>>19216It is dated in alot of aspects but nearly all MMOs haven’t evolved to actually kill the fucking thing which is why it’s still alive and if diablo 4 somehow manage to piss people off blizzards gonna stay on top for even longer
I think I can trace a few things gamers as a general community want out of MMOs
<technical features Crossplay, cross compatibility, cross server and private server support is generally a way for these games to massively boost their populations. It worked for RuneScape and Albion and if that’s an indicator it’s gonna work for anything else
<that sense of explorationI think this is why games like diablo 2 did so well. Even if diablo 2 isn’t an mmo most mmos and just open world games that do well in general have good exploration mechanics that allow the player to do more than just grind enemies at location a to location z once they’re max level, shit like underground levels, paths to zones, a minimap that only expands to new regions you explore, region specific shit etc all encourage players to play dynamically considering so many MMOs even osrs feel fucking static for far to long considering the sizes of the maps in these games. ESO handled exploration however fucking perfectly
<respectable levels of difficultyThis is a universal problem not just with MMOs but new games with general that’s driven so many players from these games. They’re too easy, theirs no endgame, there’s no skill required beyond button mashing, there’s not much pvp in them if any, there’s no risk to dying, there’s no reward for playing aggressively or taking risks in higher level zones, etc I can keep going on
Like fuck the original wow was never a hardcore game in the true sense but hell if it released to day people would be complaining nonstop about how fucking long it takes to level 60 due to their not being shortcuts with boosters