MMOs aren’t going anywhere, but the label may be on the way out. This comes from former World of Warcraft lead Rob Pardo, who said in an interview that developers are avoiding the term “MMO” like the plague these days.
“If anything, I think people are even avoiding the term MMO,” Pardo said. “A really good example is Destiny. It clearly is an MMO. But they’re really trying to avoid calling it that, and obviously it is a very different type of game. But I think that’s a good example of how with MMOs, the term has been eliminated. But you kind of continue to see the influence in games that are persistent world games that have spawned out of that. It’s just people seem to avoid the term MMO now.”
Pardo also affirmed that Blizzard hasn’t given up on MMOs, even though the studio canceled Titan last year. “I think there’s still a big belief within Blizzard that MMOs are a great genre to be in,” he commented, going on to say that WoW’s success meant that the studio kept more people on that team instead of farming them out to Titan and other projects.
