MMOs and Player Expectations

This isn't going to be a formal post, more of an I-transcribe-my-stream-of-consciousness writing exercise as I navigate my thoughts. So, for starters:

What is the purpose of the first 'M' in MMO?

I go back and forth on this all the time. I've played World of Warcraft off and on for around a decade (mainly off, most of my time has been in Classic). I played Final Fantasy XIV all the way through Shadowbringers. I've picked up and dropped Guild Wars 2, TERA, Black Desert Online, and Lost Ark. I'm by no means an MMO veteran, nor would I claim to be an avid MMO player. But I've browsed, and I have always been deeply compelled by a massive, virtual world with other players.

The first 'M' means 'Massively'. It isn't very complicated, to be honest, so why did I ask the question? Well, Massively is indicative of a few things and I think a lot of MMOs don't properly address this term when they brand themselves as such. Keep in mind this is all my opinion, nothing more. I'm not well versed in the nuance of genre-branding, or how MMO as a term may have changed definitions colloquially. This is what it means to me.

Massively means the following:

1. A vast, sprawling world

2. Large-scale communities

3. Swathes of players in capitals or endgame hubs

4. High player-to-player interaction (world PvP, grouping, trading)

5. 24+ person PvP matches, objective based

6. Sprawling raids and 8+ person raiding parties

World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV are great examples of games that fulfill these criteria, and each has a different approach.

World of Warcraft is an MMO first and foremost, and was from the get-go. You are a nobody joining a faction at war, and as you get stronger you become intertwined with the plot of the greater world. This is compelling, but I don't think World of Warcraft's narrative has ever been its strongest aspect. The vastness, the open-endedness, the forge-your-own-path-ness; these are what makes World of Warcraft a compelling player experience.

Final Fantasy XIV takes its narrative very seriously, and can almost be treated as a single-player RPG save for alliance raids and early dungeons that lack NPC party filling. There are still a plethora of MMO-type features, though, and its endgame activities are arguably the most compelling in the genre from the standpoints of both enjoyability and difficulty.

I'll provide another example here, one that I think fails to meet my standard of 'Massively': Lost Ark. Lost Ark feels, at least to me, like a Diablo-style ARPG with MMO aspects added on top, coupled with a free-to-play business model. I will concede that this might be different at endgame, but not once during my time in Lost Ark did I feel a connection or admiration towards other players. I never had those "wow, they have such a cool mount" or "I wonder if they'll party with me and help me clear this hard quest" moments, I just played through the content. I was never captured by the narrative in the way that I was with Final Fantasy XIV, and I never had any compelling player-interaction moments that I find myself in so often while playing World of Warcraft Classic. So I dropped the game! And I think that says something, not necessarily about the quality of Lost Ark — it is undoubtedly a good game, and people enjoy playing it. I think it says something about its failure to capture my attention as a player, what it did and didn't do, and why I look at it and feel none of the wonder I feel towards other existing or emergent MMOs.

When I as a player enter an MMO, I am expecting to (unless I play on launch) join after others have exhausted the content. I'm expecting to see endgame-geared players hanging out in social hubs. I'm expecting to see incredible mounts or cosmetic rewards from hard achievements, things that make me want to dig my teeth into the meat of the game. I'm expecting to feel something. Wonder. Intrigue. Excitement. And I don't think this should be singled out to the gameplay and game mechanics.

It's everything.

The world, social systems, leveling, endgame, player progression. It's the whole package. And that's an extremely hard goal to meet. I don't think a single game has properly satisfied my MMO fantasy; that's fine, I don't actually expect them to (though it would be nice). I'm fueled by my experiences playing Dungeons & Dragons, watching isekai anime in middle school, thinking about an undiscovered fantasy world where anything is possible and magic is real. Class fantasy, where a paladin can stand in front of a dozen people and protect them from dragonfire; where a mage can weave blizzards and thunderstorms, lay oil slicks and ignite enemies in an infernal blaze; where a rogue can sneak through a garrison and steal from a bank, then kill the sole player who witnessed the crime before they can call the guards.

So why did I include player expectations in the title of this post? It's because I struggle to align my own expectations with what the industry wants to do. Plenty of people have this expectation that their "time will be respected" while playing, but I always wonder what that means, really. Do they mean that they should be able to get in a good play session with whatever time they have, be it 30 minutes or 6 hours? What makes a good play session to begin with? Tangible progress after each play session? How much progress? Should the progress be easily measurable? In a PvP game, if you lose 75% of your matches in a play session, was your time respected? If there's a random drop that doesn't have a deterministic acquisition path, is farming that drop specifically when the drop is cosmetic only disrespectful of your time because the acquisition is equivalent to gambling? Is there a place for random chance drops in a game that truly "respects your time"? Should everything have an acquisition path that, given enough time, all players can reach regardless of gameplay improvement? I struggle with the last one a lot, admittedly, and I don't have good answers for any of these. They're all important questions.

That said, my expectation when it comes to an MMO is that I am entering a different world. Yes, it is still a video game, but it is also a portal into something different. For many, MMOs form an escape. Maybe that's something I align with subconsciously, using MMOs as a form of escapism. It probably is. But there's also a large part of me that has this childlike wonder for vast worlds, exploration, loot, and player expression both through gameplay and socialization. I still get that feeling sometimes, like when I stepped into Blade's Edge Mountains for the first time in World of Warcraft Classic, or The Tempest in Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers.

What I want in an MMO is a game that feels like a world, not a world that feels like a game.

Hope that all made sense, and if you got anything valuable out of this, I'm glad.

Cheers for reading through to the end :)