When doing research for this piece, I came across a statistic that seems counter-intuitive to what I'd initially expected: MMO activity has been on the rise. The genre has essentially doubled its tracked estimated player activity numbers over the past five years to roughly ten million registered players. Over the years I've put a lot of time in MMOs, vastly dwarfing my time spent in every other game genre combined. I won't name my particular drug of choice, because fuck that developer and they don't deserve to be named, but I will say my account for that game was registered in 2004 and I had an account before that one, as well. I've still got my old RuneScape account with my 15+ year achievement cape (Come at me, noobs). Somewhere in storage I've still got my GameCube with the broadband adapter for Phantasy Star Online. I'm a fan of the genre, is what I'm getting at here. Or, I should say, I used to be.
Within the past year, friends talked me into giving Final Fantasy XIV a go, after retiring from MMOs for a long, long time. And to be honest, I loved the game. I never got into WoW due to not being able to afford a computer powerful enough to run it, so a lot of the same beats that XIV hits were new and fresh to me. But despite how much I genuinely, thoroughly enjoyed XIV, I just couldn't get into it in that special way that anyone who has sunk a major amount of time into an MMO can identify. Why, then, couldn't I latch onto this game which is arguably one of the most perfect iterations of the genre?
One of the defining features of the early days of MMOs was the lack of features. There was no way back then to render Jaina Proudmoore's realistic jiggle physics over an AOL connection onto my Voodoo 2 (Editor's Note: Casey has no idea how WoW works.) Just about every game back then used some variation of Ultima's isometric top-down graphics and were designed to have as bare and simple input as possible. Developers learned to do as much as possible within that space and there was a lot of brilliant innovation in gameplay due to these limitations. Over the long years as the technology changes the landscape, the audience changes as well. As a broader audience is built for, a larger audience will come. And developers will continue to build to appeal to more people, which is a great thing. But this can have a side effect of pushing out those of us old timers who grew up on the ridiculously grindy and repetitive games. With so little variety of things to do, the MMO for me meant more about player interaction and connections than frame-perfect hotkey rotations. It was the social interaction that I was too anxious to go out and have with people who I clearly had a common interest with, as we were all already here instead of out doing anything else. Without social media and portable computers to connect everyone in the world immediately, it was a magical gateway to forming bonds with some fantastic people (Many of whom I still communicate with regularly from back from 2004). These were friendships that meant something to me, as instead of finding the person with the fastest hands to beat the raid with, it was more about finding the people who I wanted to hang out with while we fucked up some demons or something. I guess at some point for me it became less about being a chatroom with dragons and more about the competition, the most optimal DPS and more work.
The age-old debate: how much grind is too much grind? With a game that is by design infinite and never-ending, repeatable, lengthy tasks are basically required. Ask someone who grew up on Phantasy Star Online and you'll know how cool we all were with repeating the same four levels for hundreds of hours. Teenager me was more than fine with this as time was infinite and I'd be young forever, fuckers! But now almost-30-year-old me has a full time job and responsibilities and shit. As with all things though, your mileage may vary, as I know plenty of working adults who still sink their free time into MMOs, and they even have children. At a certain point we all have to decide how to budget out our free time as it becomes a smaller resource. Full respect to those with even more responsibilities than I who don't mind mining for runite ores for thirty hours a week, but I suppose I just decided at a certain point that I couldn't invest the attention that I needed to for an MMO to get the experience out of it that I wanted. Maybe I'm just old and don't mesh with the new tropes and trends. Maybe it's the rose-coloured glasses that I see the close friends I made on terrible games during my formative years. Or maybe it's just that it's really hard to have a professional career and a game that can ask as much as a job. I think it's a combination of it all for me. Who knows, I might just need to give into Paxton and Chris and give WoW a try? (Editor's note: Casey IS the editor and I still say "No")
