MMOs evolve, whether people realize it or not. Jon Wood runs down five ways that MMOs are changing, offering proof that they have not stagnated.
Every Tuesday, Managing Editor Jon Wood counts down things in "The List."
Five years ago when someone described a game as an MMORPG, it was easy to figure out exactly the kind of game they were talking about. You knew that it was an online game with a persistent world, probably with a fantasy setting, with all of the standard RPG game design elements.
In today’s MMO landscape, new ideas are more and more often bubbling to the surface as the classic ideas of persistent world, advancing characters, guilds, crafting and the like are beginning to share design space with concepts from other genres: Action, FPS, RTS to name a few.
There are certainly examples of this spread throughout the history of MMOs. Upcoming games like CrimeCraft, APB, Cities XL, Global Agenda, Huxley, DC Universe Online, and The Agency, are all playing with the established conventions of how we think that an MMORPG should operate, and that’s probably a good thing. While there is a group of purists out there who feel that the genre is just fine as it is thank-you-very-much, I think that anything that expands on the existing genre and gives more gamers more options when it comes to MMOs is probably a good thing.
Read it all here.
