Is there life in MMOs after the fantasy genre?

by Michael Zenke May 7th 2008 at 3:30PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Culture, MMO industry

Most of the AAA subscription MMOs are set in the fantasy genre. Many of the in-development titles are set in the fantasy genre. The most popular massive game in the US is a fantasy title. So when is the industry going to get over this hangup on orcs and elves? Is there even an MMO industry without the fantasy setting? Those are the questions asked by Oli Welsh today at the GamesIndustry.biz site. Welsh returns to the conclusion many have reached when examining buzz, marketing, sales figures, and new games: players are just as 'risk-adverse' as publishers are when it comes to new game settings.

As we at Massively have done in the past, the author goes on to hope for a future with a little more bravery in tackling genre tropes. He lauds Cryptic's adherence to the four-color comic book world, and offers high hopes for 'real life' titles like All Points Bulletin or The Agency. Ultimately, he says, it may just be the case that a developer needs to take the Diku-mud style of game perfected by SOE and Blizzard and transpose that sensibility to another genre. Though Tabula Rasa and the modern incarnation of Star Wars Galaxies approaches that style, there really isn't a good, working "EverQuest with lasers" out there. Perhaps the likes of Red 5 or Carbine will ride up on an armored hoverbike to offers us a new and (possibly) better way.

Tags: fantasy, horror, mmo-industry, sci-fi

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Lemmo said on 5:10PM 5-07-2008

Companies keep trying, someone's bound to get it right.

Wildhammer said on 9:39AM 5-08-2008

This is also going under the assumption that the fantasy genre will every die out. Personally, I don't think it will. Sci-fi may be clever, but fantasy plays into people's personalities with certain races and classes. From a purely fiscal standpoint, you can cheaply hackney up a bunch of lore to feed into what people like in fiction and get them hooked on a race/class ect. That's a lot harder to do with sci-fi in my opinion.

cerement said on 11:12PM 5-07-2008

Well, there's been two notable (but not necessarily successful) sci-fi MMORPGs (plus a score of flash-in-the-pans).

Earth and Beyond was bought out by EA Games and killed off to make way for Sims Online. (although fans are still sitting out here, four years later, hoping for a revival, and still reviling anything with the EA moniker)

The more succesful EVE Online has stunning graphics, epic PvP, their own economist to handle the economy. It also has no PvE content (beyond being a mind-numbingly dull space mining simulator) and no chance to just relax and explore ...