Nowadays, genre definitions seem to matter little. With so many games blending the lines between what an RPG is and what constitutes an MMO, it’s already hard enough to define most games. Yet, it doesn’t help when we willfully ignore these definitions, and that seems to be happening most with the “single-player MMO” movement.
I stumbled upon this while looking up some MMO videos on YouTube to put on while I cooked the other night. In a video by long-time YouTube channel Gameranx, the title “10 Single Player MMOs you can play for ENDLESS HOURS” popped up on my feed. Curious, I clicked the video only to realize the ten “MMOs” were mostly single player RPGs.
Sure, there were a few multiplayer games on the list such as Monster Hunter World, but it was mostly the type of game we’d classify in our “RPG Files” column series if we wrote about them.
The justification for this title was made from the get go, with the narrator Falcon stating that single player MMOs are games that “play like an MMO” but can be played by single player. Pretty straight forward, but the contradiction here is hard to ignore.
MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER Is key
First of all, it should be noted that the term “MMO” has started to serve as a catch-all marketing term as more and more games start to add the features and online components that MMOs have traditionally had for decades. Games like Fortnite and ARK: Survival Evolved are simply building off the groundwork laid by Ultima Online, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft in days gone by.
For a while, any game that included a large multiplayer component was called an “MMO.” The term “survival MMO” is probably one of the most ubiquitous nowadays, though we know not everyone uses that phrase to describe the current wave of survival crafters nowadays. We’ve even started to move away from it despite what a developer calls it, now just referring to them as just that, a survival crafter (I know our friends at Massively use “survivalbox,” which has a good ring to it as well).
Definitions matter, and while developers and marketers mired the meaning of MMO, I do acknowledge that our site has played a role as well in years past, defining games that don’t feel like an MMO as one (no, despite being played massively by a ton of people and being multiplayer, League of Legends is not a traditional MMO, as one example).
We all also have varying ideas of what constitutes an MMO. Is it 100 players on the same server together? 1000? What about the differences between an MMO and an MMORPG? Is there even a difference? For some, there isn’t, while for others, it’s as clear as day (and is a topic for an article another day).
However, I think the definition is right in the name: Massively Multiplayer Online. Those three words have meaning all their own, and all need to be present to call something an MMO. Sure, we can debate on the number “massively” means, but the other two aren’t really up for debate. Is it multiplayer? Well then, naturally, it would be online right? I mean, couch co-op World of Warcraft would be cool, but I don’t see that ever happening.
Hell, even the Dictionary definition doesn’t give any leeway to a single-player game being propped up as an MMO: “any online video game in which a player interacts with a large number of other players.” However, a definition like this certainly opens the door for games like Fortnite to be classified as one (though I don’t personally ascribe to this).
The idea of a single-player game feeling like an MMO, which is the definition offered by the video as justification for calling them “single-player MMOs,” completely misses the mark. How can a game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey feel like an MMO when you neither play online nor interact with “a large number of players?” Are we simply calling open-world games MMOs now? Is it the vast worlds you can explore that feel like the huge tracts of land you romp around in your favorite MMORPG?
If that’s the case, would The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim be an MMO under this definition? I’m sure Todd Howard would love to learn this, if for no other reason than as a way to market and re-release the RPG for the umpteenth time.
No, a single-player game cannot feel like an MMO purely because it lacks two of the three major factors that make an MMO: the massively multiplayer part.
Yes, you can play MMOs single-player
However, this muddies another trend that’s been taking over MMOs in the last ten years: an emphasis on single-player gameplay.
Yes, it’s true that MMOs are best when played with other people. This is what made the genre so enduring through the games industry's tumults and the rise and fall (and then the rise again) of the MMO genre since the 1990s.
But more and more games are trying to cater to a wider swathe of players, and this necessitates making sure that much of a game’s content can be played alone. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. I’ve played most of Final Fantasy XIV as a single-player JRPG until it came time to do a few duties, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on much. The Lord of the Rings Online has been mostly soloable for years now, despite its roots in fellowship and community.
Heck, one of the main reasons Amazon is starting to classify its MMORPG New World as an action RPG is its renewed focus on solo play.
Playing an MMO single-player is a choice, and one player is perfectly allowed to make it. But it doesn’t remove the main pillars of what an MMO is: it’s still massive, and it’s still, at its heart, a multiplayer experience.
Take EVE Online, for example. This is a single-shard MMO where every player inhabits the same server. You can spend your entire existence in New Eden by yourself, mining, ratting, completing missions, and more, should you choose. Yet you will inevitably run into other players. You will have to interact with the population through the in-game market. Lose your ship? Well, guess who made the ship you’re now buying in Jita? Another capsuleer. Get ganked by a group of organized pirates? Well, your solo play just got interrupted by the multiplayer elements in your MMO.
The same is true for Final Fantasy XIV. You can do duties now with NPC groups, but when it comes to its raids or major boss fights, you’ll be forced into grouping with other Warriors of Light. You cannot completely avoid the multiplayer aspects of an MMO, whether you decide to be a lone wolf or play as part of a larger group.
By contrast, you cannot escape your solitude in a truly single-player game. You, the player, define everything in that game. You cannot have a game that feels like an MMO if it has an absolute absence of what makes an MMO feel the way it does. By calling a single-player game an MMO, you’ve now muddied an already muddy discussion even further and made it harder for those actually looking for an MMO to find the right one.
Call them what they are: single-player RPGs
Part of this is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Every major media outlet has to play this game now, especially in these times of uncertainty with Google’s algorithm changes. MMOs are a buzzword in the industry and it draws eyeballs, regardless of what the genre doomsayers may predict. The “death” of MMOs has apparently been coming for a decade now, yet it’s still one of the more exciting genres out there.
Single-player RPGs are everywhere, and they are great. We cover them now partly because of the SEO game but also because we enjoy them. And our readership numbers show that a lot of you out there, despite what the forums will occasionally say, enjoy reading them (yes, we know it’s not an MMO…you can seriously stop commenting that).
There is no need to invent a whole new genre of game just to describe what is already there: a single-player RPG. By doing so, you’re confusing viewers who may have come for an MMO discussion and are given nothing but.
It’s telling that 31 seconds into the video, the narrator states that the list is “focusing on games that are no MMOs,” despite calling them that mere seconds before. This is a bit of an issue wholesale in games media nowadays, especially on YouTube. Again, much of this could purely be because SEO is king, and optimizing titles and videos to search terms and not the actual content is more important now than ever, but still, this could be avoided by just calling it what it is: a single-player game.
I feel a bit like “old man yelling at cloud” right now. For some, including myself in the past, the strict definition of what is and isn’t something in games didn’t matter much, especially as so many games started borrowing elements from other genres. As we saw more games become “MMO-like” over the years, this blending and morphing of what an MMO truly is was natural.
But definitions do matter. An MMO is not a single-player game—even one with solo elements, full stop. A single-player game cannot feel like an MMO because it lacks all of the unique elements that make up an MMO, full stop.
So please, stop calling your single-player games MMOs.
