Hello and welcome to our long-running Working As Intended column! I’m Bree, and I’ve been working on Massively/MOP for over 15 years. I’m actually a historian. I care a lot about MMOs and history. It’s kind of my whole deal. And I have never been shy about my belief that sites like MOP aren’t as important for their entertainment value as they are for their archival value. They record what is happening as time marches on because otherwise, some humans will forget, some humans will misremember, and some humans will lie. That belief is a solid 50% of why I’m still here overworking in this extremely underpaid job where I get abused by gamers and sometimes by studios and the extremely rich men who run them, daily!

Longtime MOP readers know that as MOP’s editor-in-chief, I have been vocal about the need for the MMORPG genre to grow, to stay flexible, to adapt to the needs of new demographics and shifts in the genre. I am likewise not a stickler for defining the terms “MMORPG” and “MMO” because I’m not into gatekeeping, and if you’ve been in the genre long enough and you’re honest about it, you know the term keeps evolving as we absorb and eject games. That’s just how language works.

I’m telling you all these things so you understand where I’m coming from when I say that I am not worried about the MMORPG future that is still being written. I’m worried that some players and devs are trying to rewrite the past too – or at least pretend it didn’t happen.

I actually touched on this a bit last month in an Overthinking piece about Dune Awakening because I kept seeing people popping up with very weird explanations for what MMORPGs are and do and have done, historically. For example, I went ’round with some guy on Reddit (I know, I’m an idiot) who was complaining that survival content like chopping wood is a “gimmick” added to prolong MMO gameplay, “one of the annoying unnecessary mechanics being spammed everywhere now.” Which is wild because I was running around Ultima Online chopping down trees, eating ham, grinding skills, building houses, and trying not to get ganked and corpse-stripped by my fellow man in an MMORPG in 1997 – you know, when MMORPGs borrowed all that stuff from MUDs and elevated the graphics. Guys, survival games are just old MMOs. Survival content is MMORPG content. Wrap your head around it.

But hey, that’s just some guy on Reddit. Who cares, right? Well, devs think this stuff now too. Last spring, a game dev got in my inbox grumping at me because we labeled his FFA PvP/crafting MMO a sandbox MMO. He insisted it wasn’t a sandbox because it didn’t have Minecraft-style building. I honestly stared speechless at the email for a while before gently trying to explain that MMOs were using the term sandbox since before Minecraft ever existed, that they are bigger than building, and indeed, that Minecraft sprung out of a sandbox MMO.

You can see the problem here, right? The rise of the formalized “survivalbox” as its own genre has effectively robbed the MMORPG genre one of the fundamental terms we use to identify styles of MMOs. As an industry, we’ve been talking about the sandbox/themepark MMO spectrum since long before I got here. But now we’re losing the term sandbox along with people’s memories of the sandbox gameplay MMORPGs began with. Even we have had to start specifying “cozy MMOs” when we mean MMORPGs with housing and crafting because if we just say sandbox, people assume it’s a gankbox, even though MMOs have had housing and crafting since 1997.

But it’s not just sandbox MMORPGs being casually deleted from history. Last week, in an interview discussing the upcoming The Cube MMORPG, Mundfish’s game director made some bold claims about what “traditional” MMOs are:

“We’re calling it an MMORPG shooter because it blends that strong narrative foundation with large-scale systems: deep and persistent character progression, customizable loadouts, long-term gear upgrades, quests, and evolving objectives, like expeditions, shaped by the community. But unlike traditional MMOs, The CUBE is not about static quest hubs or routine grinds – it’s about exploration, discovery, and adapting to a shifting, surreal environment that changes over time. Players will engage in cooperative missions, dynamic world events, and possibly confront other players in certain regions, depending on the context.”

OK, so this dev was clearly being a little rhetorical and contentious on purpose. He’s plainly trying to make “traditional” MMOs sound boring and grindy so he can position his game as a leap forward, and it would not be totally unfair to say that traditional MMOs, the first 10 years of the genre or so, included grinding (pre-WoW) and quest hubbing (post-WoW). But see what else he’s done? He’s implied that traditional MMOs weren’t about exploration, discovery, or dynamic environments. Again, my eyeballs popped right out of my head. Of course early and traditional MMORPGs were about all of these things. I lived in a player-built MMO town in 1998! Moreover, most of the big MMORPGs of the last 10-15 years also hype all of these features because they are core to the genre, not just afterthoughts. My goodness, there was an arms race around 2010 to see which MMOs would manage to reinvent and repopularize dynamic environmental content first! That was 15 years ago, and it wasn’t even new then!

That wasn’t an isolated incident. Here’s one from the week before that: The devs behind Lionhearts insisted that in spite of the fact that the game is a single-shard persistent world with thousands of people PvPing, trading, and vying for power, it isn’t an MMO because it relies on “favor and real player-driven hierarchy progression” instead of quests and experience, which they apparently believe define MMOs. The devs were literally describing a PvP sandbox MMORPG akin to EVE Online with some Asheron’s Call monarchies mixed in, and they have no idea! How can a team with so little understanding of these genres and games think it’s capable of building anything in or near this space?

Maybe this is just the next stage of Castronova’s “unbundling” of MMORPGs. I once called it disassembling the genre for parts, and I think that’s more accurate now. These studios don’t dislike MMORPGs; they just don’t want the responsibility or cost of running a whole one, so they’re slowly redefining what MMOs are, either to get out of supporting them or to pick out subgenres to monetize separately, from MOBAs to battle royales and now to basic sandbox content, exploration, and the living world.

Or maybe they’re just doing what Funcom did: waffle so hard on whether Dune Awakening is an MMO that it managed to convince not just gamers but itself that it didn’t have to listen to decades of MMO lessons. MMO gankbox endgames don’t work, but we’re not an MMO, so our gankbox endgame will work! Well, it’s an MMO, so the gankbox endgame didn’t work, and you all know the ending to that story. Given its long history in the MMO genre, Funcom should’ve known better. MMO players did.

Maybe all of this would be mere semantics except that those semantics shape history, and right now, we’re allowing semantics to both erase our genre and shrink its horizon too. To paraphrase myself: The reason “nobody is making MMORPGs/MMOs anymore” is that gamers and studios have started believing and regurgitating that only 1:1 WoW clones are MMORGs and nothing else counts. We are defining MMOs out of existence because we refuse to let them evolve – and refuse to acknowledge their bygone diversity.

I’m going to end by quoting another Redditor, whose comment on a Hytale thread was so good I clipped it out to think about. “MMOs nowadays are either built by complete novices in game development or scummers,” he wrote. “There is no in-between.”

Harsh and hyperbolic? Yes. Absolutely. There are perfectly lovely studios and devs of all ages and levels in our genre. We know this, and so does that Redditor. But I understand what he means. The games industry has been deflating over the last couple of years thanks to grotesque executive-level malfeasance, and the MMORPG genre has been hit hard – we even pointed this out a decade ago when lamenting the lack of midbudget MMORPGs in the pipeline, just as true today as it was then. We’ve witnessed devastating levels of braindrain as companies lay everyone off and people – our MMO people! – are forced to leave the genre and the industry and take decades of institutional knowledge with them, and who can blame them? That means that the devs still with us are often the old-timers who were never in it for money, the hucksters grifting, the overseas companies temporting their planned-obsolesence games westward, and a bunch of fresh graduates with stars in their eyes and no memories of what the genre once was, bless their hearts.

But without that experienced generation and its institutional knowledge to draw from, those sweet newbies don’t always understand what really happened to the ruins they’re building on top of, and there’s no one left to tell them what they don’t know. So I am begging you, as gamers and devs: Read a book. Any book, but preferably an MMO history book. Play the old games that came out before you could hold a controller. Listen to the gamers and devs who paved the way to where the genre is now. Learn the lessons of the people who came before you, for your own sake and ours. Everything you’re doing in your game has been done before, I promise. Every lesson has already been paid for in some elder dev’s sweat and tears before you. Whatever you’re doing, we already have a name for it. You really didn’t just invent a new type of MMO or content that deserves its own special acronym. This time really won’t be different.

But most of all, please stop coming into the MMORPG genre, this sprawling and weird and decrepit and chaotic MMORPG genre with its three decades of dust and love, and telling us that you’re gonna spruce this place up by inventing mechanics and systems and ideas that we’ve had here the whole time, all while gaslighting us by pretending MMOs aren’t MMOs. I’ll never be a gatekeeper and tell your game that it doesn’t belong here, but I’m definitely not going to stand idly by while our foundational games and their contributions are erased.

The MMORPG genre might be “working as intended,” but it can be so much more. Join Massively Overpowered Editor-in-Chief Bree Royce in her Working As Intended column for editorials about and meanderings through MMO design, ancient history, and wishful thinking. Armchair not included.