The rise of MMO-RPG’s
One of the most widely known MMO-RPG’s of our day in age is World of Warcraft. With the development of MMO-RPG’s throughout the years, many things have changed and ideas spread throughout. Yet, World of Warcraft was not the first MMO-RPG that gained notoriety in the world. That title would be saved for Mazewar, being the first time the formula for an online game that could be played with others was tested out. As computers and systems were a fairly new format and idea for anything it gains very little popularity in the world and eventually crashed and burned. Then came the game Avatar on the PLATO system which expanded the horizons of many college students as nearly the only way to get access to a good system in that day and age was to go to college. This started the trail of ideas that led to games becoming ever more prevalent in our society as a whole, later leading to the release of EverQuest in March of 1999. Slowly this came to a climax with the release of RuneScape which was THE biggest MMO-RPG of its years.
Even still RuneScape has some players that play even today in 2019. The ideas behind RuneScape were revolutionary and the formula is still used today in MMO-RPG’s. It changed the open source idea that MMO’s can be anything and started building a story world for people to follow and fall in love with as many have in the past and will in the future forevermore. RuneScape succeeded so well that it had two more sequels released, RuneScape2 and RuneScape3 — not the most creative names but they work! Even today they are working on the release of RuneScape4 which will be a breath of fresh air for the people who originally played RuneScape. Moving forward, in 2002 with the release of Final Fantasy XI by Square Enix, it sparked the revolution for games to have online servers on Consoles such as the PlayStation or X-Box. It gave the first ideas to the world of content such as “Raids” which are groups of players that come together to go against a high tier dungeon that takes the best gear in the game to take on.
Even with having the best gear you had to have teamwork and care for each other to be able to truly clear the high tier content. Coming fast on the coat-tails of FFXI came Ubisoft’s Shadowbane which came with the idea of no quests or anything to happen, it was quickly quashed out but the ideas of people creating their own content exists even today. After that came Toontown which was the first MMO-RPG to be targeted towards kids and it blew up quickly. It mainly consisted of characters from Who Framed Roger Rabbit and expanded outwards towards more games to families. After this came the Current Generation of MMO-RPG’s. The generation turned with the release of World of Warcraft which shadowed out RuneScape quickly and dominated 50% of the Online Game Subscription market for years. It took all the ideas put in place from prior MMO-RPG’s and expanded on them from dungeons to crafting, adding something for everyone who wanted to do something. In the following years came Guild Wars, which unlike WoW was a one-time purchase game that was a winning system for their producers. Soon came MapleStory which is also a large game today even with its 2-D model and causing most people to feel nostalgia to pull even the oldest players on in. Proceeding onwards came the game Star Wars: The Old Republic which only recently has begun to see a decline in subscriptions due to poor updates and releases that do not draw the original audience back in for more.
Finally with one of the most prevalent MMO-RPG’s of the current age is Final Fantasy XIV, it took the ideas given by WoW and pulled it off even better. From the ideas behind crafting towards dungeons, they pulled off class systems much better and raiding at an even better rate. The game builds a story throughout and the attachments you make with each of the characters feels real and all the characters have really thought out ideas and they feel real to a fault. The game is like a storybook brought to life where your choices matter in real time. Yet this is the goal of all MMO-RPG’s to let people into a new world to see what decisions they can make to change this world for better or worse, to save or destroy it, to be a hero and a villain. The MMO-RPG genre has existed from the very beginning of video games and will remain for its whole life span since it has an amazing ability to evolve and change over the years, from Maze War to FFXIV it has changed quite a bit since it first was born. Maybe it will change more in the future, but who knows what the future has in store for us. For now, we can all band together on MMO-RPG’s and enjoy each others company and meet people from all over to be friends with us for all of our lives or maybe just for one day. These games have the ability to let people become friends all across the planet for years and will stay for years to come throughout. Yet, this is just one genre in a world full of different ideas that can be expanded on at any point, RPG’s are a large highlight of gaming but they are not all there is. Each game has evolved and changed over time causing us to get where we are today, each group of people who play together become more than just strangers, they become a family and as is said, “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” These bonds we make by choice are more important than the ones we make from birth.
