Back when Amazon first announced its New World Aeternum rebranding, I noticed an interesting comment about the planned raid. Longtime reader Squid opined that the new raid is a bit of a let-down for the game, or possibly an oversell, as it’s really just a double-size dungeon.
“How long until an MMO ‘raid’ is just two-player content?” he wondered. “I’m not saying we need to go back to EQ1’s 72-person raids, but c’mon. This is just an expedition balanced for two groups instead of one.”
I was genuinely surprised to hear that complaint; I tried to argue that we’ve had 10-person/two-group raids all the way back to vanilla WoW, and lots of MMOs have done it in the two decades since.
And yet at the same time, I am not sure why that seems OK to me. I was there, Gandalf. I was there for the Mage Tower dungeon crawls where hundreds of people would stomp through Ultima Online dungeons. I remember when we used to bring three guilds’ worth of people to Fear to try to get all our recruits gear in EverQuest. I slogged through 40-man Molten Core dozens of times for some reason in the long long ago of World of Warcraft. I was raised on massive raids. Who even am I? How did it happen that as long as it’s more than one group, however the game defines the group, it feels like a raid to me? Is it because I am over raiding anyway? Or because I prefer it to be more accessible? Or because mega raids are laggy and mostly about cat-herding? Or because group size always felt weird and arbitrary?
I don’t know, but I bet you’ll fill me in. How many players do you think should constitute a proper MMORPG raid? And how are you arriving at this number?
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!
