Earlier this year, a poster on the MMORPG subreddit posted a controversial take: While admitting that he hadn’t actually played EVE Online in a decade, he argued that EVE Online is “the quintessential ‘gold standard’ of MMOs” and “the best example of what an MMO is and what an MMO should be.” Indeed, he asserted that it’s “one of the few ‘true’ MMOs currently on the market.”
Now, I came away from this hot take agreeing with many of his examples of EVE’s virtues, like its focus on a massive single-shard world and the player-driven market, without actually agreeing that it’s the gold standard for MMOs. But I don’t particularly want to make this a referendum on EVE Online; I actually want to talk about the other MMORPGs we’d propose for such an honor. What would you say is the “gold standard” example of MMORPGs? Imagine that you could pick only one example from our whole genre to try to explain what an MMORPG is. Which one would it be?