// PC GAMER — GAMING
Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies vet tells me the theme park 'assembly line' MMO just isn't viable anymore, especially as dev costs spike: 'We hit the wall'
"The MMO audience feels underserved and overmonetized, that's how they feel about what's going on."
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This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Raph Koster about his upcoming MMO, Stars Reach, which is trying to recapture the oldschool sandbox magic of some of his prior games—namely Ultima Online, which he worked on, and Star Wars Galaxies, which he was the creative director for.
Needless to say with that sort of experience behind him, we also got into a chat about the industry writ large—namely about how it kinda sucks out there. Granted, there are several very good MMOs you can enjoy, but they're all typically over a decade old—and newer MMOs, whether recently released or still being developed, have been subject to a massacre.
The survivors have drifted towards the theme park, seasonal, encounter-based model, which Stars Reach is deliberately trying to get away from:
"I think ever since World of Warcraft, the genre kind of narrowed back into 'Kill 10 Rats', with classes and levels and raids, and that gameplay style is actually from 1991. It predates sandbox MMOs. It was a text MUD staple. "
"EverQuest was very much that game with graphics, and then World of Warcraft was very much EverQuest with usability, and a lot of quests—because WoW came along and spent more money than every other MMO combined in history to that point, right, and was able to build that quest-led game."
And while the MUD staple of knocking a dozen vermin upside the head, rinsing, and repeating is old hat, Koster says that sandbox MMOs were actually responsible for more innovation—which proliferated across videogames writ large:
"Despite that dominance—they did a great job, I'm not knocking that—if we look at what sandboxes brought to the table, you craft in video games because of sandbox MMOs, you decorate houses before the Sims, thanks to Sandbox MMOs. You raise a pet in a game because of Sandbox MMOs.