The MMORPG Genre's Greatest Challenge: How Ashes of Creation Exemplifies the MMORPG Ambition Crisis

Fifteen years ago, I was just some high school kid with insomnia and a crappy ADSL connection when I first stumbled into the post-Cataclysm Azeroth. God, I can still picture it—huddled at my desk at 2 AM, the sound of my footsteps in the snow of Dun Morogh, my nerdy friends helping me figure out how to tame a pet.

At the time, World of Warcraft was barely emerging from its player peak. We were at the dawn of great titles such as Guild Wars 2, The Elder Scrolls Online, and Final Fantasy XIV ARR. MMOs that still define the landscape to this day. Each of these has found and perfected its own formula over the years. An originality that partly explains their success, at least in the context of the “WoW-like” decade that preceded them.

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Now? I'm pushing 30, and I can't help wondering what the hell happened to that magic. The MMORPG genre is caught in a weird position. Probably the crown jewel of online gaming in the early 2000s, it now finds itself stuck between a smaller number of releases, the impression of not seeing anything new, and that the genre doesn't learn from its mistakes. In reaction, a number of us call for “innovation”, but also lose patience when it takes years and years (and millions) to build. 

The Example of Ashes

Few titles embody that tension quite like Ashes of Creation. It’s the passion project of Steven Sharif, a former entrepreneur who went all-in on his dream MMO, founding Intrepid Studios to make it happen. Announced back in 2016, Ashes has become something of a poster child for what makes modern MMORPG development so tricky—trying to juggle bold ideas like evolving worlds and player-run politics while wrestling with engine constraints, community pressure, and the ever-creeping danger of flying too close to the sun.

But Ashes is far from alone. Projects like Star Citizen (still stuck in alpha limbo, despite eclipsing $800 million in funding) and Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen underscore in various ways that ambition in this genre comes, sometimes quite literally, with a hefty price tag. And yet, Ashes offers a sliver of hope. By embracing transparency, iterative testing, and early player feedback—tactics that helped Final Fantasy XIV rise from its ashes—Intrepid might just pull off what many haven’t. With the MMO soon entering its 24/7 alpha phase 3, the industry is watching closely. Will it deliver on its promise of emergent gameplay, from evolving cities to players becoming world bosses? Or will it collapse under the weight of its own design?

The Burden of Ambition

What really hooked me with Ashes of Creation is its node system—a world-shaping idea where what players do actually changes the game. These nodes are scattered across the map and can grow from sleepy wilderness outposts into full-blown metropolises, depending on player activity around them. And it’s not just cosmetic: when a node levels up, it unlocks new quests, shifts the local economy, changes which dungeons are available, and even kicks off political drama. It’s genuinely exciting stuff, but also the kind of system that sounds like a nightmare to build.

Unlike static worlds like World of Warcraft, where everything is scripted and compartmentalized, Ashes must account for plenty of simultaneous player decisions. What happens when two rival guilds vie for control of adjacent nodes? How do changes in one region affect another? In my opinion, this complexity is what makes the project truly exciting. But what kind of resources does it take to build these systems?

In fact, these aren’t just design questions. They might be nightmares for developers to implement. Probably to make it easier, Intrepid took the leap from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 in 2021, forcing a rework of core systems and pushing timelines even further. But in the context we’ve just outlined, I’m wondering, can the community really stay engaged through all this? Ashes of Creation was first announced back in 2016. That’s nearly a decade of waiting, testing, teasing. At some point, even the most loyal players might just lose interest, not because they don’t believe in the vision, but because the journey is starting to feel endless.

Transparency vs. Discovery

One thing that sets Ashes apart is its openness. Most studios keep development behind closed doors, revealing their work right before launch. Intrepid? They’ve been streaming monthly updates for years and letting over 130,000 testers—those willing to pay the controversial $120 entry fee—into early alpha phases. It’s a bold strategy, and a risky one. Transparency builds trust, sure. It helped Final Fantasy XIV’s revival, and it’s clearly part of Ashes’ playbook. But it also opens the door to criticism. Every delay or visual hiccup shown during dev streams becomes fuel for YouTube hot takes.

Then there’s the player base itself: deeply invested, wildly opinionated, and, let’s be honest, already knee-deep in the project. But with so many players having poked around in multiple alpha and beta phases, Ashes risks reaching launch with little left to reveal. Even if Intrepid nails the execution, I can’t help but wonder: what’s the point if the sense of discovery is already gone? The devs may do well to involve the community to shape the MMO around shared ideals, but when everything’s been dissected in streams, tests, and forums for years, that first-time magic? It might already be spent.

The Genre is at a Crossroad

In the end, I get why Intrepid chose to go the open development route. With so many MMOs launching out of sync with what players want, it makes sense to build Ashes this way. Gathering feedback early, to adjust course before it’s too late. And honestly, it’s working. What we’ve seen since Alpha 2 feels like a team slowly but surely closing in on their vision.

But I also think that same transparency is part of what’s stealing the magic. The sense of discovery—the wonder I described earlier, that once came from logging in and not knowing what was around the next corner—gets chipped away with previews, playtests, behind-the-scene dev streams etc. Even if the final product is good, maybe even great, it’ll be hard to shake the feeling that we’ve already seen it all.

Ashes of Creation might very well pull off a great MMO. I hope it does. But it’ll come at a price: a nearly decade-long development cycle and, perhaps, the loss of that “first time” spark that made me, and I believe many of us, fall in love with the genre in the first place.

Right now, MMORPGs feel stuck, caught between ambition and feasibility, nostalgia and impatience. Whoever finds a way to break that deadlock—to capture the clarity of vision Ashes has, and maintain players’ surprise long enough to keep the magic alive—that’s a MMO that could, finally, push the genre forward again.