upon any other species they come across and are themselves almost immune to predation.  Think of a lion in modern African ecosystems, a tiger in Asian ones, or a polar bear in the arctic.  In marine environments the progression of top predators over geological time was especially dramatic.  The first marine top predators were various types of invertebrates, culminating in the Pterygotids.  This groups includes the largest arthropods ever known to have existed, and were almost certainly among the top predators of their environments.  However, a basic arthropod design has some serious disadvantages when it comes to being a truly large animal.  Among the primary issues is that the skeleton is on the outside of the muscles.  That means that the size and weight of the skeletal elements increases faster than the power of the muscles that move them around as you keep scaling up in overall body size.  So the largest sea scorpions were probably large as animal using that basic bauplan can get and still function well, at least here on earth.

One of the earliest known vertebrates, Haikouichthys.  This little fellow lived over half a billion years ago, and was only about an inch long.  For one of the biggest sea scorpions, it would not have even warranted notice as a snack.

Vertebrates had also been trucking along for a while at that point, but until the Devonian period they didn't get particularly big.  However, they had one huge advantage.  By having a basic design where you put the supporting skeleton on the inside and the muscles that power it on the outside, they are able to achieve much larger functional body sizes than any arthropod could ever hope to.  Being really big is also pretty important for a top predator, as they need to be able to overpower anything they want to eat.  In the Devonian, around 385 million years ago, we see the first big aquatic vertebrates filling the top predator niche in their local ecosystems.  From there we see a progression of a variety of top predators coming from different vertebrate taxonomic groups, culminating in two absolutely monstrous animals that lived in the same time and place and may never be equaled again.  Though to be fair even the relatively paltry orcas and great white sharks of today are still very impressive animals that would have killed a sea scorpion (the top image) with ease.

The first really impressive vertebrate predators we find in the fossil record are these arthrodires that lived from around 380 to 360 million years ago, in the Devonian.  They belong to an early group of jawed fish that are now completely extinct.  From here to the present we see an ever more impressive array of top marine predators in the fossil record, each more terrifying looking than the last. Once big vertebrates were on the scene, the age of arthropod top predators was over. Vertebrates could reach body sizes that no arthropod could hope to equal, and with that came corresponding speed and bite force.

Going back to the evolution of shared virtual spaces, I am now beginning to think of MMORPGs as an early experiment that succeeded despite the technological limitations of the time by stealing crunchy mechanics from other games.  These mechanics helped to create the illusion of a world, and allowed them to succeed despite primitive graphics and a first hour experience full of absolute confusion for many players. These days any visuals or interactions that you care to represent are possible to render digitally.  Instead of creating the illusion of a world with mechanical depth, games can create the illusion of a world by simply rendering it in nearly photorealistic detail and putting a lot of stuff to interact with in it.  That is actually a much better mass market solution than crunchy RPG mechanics.  For example, most people have no interest whatsoever in understanding something as arcane as how stats really work in Everquest, or how you build out a legendary item in LoTRO.  But do they want to run around in an extremely well realized shared digital world and have all kinds of adventures?  Hell yes, almost everyone can see how that is fun.

This terrifying animal, Livyatan, was only slightly smaller than a modern sperm whale.  From the arthrodires (above) we see a gradual, but certainly not linear, progression of vertebrate marine top predators.  Giant lobe finned fish, Ichthyosaurs, Pliosaurs, Mososaurs, even a 40 foot long marine snake.  All of this culminated in the two largest macro-raptorial animals that ever lived (unless Ichthyotitan was actually predatory and not a planktivore).  Megaladon, a giant shark that only seems to have died out about 3.6 million years ago, you have almost certainly heard of.  Livyatan overlapped with it in space and time.  Unlike modern sperm whales that basically slurp up giant squid like they are big scary noodles, this species was an active predator going after prey much closer in size to its own.  It was up to 60 feet long and absolutely used those teeth to take giant bites out of other whales.  Both this species and Megaladon lived in an oddball ecosystem where there were tons of baleen whales about the size of a gray whale.  In this environments both sharks and hypercarnivorous whales evolved to be the tigers to these planktivorous whale antelope.

I also suspect that is why we have started to see more and more games that aren't MMORPGs begin to incorporate MMO elements, and in turn why the market for MMORPGs has stagnated.  Other types of games have started to take over that market niche.  What we are seeing now is the inevitable transition from arthropod top predators to vertebrate top predators that can engage a wider variety of players and do so much faster.*  Once you can digitally represent anything you can think of,  distracting players with crunchy mechanics and endless statistical complexity becomes completely unnecessary.  And much like how the endoskeletons of vertebrates are a superior basis for top predator compared to the exoskeletons of arthropods, design elements that generate player immersion almost as soon as you stick your head into a space are a much better starting point for mass market shared digital worlds than crunchy RPG mechanics that a casual "five-minute impression" player (1) may not notice or (2) may even be turned off by if they do.

Like a vertebrate, cephalopods have a "muscles on the outside" design (in their case the arms consist of a solid bands of muscle surrounding a central nerve cord) and can get very large.  Much larger than any arthropod. In fact, cephalopods have kind of always been waiting in the wings, and would likely be quite happy to take over the top predator role if vertebrates ever really stumble.**  Will invertebrates retake the marine top predator crown at some point in the future?    While that would no doubt be a fascinating development, and I'd love to see what kind of designs they would come up with (if I were immortal and could watch the whole thing play out) I have to admit I doubt it.  Fish are so abundant and diverse that even if all the current big ones (along with marine mammals) got wiped out, some other fish would probably take over in a half million years or so. In a similar vein, I'm not betting my retirement on a major western MMORPG revival any time soon, as much as it would delight me. 

 
Now I love me some crunchy RPG mechanics, don't get me wrong.  I am honestly a bit sad to see games like LoTRO, SWTOR, and many similar ones that I love (and started this blog largely to talk about) start to fade from the limelight.  But I won't be too upset!  A ton of innovation is happening in the space of shared digital environments right now, and quite frankly I can't wait to see what comes next. 

That said, every time a new MMORPG comes out I will be rooting for it.  "You go little sea scorpion, show them what you can do!"

*We (or at least our wallets) are the prey in this analogy, obviously.  However it really breaks down when you consider that many of us are actually swimming around, hoping to get eaten (at least for a year or two at a stretch).

**I left cephalopods largely out of the narrative because it becomes much more nebulous if you include them.  It's clear that there were and are some very large ones, but exactly how often any ecosystem had one that was able to compete with vertebrates on close to even footing for the overall top predator spot is not clear at all. In moderns oceans only a few sharks and whales are able to feed on a large adult of the largest squid species.  There have always been rumors of absolutely monstrously large individuals, but most evidence indicates that Colossal squid top out at around a half ton (though absolutely still nothing you want to run into while swimming!).  

Are MMORPGs an evolutionary dead end? Where they came from and where they are (part I)

This post over at Inventory Full, got my wheels turning.  Well, it's actually about three posts, the middle one is the one I am talking about.*  The premise is that big budget MMORPGs are pretty well dead, and that going forward the only new and successful ones we get will have small budgets aimed at a niche audience.  While I feel that the Asian "big budget" MMO market may still have some legs in it, by-and-large I have to agree.  Further, the few Asian MMOs I have tried (most recently one on my phone) really were not enjoyable to me .  While often pretty games with visually interesting settings, they mainly seemed designed to get you to pay to bypass various grinds. 

This also seems like a good opportunity to step back and think about where shared digital spaces are at in general.  However, I feel like some context helps with that, at least if you want to do it at a really high level.  So let's back way way out, and think about the history of online multiplayer games and virtual social spaces.  At first just having any kind of shared digital environment where there were avatars run by other players was quite novel.  Games doing that with honest-to-Christ graphics are way older than most people think.  However, during the 1990s is where we can see evolution of shared digital spaces really start to take off. A bit of an adaptive radiation in the parlance of evolutionary biology.  

Message boards, social spaces where you can hang out and have an asynchronous conversation,  had been going strong for a while.**  MUDs had also been going strong, but the two had really remained largely distinct entities though most of the 80s, or so I have read (I was in middle school in the mid- 80s and didn't even dial into my first local BBS until around 1989). However in the 90s with much wider adoption of the internet, and especially the popularization of the web around the mid 90s, shared spaces on the internet really began to take off.  Message boards started to become really mainstream, with a lot of websites built for other purposes even embedding some kind of message board into themselves (back then every single news story on the internet didn't have a comment box at the bottom . . . different times).  For example, IGN is a direct descendant of a N64 gaming focused news site with integrated message boards I used to hang out on around 1998.  This was all obvious to pretty much anyone on the internet back then.

However, much less obvious, save to fairly hardcore PC gamers, was all the innovation going on in shared virtual playgrounds.  There was a real hunger for places to hang out in that felt like actual physical places rather than a disembodied asynchronous conversation on a BBS or Usenet, and a lot of people were trying to figure out how to deliver that. In the MUD space all sorts of bizarre experiments were attempted.  MUDs were an especially fertile ground for experiments because coding up new rules for environments described by text is pretty straight forward (at least compared to building your own shared graphical environment from scratch!).  Programs to implement basic MUD architecture and modify it as you see fit were also really common and well documented back then.  For example by the late 80s you could hardly download a big IBM game compilation without at least one being in there, or at least that was my experience. MUDs also worked well with primitive 1980s and 1990s tech because the human imagination can be a pretty powerful graphics processor, as anyone that has ever read a book is likely aware.  

The mid-1990s is when things began to really accelerate. Suddenly almost everyone had at least heard of the internet, if not headed there themselves to hang out on message boards, set up a primitive website or track down kinky images.  During this time the game graphics needed to represent a world also evolved at a startling pace.  In console space, the progression in graphical fidelity from the Super Nintendo (1990) to the PS1/ N64 (1994) to the PS2/ Gamecube/ Dreamcast / Xbox (1999) was absolutely flabbergasting.  Each generation made the one before it look positively primitive.  While a little more granular on the PC end, as better and better hardware become standard equipment a similar progression was also happening there.  In the background data compression algorithms that would allow a server in one place to keep track of more and more information about the characters being run by players on multiple systems all over the world also continued to improve.  Back in the parlance of evolutionary biology, key innovations that would allow games to fill a new market niche were being developed.  There were early forays into online PvP, some of which like Doom, Quake and Half-life became wildly popular even in the 90s.  However, those represented baby steps, and were still quite removed from a fictional world you all hang out in together (unless by "hang out" you mean run around a small map and shoot each other in the face).  Regardless, it become very clear that it was only a matter of time before we would get shared virtual spaces that felt like some kind of alternate reality.   Science fiction authors like Donaldson and Gibson saw it coming, and had been telling us how awesome it was going to be for years.

While Meridian 59 and a few others came out first, arguably the games that first delivered on the promise of a shared virtual reality in a really rich and immersive way were Ultima Online and Everquest at the very end of the 1990s.  The way that they delivered that "virtual world" feel was pretty clever.  They took the rich mechanical detail of PC roleplaying games, Ultima VIII in one instance and DikuMUD in another, and used that to breath life into the somewhat simple shared graphical user environments that technology of the time was capable of rendering and keeping track of.  The worlds themselves were fairly primitive, if sprawling and filled with a lot to explore, and even for the time the graphics were pretty basic.  However, when you are in a world that is thought out in such detail, where there are hundreds of vendors to interact with, entire poorly rendered continents to explore, piles of loot to dig through, and even books to find and read, the fact that the graphics weren't cutting edge didn't really matter.  Those games felt like real places whether they looked like one or not.

Of course Everquest was insanely successful, and that let to the next wave (DAoC, Anarchy Online, COH, and many others).  Then WoW iterated on EQ, smoothing out the most punishing mechanics of the first generation, and was an order of magnitude more successful than EQ.  This led to many big budget MMOs chasing WoW sized audiences with a similar design that basically be summarized as  "DikuMUD mechanics stuffed into a shared 3D  rendered world."   Some like LoTRO, SWTOR, EQ II and even the original EQ remain among my favorite games to this day.   Up through at least 2012 these games were thriving, with what seemed like an endless variety of new ones to try out.  Even back in 2008 I had spent time in more than a dozen of them.

The modern era: where I hope the long rambling intro starts to pay off. 

However,  more recently we have seen this lineage of games start to die out.  Since Elder Scrolls Online, which came out in 2014, the only even moderately successful new western big budget MMORPG I can think of is Amazon's New World.  And even that us regarded as an overall disappointment by many.   I have to agree with Bhagpuss's take that the only successful games in that genre going forward are likely going to be ones that aim for a niche audience and budget accordingly.  We have even recently had a very dramatic example of a game crashing and burning on launch because the developer hallucinated that they could expect a large audience for a game that costs $60 to get into.  It really feels like there just isn't a big enough market for that kind of game to generate a return on investment for a budget in the tens or hundreds of millions any more.  When the new ones come out and flop onto the beach to die a painful death  while the internet watches, I honestly kind of feel bad for the developers at this point.

Yet, surely the appetite for shared digital worlds and virtual playgrounds hasn't diminished?  For example, based on audience size, the manga and anime Sword Art Online seem to envision a world that many find compelling, and one would assume that developers find aspirational.  Fortnite and Roblox are two of the most successful games in human history, and it is as hybrid gaming and social spaces that they really succeed for a certain audience.  So it seems like there is still a very large consumer niche that can be profitable for anyone that fills it.   So what is behind this change in fortunes for MMORPGs?

I decided to split this post up since it was way too long for me to expect someone to read in one sitting, though if you did make it through the full version I posted yesterday, congrats!  Second half to be reposted tomorrow.

*And his response to my response below.

**These are obviously still going strong in the form of Reddit, Discord and a whole host of message boards like GAMEFAQS and MMORPG.com.  You could even argue that blogs are part of this lineage.

***I stuck my head in a few MUDs back then but the few I tired seemed pointlessly clunky and slow paced compared to the ascii graphics roguelikes I was into at the time.

Sometimes a really boring story makes for the best children's book: Gemini's Story Book

The Story Book feature of Gemini is a hell of a lot of fun.  I used text from an old blog post to create a story book, and it did a very good job adding little details to fill out my account into a full story:

The Master of Fate

Interestingly, the first time I forgot to tell it to pitch the book at adults, and it generated something a lot more light hearted:  

The Curious Traveler

Finally, I asked it to create one  based on my really boring adventure in SWG from the same post above:

The Grind

To me it's actually a much more entertaining than the first one, which runs completely counter to the point I was trying to make in the post!  However, Gemini somehow figured out I was talking about a MMO, and added appropriate small details, which is quite impressive. It also came up with a title that encapsulates the point I was going for quite well.

Another surprise I got when trying to find the Storybook feature I first read about on Bhagpuss's blog, is that there is a small press that published children's books called Gemini Books.*  I have to think that Gemini becoming synonymous with AI produced children's books could do some damage to their brand.  I wonder how that will play out. 

It's also hard to believe that this blog has been active for longer now than it was after I first started it.  I fired it up in 2008 and then shut it down in 2012.  However, I came back in 2018 and now have posted at least a little for eight full years.  I even have a mostly written post comparing MMORPGs to eurypterids that will go up soonish, and I feel like three posts a year still counts as "active."  Happy hunting regardless, and thanks for stopping by!

*Oddly, that publisher has become much harder to find on Google today, I had to use Bing to get that link.