As I grow older, I grow more distant to the genre which captivated me into the idea of roleplaying, immersion into a fictional world, and community enhancing the replayability of a game being something I considered a form of enjoyment. MMO’s have gotten stale. It reached its pinnacle, in my opinion and you’re free to argue about it, with World of Warcraft.

*gasps in the audience* He said that which must never be spoken!

Since the release of World of Warcraft, has their been a phenomenon in the genre that hasn’t thrown their hands up in defeat and gone with a free to play model to entice gamers to their bargain bin hamster wheel? Okay, there are some, fewer than some even. Many have collapsed upon their failures to capture what WoW delivered and many have failed in their attempts to grab gamers with their gimmicks.

One thing has become evident though, the MMO genre has petrified itself.

When raiding first came out, it was cool, albeit for a bit. Why? Because it was new. At first, it was exciting to grab a large group of your friends and undertake the opportunity to slay a dragon, to take down something that could not be solo’d and was too grand for even a small pack of heroes to conquer. Then the shiny coat of wax waned away and what did raiding become?

Eventually it became grinding for loot. Grouping for loot. A mind numbingly endless grind to keep ahead of a genre that had a finish line that kept moving forward the closer you got to it. People who came into the game later had to grind to keep up and people who were already in the game fought to stay ahead. Then there would be the occasional restart which made all your efforts obsolete and the cycle would start all over again.

Character development in an MMO is the equivalent of walking barefoot through broken glass for medicine to heal a cut. Development comes via gear and it doesn’t end. The wheel keeps turning. The entire idea of hitting max level and snatching gear as the sole means of “Character growth” is archaic. Why are people going to login if every expansion or patch all their efforts are washed away in a sea of patch notes?

Give people community driven goals. Fight for your country, I mean really fight for them. Choose who you ally with. Build homes, farms, communities, keeps and make these things vulnerable. We can still have monsters but give them a greater purpose than being a vending machine for phat lewtz.

We all know where the genre is going and while we bicker about WoW being better than Rift or Tera being better than Old Republic we all have to face one evident fact. You’re still playing a game with the same skeleton. You grow to max level and begin farming for gear. Looking beyond each MMO’s gimmick and promise to take you away from normalcy you know it’s all the same in the end. Is this really what you still want? Another game of the same old, same old?

We aren’t part of a living and breathing world.

Is there a notorious murderer running amok in the city killing civilians and walking away into a back alley? Let me choose if I want to kill him. Is he really a concern of mine? Dragons hiding away in a dungeon? How about a player who builds a tavern and has spent their time making this place their own little slice in the world only to have gnolls or goblins raid the tavern or for a dragon to proclaim in his seething rage “I HATE MEAD HALLS!” and proceed to scorching it. Let the community of players gather around to save the tavern, whether it be because they are looking for a good fight, they like the tavern, or they are just a good person and don’t want to see this poor player’s hard work collapse to some malevolent force.

You want me to keep killing Nagafen for 3-6 months while you make a new dungeon for me just to repetitively beat my head against the wall? Fuck that noise. Let me steal, let me raid a rival nation, let me build a business and be the most profitable man in the world.

All developers are doing now are adding a thing here or there. A new bright cherry upon a pile of petrified shit. The genre is stale, boring, and expected. The unexpected is not there. Innovation has flown out the window. Don’t tell me I have the option now to fight in an uninstanced dungeon where I can camp for loot or travel over and over again in an instanced dungeon beating upon the same enemy for months. All your doing is taking what was already there and building options upon it. Stop taking ideas from other MMOs and adding them on top a new MMO. Build something new. Build something better. Stop insulting us and become a phenomenon.