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  • I used to play WoW a lot. I don't think I stopped liking MMOs — I just stopped having enough time for them.
    by eile23
  • This article ignores the true inventors of the MMO, Trubshaw and Bartle with MUD1 at University of Essex in 1980ish.
    by hackingonempty
  • The interface reminded me of Community in Halt and Catch Fire. Sure enough...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)#Popular_c...

    by magicmicah85
  • It's starting to feel like MMOs were just a product of the times we lived in, rather than a separate genre of game. In ~2004 I remember at least four MMOs: Asheron's Call, Planetside, World of Warcraft, and Dark Age of Camelot. It seems like only WoW survived, and nowadays I'm not sure the experience resembles the original anymore. Oh, and then there's EVE-Online, Runescape, Ultima Online...

    Nowadays it's mostly Roblox and Fortnite. I saw some 11yo's socialize the other week. One asked the other hey, do you play fortnight? And they swapped contact info that way.

    What's the genre of Roblox / Fortnite? Live service games? It would be interesting to have a separate term for them the way we had for "MMOs".

    MMOs were also fun from a technical standpoint. One of my big challenges to myself was to make an MMO. I learned a lot about networking that way. When I was 13 I even ended up on the phone with a local business trying to negotiate a dedicated 10 Mbit link. He correctly told me to just wait, that 10 Mbit won't seem so crucial in a few years.

    Then there were the MUDs. I'm not sure if it's correct to call them MUDs, but Gemstone and Underlight spring to mind. Underlight especially was a charming little game where you were expected to roleplay in-character whenever you were online. Meaning, no discussion about the real world. It was very addictive for a socially awkward 6th grader to just vanish into this new world.

    I wonder what kind of new genres of games people will be talking about in a couple decades. It's tempting to think there's something like "the MMO" that's yet to be discovered, just like the arena shooter was.

    by sillysaurusx

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