My Life As A Gamer: On Picking A MMORPG To Play (Or Not)

Josh Strife Hayes talking about picking the MMORPG for you.

This is very much about making a sober analysis of what you want from your entertainment, and choosing the option that best fulfills those desires. Pay close attention to how Josh goes about this process, because this is generally applicable for other things that share a general classification but its array of options show very different ways to go about it. However, there is a trend to tease out here.

The thing to take from this MMO breakdown is that some games lean harder on the "massive" element than others, and we're finding out that the emerging and enduring games are those that don't lean hard on being massively multiplayer or myopically focused on current endgame; creating and sustaining a long tail of entertainment that is friendly to casual players and busy adults--e.g. you can complete everything but Ultimates in FFXIV on a pick-up group basis--while one of the reasons for the fall of World of Warcraft has to do with catering nigh-exclusively to the Endgame-Uber-Alles cohort and telling the Normies to go farm gold.

The only thing I disagree with is that you can be active in multiple MMOs at once.

Unless you approach every game as a single-player game with some multiplayer on the side--and FFXIV is heading that way, with more NPC bots being usable in dungeons to replace other players--this is not possible. MMORPGs are meant to work off the Network Effect, so that means you have to go where the action is or you'll have a bad time once you come out of any bubble of single-player activity. The older games lean heavy on the Network Effect, and punish you for soloing. WOW is where this started turning around, but then the raiders took the throne and here we are. The newer games don't lean so heavy on needing people to do things, but you need them for more macro-level concerns like server economies and certain content types (e.g. PVP) so it still matters.

Otherwise you get something like Destiny or Guild Wars 1, where it's really a lobby to hang out in and do logistics/advance PVE stuff and everything else is instanced, which is just a PVE version of PVP games like Apex, Splitgate, Warzone, etc. and we've seen that most players aren't keen on that in online multiplayer RPGs.

Until this changes, you really do only have one or two MMORPG options at any given time. Right now that's WOW and FFXIV, with the former on the downstroke and the latter clearly surpassing it, just as TRPGs remain dominated by Current D&D and Past D&Ds, and everything else--even stuff I like--is an also-ran. If this is not to your liking, avoid MMOs and all similar games (such as Battle Royale shooters).