So I was recently doing a piece about Ethyrial and noting its promise of being a throwback to the golden days of MMOs, deliberately evoking games like Ultima Online and RuneScape by name. This is all well and good for establishing the designers’ ambitions, but it falls short of being a siren song for me because if you want to throw me back to the days when I was having the most fun with older games, that wasn’t the right target. When UO was a new thing I was not playing it, and I do not have fond memories of it to fall back on; indeed, I have memories of hearing stories about it online and thinking, “Wow, that sounds awful.” Then I went back to playing whatever single-player game I was on that week.
Now, I also freely admit that I am not the person in the market for playing a throwback game in the first place because I’m having a lot of fun with MMOs right now with no need to roll back the clock. That having been said, if you wanted to target my sensibilities and say you were trying to make a fun throwback, you’d have better luck targeting me with Wrath of the Lich King-era design with a lot of added options (and not, say, removing options in the name of arbitrary gatekeeping). Or you could lure me with the promise of City of Heroes, or maybe some of that good old original Guild Wars–style fun. That is more interesting to me than promising me RuneScape.
But hey, we’re all different. Whether or not you’re having a lot of fun in MMOs right now, it seems like a fun question to ask. What’s your ideal “throwback” MMO? What’s the game that would get your attention if the designers promised to evoke the classic design of that title?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
