ArcheAge Chronicles, formerly known as ArcheAge 2, was officially announced and unveiled during yesterday's State of Play, and one aspect of the announcement has become a sticking point for interested fans: is it an MMO?
This confusion isn't helped by the simple fact that in yesterday's accompanying post on the PlayStation blog, executive producer Yongjin Ham repeatedly calls ArcheAge Chronicles an "online action RPG." If you've heard this before, you're not alone. We have been dealing with this confusion and genre-shifting recently with Amazon's New World: Aeternum, which is also being (mostly) called an online ARPG now.
Is ArcheAge Chronicles an MMO?
Simply put: ArcheAge Chronicles is an MMO, regardless of what marketing buzzword Kakao or XLGames is determined to use instead. Looking at both the Steam and the Epic Games Store pages, the term "MMORPG" is used multiple times to describe the experience players can look forward to - in fact, stating that the mechanics on offer will "transcend" traditional MMORPG gameplay.
In fact, the closing paragraph on the Steam and Epic Games Store descriptions calls ArcheAge Chronicles the "next evolution of the MMORPG genre." You don't have that evolution if your game isn't one in the first place. While the PlayStation store page offers little information at all, this language is intact on the Xbox store listing, though the tags stop short of calling it an MMO outright (though it does list ray tracing, which will be interesting to see moving forward).
Yet, on the PlayStation blog, yesterday's press release sent to us and others, as well as the welcome letter on the Steam page, XLGames is very clearly trying to get players to see it as an "online action RPG." And while some simply won't care about the label (which, personally speaking, I can take it or leave it if the game is good and gives me what I want out of an ArcheAge game), for others this is an incredibly important tag - especially in a genre whose "death" we've been lamenting for years.
Indeed, within minutes of yesterday's announcement, posters on both the MMORPG and ArcheAge subreddits brought up this exact question. Here on our own forums it was the first question asked on our coverage by readers. It's an important distinction for long-time fans of the genre, especially now that we're seeing yet another high-profile MMO franchise move to console and change the language with which it's described.
Why Online Action RPG?
When we asked our Kakao PR contact yesterday about why it's being described as an online action RPG instead of an MMO, we were pointed back to the press release with a comment that "More details about the online and multiplayer components will be coming soon." Kakao and XLGames seems poised to continue to use the online action RPG moniker to describe ArcheAge Chronicles, with fans speculating this could simply be because of the console audience.
Indeed, when Amazon was trying to play defense following its June announcement of New World: Aeternum, one of the things game director Scot Lane said in a Q&A was that ARPG "is a little more well known on console," signaling the shift in its language could be due to the fact that an MMO might push console players away. Kakao and XLGames could very well be thinking the same thing here, as posters on Reddit suggest.
When you consider that large-scale, open-world MMOs have been on consoles for quite some time now (I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy XI, Black Desert, and even The Elder Scrolls Online, among many others), there is a certain sense of mental gymnastics you have to do to fully subscribe to this feeling that console players will be put off. However, I also don't have the data that these large companies are looking at when making these decisions.
Everything that ArcheAge Chronicles will apparently have on offer screams MMO to me as well, from its raids, its housing, crafting and player trading (you can, apparently, form "town-like communities" with housing), as well as boss fights with at least up to 10 players that we know of right now. Ham also mentions in the PlayStation blog announcement that Chronciles will feature "large-scale raids," which you don't typically get outside of an MMO-ish game. In my opinion, these are hallmarks of what makes MMO, not necessarily an online action RPG (which, when I think of that, I still think of Path of Exile and Diablo more than anything).
Simply Semantics?
At the end of the day, this could simply be semantics, as I posited in my very similar post about New World: Aeternum. Whether it's labeled as an online action RPG or MMO doesn't change the game itself, and for many people out there that is what matters most.
However, the fact that it was one of the first questions I saw asked here, Reddit, and more, signals that this matters to a lot of fans out there, and the fact that yet another high profile developer in the space is refusing to call their game an MMO outright is concerning for some. And that should be taken into account when we look at the discourse as a whole. For a genre that has felt to many that it's been in its death throes for a while, a shift away from calling what is clearly an MMO just that is yet another signal that MMOs might not be as relevant as we'd like in the grand scheme of things.
I personally don't feel that, but I completely understand the sentiment. It'll be interesting if the language evolves around ArcheAge Chronicles as development hurtles towards its planned 2025 release across all platforms, and I'll be curious if we see a change in how the upcoming game is described to the PC audience versus the console audience XLGames is looking to capture.
As always, we're very interested in your thoughts here, especially as we've now seen this happen twice in a single calendar year. Do you care how its described, or is the shift from calling an MMO what it is to something potentially more palatable concerning? Let us know in the comments.
