Five MMOs That Have Changed the Most Since Launch

These days, classic and progression MMORPG servers are all the rage. That there’s a demand for these things is a testament to how much an MMO can evolve over time. After enough years, it can almost feel like playing an entirely different game.

A screenshot from Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

But which games have changed the most since their initial launch? Let’s take a look at some of the candidates.

Ultima Online

As one of the oldest still-running MMORPGs, Ultima Online has had literal decades to grow and evolve. That’s far too much change to adequately cover here, but one particularly notable event worth mentioning came early in its history: the release of Trammel in the year 2000.

Trammel is the second continent added to the game. It is a perfect mirror of the original, Felucca, but with one crucial difference: Trammel does not allow non-consensual PvP.

This added an entirely new way to experience the game, free from the predations of other players, and it proved wildly popular. All subsequent landmasses added to Ultima Online have followed Trammel’s lead by not allowing open PvP.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

At launch, Star Wars: The Old Republic was pretty much just another WoW clone with a Star Wars skin slapped over top. It took until the game’s third major expansion to change that.

Knights of the Fallen Empire introduced major system changes to make SWTOR less of a standard MMO quest grinder and much more like the single-player RPGs Bioware is known and loved for. The leveling game was adjusted to put the focus on class and planetary stories, allowing players to easily ignore the forgettable side missions that had once bogged the game down.

A screenshot from Star Wars: The Old Republic

SWTOR as it exists today is a lot closer to the story-driven MMORPG it was originally advertised as.


Aion’s a long-running game with a lot of big changes under its belt, from a free to play transition to multiple expansions.

But its biggest shift in identity came more recently with the massive Awakened Legacy patch. Awakened Legacy radically changed many game systems, hugely streamlined leveling, and controversially removed many whole zones and dungeons. It was a jarring change that angered many, with some comparing it to the infamous “New Game Enhancements” introduced by Star Wars Galaxies back in the day.

For better or for worse, Aion is now a very different game from what it launched as.

World of Warcraft

This list contains a lot of examples of major reboots that rewrote a game overnight. In World of Warcraft’s case, it’s more a matter of incremental changes piling up over time. Over fifteen years and seven expansions, WoW has grown and evolved so much that very little of the original game remains, at least in an untouched form.

Of course, one can identify points in time where things changed more radically than others. Cataclysm rebuilt the original two continents, leaving virtually no zone untouched. Mists of Pandaria introduced a new talent system, while Legion brought with it sweeping class design changes.

A screenshot from the Dragonwrath quest chain in World of Warcraft

What’s funny is that every once in a while you’ll hear speculation about a possible “World of Warcraft 2,” but really, we’re already playing WoW 2. The game has reinvented itself so much it’s more like a sequel to the original MMO, rather than a continuation.

Final Fantasy XIV

Of course, when it comes to reinventing yourself after launch, no game can quite equal Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. It’s right there in the title, after all.

As it launched, FFXIV was pretty much broken. It was such a mess the developers at Square Enix stopped even charging a subscription fee for a time, too embarrassed to ask for players’ money.

For most companies, this would be the end, but Square Enix had the resources to try again. Final Fantasy was ultimately relaunched as an almost entirely new game, rebuilt from the ground up. This makes it not only one of the biggest examples of an altered game in the MMO world, but also one of the most positive and successful. Whereas in other games change can be controversial or even despised, here almost everyone agrees it was for the best.

Old School Grind Was the Real Participation Trophy

When people talk about modern conveniences in MMOs — like more accessible gear and better quality of life features — inevitably you’ll have some people chime in that it was so much better in the good old days when people had to “work hard” to achieve things in games. The phrase “participation trophy” comes up a lot to describe modern perks.

A cutscene from Riders of Icarus

That phrase and the surrounding mentality are what I want to focus on today. I think people have it entirely backwards. I think the old school grind was the real participation trophy.

The perception seems to be rooted in the idea that games were harder back in the day, but most of the things people point to when they make that point weren’t actually difficult. They were just inconvenient.

Long travel times, low drop rates, unclear quest directions, glacial leveling speed… these are all things that made games more time-consuming, but they generally didn’t require any real skill to overcome. Anyone can succeed in an environment where grind and tedium are the main obstacles. It just takes time and patience.

But if you spend hundreds of hours working toward an in-game goal, it’s easy to feel like you’ve accomplished something significant. And that, really, is what the whole concept of a “participation trophy” is about: Making you feel like you’ve accomplished something when really all you did was show up.

By comparison, the relative generosity of more modern games, where loot is plentiful and quality of life is better, might also provide one with a false sense of accomplishment, but that’s more of a side effect. The goal there is to get people engaged with the game and let everyone enjoy the content.

Making gear and content more accessible was never about messaging the egos of casual players. It was about making sure people actually got to experience the whole of a game. Before the Raid Finder was added to World of Warcraft, raids were seen by such a small portion of the game’s population that it was becoming difficult to justify spending development resources on them.

Nor do I think it’s entirely accurate to say games have gotten easier, though they can be too easy at times. Highly challenging content can still be found in virtually all MMORPGs, but that challenge is much more skill-based than grind-based. It’s now much more about your skills than how much spare time you have to devote to the game.

A space combat mission in Star Wars: The Old Republic, a game with many modern conveniences

And I want to be clear that I’m not writing this to trash fans of old school design. If you enjoy the old ways, that’s totally fine. There’s no wrong to play video games, as long as you’re not making trouble for anyone else. I’m not saying that liking long grinds and inconvenient systems is a moral failing, or that it means you’re bad at games.

But I am saying let’s call a spade a spade. Being a grind fan doesn’t make you bad at games, but it doesn’t make you good at them, either. Spending a hundred hours camping for a rare item doesn’t make you a skilled player or a hard worker. It just makes you someone with lots of free time. Any feeling to the contrary is an illusion, and it’s an illusion the developers probably crafted intentionally to keep people coming back for more.

Exploring MMO Group Roles Beyond the Trinity

The “holy trinity” of tank, healer, and DPS always has been and likely always will be one of the hot button topics of the MMO world. Often, when talking about ways to “fix” the trinity, we discuss removing tanks or healers (or both), but things can also go in the opposite direction. It’s also possible to add more roles beyond the traditional three, and some games have.

A shaman in World of Warcraft, a class once known for its buffing skills

Let’s take a look at some other roles MMORPGs could add.


These could easily be separated into two roles, but they’re similar enough in function that I’ll lump them together. A buffer is a character focused on improving the capabilities of their allies by giving them temporary boosts to their stats, while a debuffer does the opposite: weakening enemies by lowering their stats.

Buffers and debuffers were more common in the early days of MMORPGs, but they’ve fallen out of vogue. I understand why; just standing around and throwing out buffs and debuffs isn’t the most exciting gameplay around.

But I think these roles could be designed in such a way that they are compelling. I’m a fan of making buffs and debuffs much stronger, but much shorter in duration. World of Warcraft’s Bloodlust spell and its variants are a great example of a buff that feels exciting to use. For around half a minute, you vastly increase the haste of your entire raid, leading to a massive spike in damage. It’s one of the most exciting abilities to use in the entire game.

Debuffs, meanwhile, could come in the form of secondary affects to attacks. Rather than just slapping a debuff icon on the enemy, you could give them flashy animations and sound effects. It would feel more impactful.


A controller has some common ground with a debuffer, but they’re more specialized. Their purpose is to lock down enemies with stuns, slows, or other crowd control abilities.

The trouble with controllers is that they’re difficult to balance. If their control abilities are too strong, enemies don’t get to fight back at all, and that’s just boring. As with debuffers, I think a good solution here is to keep their abilities short-lived but impactful.

A paladin character in the fantasy MMORPG Neverwinter

You could also make controllers more reactive — interrupting powerful enemy attacks rather than locking them down entirely.


The role of a puller is to, well, pull. They aggro monsters and pull them back to their group. Done right, it allows people to face enemies in controlled numbers, on their terms, without risking being swarmed by unexpected adds.

There are different factors that determine what makes a good puller. Movement speed to stay ahead of mobs is helpful, as is a way to drop aggro when they bring the mobs back to their team. Being able to survive a hit or two is also pretty important.

Pullers were common in older games like EverQuest. These days, they’re much less common. To be honest, I have a hard time picturing a role for pullers in the more fast-paced games of today, but there may be the occasional throwback title where pullers can once again shine.


Of course, most MMOs have crafting, but very few offer classes entirely devoted to crafting (the late Star Wars Galaxies is the only one that comes to mind for me off the top of my head). It’s usually a side feature rather than a core playstyle, but it doesn’t need to be.

There’s a couple of ways you could make dedicated crafting classes. One is to have them as pure non-combat classes, but to me that doesn’t seem so interesting. I would be more intrigued if someone managed to make crafter an actual combat role. Perhaps they could provide consumables or equipment to their allies mid-battle.

But my favorite idea is to create a game where it’s possible to build fortifications, traps, or turrets on the fly, sort of like Fortnite but in an MMORPG context. That would make for a truly unique playstyle that I think I’d enjoy.

Five Turning Points of MMO History

The ever-evolving history of MMORPGs is a fascinating one. Sometimes I almost feel like MMOs are more fun to analyze than they are to play. It’s a complex story that could fill volumes, but for today, let’s just take a look at some of the biggest turning points in the history of MMOs.

Text MUDs:

Achaea, a modern MUD

The true origin of the MMO genre is debatable. You could trace it all the way back to analogue tabletop RPGs, and perhaps even farther back from there. But the birth of online RPGs likely lies with the Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD.

MUDs were text-based games originally running over small, pre-Internet networks such as those at universities.The term was christened by Roy Trubshaw, a student at the University of Essex. Development of his “Multi-User Dungeon” game was later given over to Richard Bartle, and if you’re active in the MMO community, you’re sure to recognize that name.

When the Internet began to spread, MUDs became more accessible, and eventually served as the inspiration for the first generation of MMORPGs.

Early Graphical MMOs:

Again, we can argue about where exactly the story of graphical online games begins. Meridian 59 is credited by some as the first, while Ultima Online was where the concept began to gain significant popularity. It was the first game to be described with the term “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game.”

This was soon followed by many other graphical MMOs. The most famous would probably be 1999’s EverQuest, which served as an inspiration for many of the games the followed.

WoW and Its Clones:

There is an eternally raging debate over whether World of Warcraft is the best or the worst thing (or perhaps both) that ever happened to the MMO genre. The one thing everyone can agree on is that WoW changed everything.


In the early days, MMOs had achieved a respectable level of success, with playerbases measured in the thousands. But WoW blew all that out of the water. It parlayed the brand recognition of Blizzard Entertainment, more accessible mechanics, reduced grind, and the increasing prevalence of high speed Internet connections into a perfect recipe for success, achieving a previously unimaginable level of popularity.

A low level zone from the MMORPG World of Warcraft

WoW eventually peaked at around twelve million players worldwide, a population greater than that of some nations. While it’s popularity has shrunken significantly since then, even now it remains more successful and more populous than the large majority of its competition.

The success of WoW created ripple effects throughout the genre. Everyone wanted a bite of that pie, and developers spent years churning out MMO after MMO that sought to emulate World of Warcraft. It was the era of the dreaded WoW clone. But these games often lacked personality, and none of them ever rose to rival the success of the game they so desperately sought to imitate.

The Free to Play Revolution:

For a long time, if you wanted to play an MMORPG, you had to pay a monthly subscription. That’s just how it worked. Oh, sure, there were a few exceptions. Anarchy Online began offering a free to play option back in 2004, and the original Guild Wars was buy to play from its launch in 2005. But those were mostly considered oddball outliers.

Things began to change in a big way when Dungeons and Dragons Online relaunched as a free to play title in 2009. Previously struggling, it saw a huge uptick in both players and revenues, and the world began to take notice.

Before long, big name MMOs were dropping their subscriptions left, right, and center, from Star Wars: The Old Republic, to Lord of the Rings Online, to Aion. At first this was seen as an act of desperation made only by dying games, but as the years went by and subscription games became an ever shrinking minority, it started to just be normal.

Nowadays, subscriptions are the exception rather than the norm, and most new games are free to play or buy to play.

Maturity and Diversification:

A screenshot from the new MMO shooter Anthem

That brings us to the modern day. The MMO genre has matured and stabilized. New releases are not so common as they once were, but there is more variety, more creativity. Gone are the days of WoW clones. Nowadays MMOs, MMO lite games, online co-ops, MOBAs, and battle royales all simmer together into a diverse melting pot.

In this writer’s opinion, the future is bright.

MMOs Are Healthy, but the Community Isn’t

There’s always been a lot of negativity in the MMO community, and it’s always bothered me. But lately, it seems to be getting worse, swallowing the community whole until there’s nothing left.

An NPC in the MMORPG Bless Online

I’m not saying there isn’t room to complain. Things aren’t perfect. While I think a lot of the concerns over monetization practices are overblown, I won’t contend that it’s not an issue. Meanwhile early access and crowdfunding have “developers” raking in money hand over fist for the vague promise of maybe one day delivering a functional game that actually resembles the original pitch, and if that’s not messed up, I don’t know what is.

And then there’s player toxicity, and the awfulness of development “crunch,” and so on.

I also grant that it’s a lot easier to find problems than to praise what is going well. Speaking as someone who’s paid to talk about MMOs, I’m intimately familiar with how much easier it is to get an interesting discussion out of criticism.

But we’ve moved beyond all that. The community has soared past constructive criticism and become mired in endless doom-saying.

These days not only are people constantly predicting some catastrophic crash in the industry, but more and more I see comments by people who are gleefully hoping for such a thing. They’re cheering for honest, hard-working people to lose their jobs just because the games being made aren’t to their taste, a level of pettiness that would have been utterly unthinkable before the Internet lowered the bar for all of humanity.

Not everyone has gone to that extreme of nastiness, but there doesn’t seem to be any escape from the negativity. Even commentators who used to be beacons of passion and enthusiasm seem to be increasingly pessimistic about the genre.

And you know, I really can’t understand why. Looking at the big picture, the MMO genre seems pretty healthy to me.

A lot of the current cynicism seems to come from the relative lack of new games coming out that are in the traditional mold of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or EverQuest. Instead things seem to be trending more toward “MMO lite” style games like Anthem, The Division 2, and Fortnite. Fans of the old school feel left behind.

A party of player Javelins in the MMO shooter Anthem

Isn’t this what we wanted, though? Back when a new MMORPG was coming out seemingly every other month, all I remember seeing was people complaining (justifiably) about how sick they were of generic WoW clones. We were all starved for change and innovation.

Well, now we’re getting that. The genre is changing. It might not be changing exactly in the direction that you want it to, but it’s not objectively a bad thing. Indeed, change is a sign of growth, and health.

Whether they’re to your taste or not, games like Fortnite or Anthem are bringing people together in the online space, creating memories, and introducing new people to the world of online gaming. Those are all good things.

And I say that as someone who is at best lukewarm to shooters and wouldn’t touch a battle royale game with a ten foot pole.

Meanwhile fans of traditional MMORPGs aren’t exactly going underserved, either. There are plenty of traditional games like WoW, Final Fantasy XIV, and Elder Scrolls Online that are still thriving.

The space of online gaming is growing, evolving, and providing a greater diversity of experience to cater to all tastes. There may be problems, but there’s also tremendous cause for optimism, even as the community — or at least its vocal members — predict the death of the genre daily.

This negativity has real consequences. For example, word of mouth has become entirely worthless.

Every single game that comes out is now decried as a lazy cash grab, regardless of the reality, which makes it impossible to determine which games are actually cash grabs. I can’t trust player reviews anymore, and increasingly I’m finding professional reviews hard to trust, too. That’s a really bad place to be as a consumer because it’s very hard to tell which games are worth spending cash on (thank the gaming gods for good free to play games).

Then we also have to consider how much of a turn-off to new players this constant haze of negativity must be. If you want to attract new players to your genre, endlessly ranting about how everything is awful is probably not a good strategy.

MMOs as a genre are fine. It’s the community that’s dying.

Build MMOs for More Alts, Not Less

I like playing alternate characters. In fact I play alts so much the concept of a “main” in my case is nebulous at best. Bouncing around between different characters with different playstyles and aesthetics keeps MMOs fresh for me.

My Jedi knight alt in Star Wars: The Old Republic

Yet always I’m left with the feeling that playing alts is a case of swimming against the current. It’s something nearly every game allows, but which very few actually encourage. It’s never been viewed as a valid playstyle worthy of its own content and systems in the way PvP or raiding might be.

And I ask: Why?

Why Alts Matter

In most games, playing an alt means repeating the same content, doing all the same grinds, and getting nothing to show for it. At best some games are now offering a certain degree of account-wide progression — such as how mounts in World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls Online are shared across all your characters — but for the most part playing alts still means starting over from scratch, and there’s almost no reward for it.

Why must this be so? If you’re putting in two or three times more effort, why not get at least some reward for it?

I’d even argue that there is a certain degree of skill required to maintain a stable of alts. You need to not only learn all those disparate mechanics but remember them as you continue to swap between them. I have found this is a skill that can be improved with practice — I’ve played so many classes across so many games that I can now pick up new playstyles and rotations almost immediately.

Now, I’m not saying that alts requires more skill or is otherwise superior to other playstyles. But I think you can convincingly argue that it doesn’t deserve to be the red-headed stepchild developers seem to treat it as.

So how can we properly support alt players?

Alts as Endgame

The first thing alts need is some variety in the leveling path. These days far too many MMOs make every character take the exact same path to level cap. Alts are much more appealing when there are multiple leveling paths. Some games offer differing content based on race, class, or faction, but I’d like to see more games vary the leveling experience based on choices made after character creation.

My templar alt in Elder Scrolls Online

Global level-scaling is also a good way to add variety to leveling, as it gives players more flexibility on where to go and what to do.

Next, at least some degree of account-wide progression is a must. Sharing cosmetics across characters is a good start, but more can be done. For instance, gear could become account-bound rather than character bound, allowing your alts to inherit hand-me-downs from their forebears.

But all that only makes alts less of a chore. What the genre really lacks is games where alts are not only tolerated, but encouraged. Alts have the potential to be an endgame unto themselves.

The best example of this I can think of is how the original Guild Wars allowed players to use their alts as NPC hirelings, though that was largely a cosmetic feature. Star Wars: The Old Republic also has some perks for altoholics. In that game, reputation is usually gated by daily quests, but gains are shared across all your characters on a server, so the more alts you have, the more quests you can run and the faster you can earn rep.

Those are all good ideas, but I think more can be done. Imagine, for example, a game wherein classes are highly specialized, but you can swap characters on the fly. The more characters you have, the more versatile you are, and the more you can accomplish. You might change characters multiple times in a single dungeon to best counter the challenges within.

That’s just one idea. Undoubtedly professional game designers could come up with others.

I’m not saying that every game needs to encourage alts. Not everyone wants to play alts, and variety is a good thing to have. But right now alt play is an under-served niche. The genre would be enriched by at least one or two MMOs where playing alts is not only welcome, but the best way to play.

How would you make alts more rewarding?