DavidJagneaux

We're bringing this List column back from the dead by casting revive. Way back in March 2015, we took a look at the five biggest Kickstarter MMO projects out there. Looking back, we wonder how much has changed in nearly three years for Legends of Aria, Camelot Unchained, Pathfinder Online, Star Citizen and Crowfall.

What if there were a Fallout MMO and what if the developers actually made it the kind of game it has the potential to become? Would it be something like ESO, or more like Destiny?

When was the last time you watched a movie and though, “Wow, this would make a great MMO! There are different groups and conflicts, that could be one class, and this would make a cool class too. It’s perfect!” If you play MMOs regularly, then you probably have something like that go through your mind during most of your favorite films.

MMOs are the perfect playgrounds for chaos. Drop thousands of players into one seamless and dynamic world and you get nothing short of complete anarchy. You’d be hard-pressed to find a game that didn’t have its fair share of terrible people trolling others. With that being said though, a solid community in an MMO can be one of the most beautiful and cohesive things on the planet.

Warlords of Draenor has not been a successful expansion for World of Warcraft. It started out with a huge amount of hype and lots of potential, but all of that quickly faded once the honeymoon period wore off. After the fresh coat of paint on the surface rubbed away, players were left with repetitive garrison missions and a neverending grind. The story was interesting, but that only lasts for a short while.

You probably read articles on our website because you like MMOs. As a matter of fact, I’d be willing to bet that you play them regularly. You might even have read something on this site today related to one of your favorite MMOs. I’m here to tell you that there are other things you could be doing with your spare time. As great as MMOs can be - and they can be really, really awesome - there are other things worth enjoying as well.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about some of the best MMOs we've had in 2015 so far. That list included stuff like new releases, games that saw big improvements, and some of the most promising ones to keep your eye on for the next half of 2015. This list, on the other hand, is going to focus on the exact opposite.

I’m not going to lie to you: 2015 hasn’t exactly been full of big moments of big announcements. Maybe it’s because all of the best ideas are already taken, maybe it’s because everyone likes different things, or maybe it’s because developers and publishers are getting lazy, but there’s no denying the fact that the MMO genre has seen better years. From a lack of real excitement or hype around releases, to a lack of innovation, it’s not like it used to be.

It’s easy to get carried away with cynicism. The MMO market is lacking in both quality and quantity for new releases, as well as overall diversity. We’ve reached a point where the games available cater to a wide range of different audiences and anything new is seen as little more than a hybrid of concepts or unappealing to the mass market. Innovation isn’t dead; it’s just harder to come by these days.

Today’s MMO market isn’t what it used to be. A little less than a decade ago everyone was playing the same handful of games and there wasn’t much MMO-hopping going on. Free-to-play was all but nonexistent and unless you paid a subscription for a PC MMORPG, you weren’t playing much in the way of persistent online games. Nowadays, you can boot up an MMO on everything from your smartphone and PC to consoles and tablets. They’re everywhere.

E3 2015 was a historic event for the gaming industry. Whether you’re an old-school gamer that was dying to finally see Final Fantasy VII’s remake announced, one of the few people that held out hope The Last Guardian was still a thing, or just a fan of gaming looking forward to the biggest and best new games the industry has to offer, there was something for everyone. Hell, we even got the first ever PC Gaming Show this year! That has literally never happened.

Whenever an MMO is localized to the West from a different country, there are a whole host of challenges involved. Not only does all of the dialogue have to be translated, but content has to be localized as well. Material may have to be changed or censored or updated for a new audience and payment models are almost never the same.

Like most things, it seems like we go through phases of getting big, sprawling single-player RPGs to sink our teeth into. It’s a totally different genre than the MMO game, for rightful reasons, but there are a lot of overlaps as well. Most people that enjoy MMOs probably enjoy single-player RPGs as well and I’d wager to say that the majority of the people that read this are either playing currently or at least have an interest in playing, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

Echo of Soul, an upcoming Korean MMO developed by Nvius and published by Aeria Games. The good news is that if you’re looking for a unique, engaging, and exciting MMO to dump dozens or even hundreds of hours into, there are lots of options out there to pick from. The bad news is that Echo of Souls is not one of them. As several of us pointed out in impressions pieces from the Closed Beta, it’s not really a good game, but it’s not really a bad game either. It’s just kind of... there.

For the past year, my day job has required that I commute about 2 hours, each way, every single day. A necessary result of this is that I often end up spending 20 hours or more in my car every week just driving. This leaves a lot of time for thinking, listening to music, and, most recently, listening to audiobooks. This newfound idle time has rekindled my interest in fictional fantasy, something I stopped really reading over the last several years.