“The Perfect MMORPG” – Does it Exist?

So I was sitting here over the weekend wondering to myself: What makes a good MMORPG?
Is it graphics? story? gameplay? innovation?
I see a lot of people mention that they like this or that MMO due to this or that reason, but I’m here to discuss what I believe makes a good MMORPG and hopefully hear from some of you guys as to what you believe does.

Let me give you a little back story. I’ve been playing MMORPGs since back in.. 2006? My first MMO was Tales of Pirates or Pirate King Online, depending on which version of the game you played.
I was drawn to it for several reasons: Since I was only.. 15, 16 years old, I was a fan of fast-paced PvP.
Tales of Pirates was a PvP-centric MMO that had a large focus on group-oriented PvP in the form of Arena battles, Guild wars and even PvPvE dungeons where you would fight other players spawning randomly around the dungeon you enter.
You leveled, geared up, you know. The norm. But you needed to be a part of a guild if you wanted to continue – there was absolutely no way to go it alone.

I went on to play that until 2008, where I moved on to Perfect World International.
Perfect World was a completely open-world MMO – The main draw of the game was once again, the fact that players were all but required to work in unison – as a guild – to claim territories and dominate the world map.
This built a community with several large guilds operating in competition for world resources. The more territories you had, the more money your guild would earn which would allow you to have a larger control over the market.

After Perfect World, I moved on to World of Warcraft, Aion, TERA, and.. well, as time went on I stopped dedicating years of my life to MMOs.
No matter how hard I tried to dedicate myself to MMOs, I found that over time they became less focused on the community aspect of the game, became more toxic, more elitist, and players themselves were more interested in clearing everything as fast as possible.
Gone were the days where progression took place over the course of an entire year or more.
These days, the vast majority of players are after several things:
Something that looks good, something that plays good, and something that allows you to reach endgame in a few days but somehow have a surplus of endgame content to participate in.. with new content releasing every other week.

I agree that graphics are an appealing facet of what makes a good MMORPG. I love Black Desert Online’s graphical style – I know some people find fault with the pop-in style of graphics but the game is beautiful.
I also feel that Final Fantasy XIV is a beautiful game, and even the new zones in Battle for Azeroth.
While a beautiful graphical style is subjective, I’m sure even you can agree that a beautiful game allows for more.. immersion.

Likewise, I’m sure everyone is capable of agreeing that a game needs to play well – specifically referring to both combat and the overall gameplay, such as movement and even interaction with the world itself.
Clunky, slow and unintuitive combat is a recipe for disaster. I’ve encountered so many MMOs over the course of this channel’s existence that just have absolutely horrendous combat systems.
I’ve also come across games that look as though you’re barely even moving while traversing the world you’re currently inhabiting.
Nothing disconnects me more from a world than watching my character lack basic motor functionality.
Like graphics, combat is subjective. I know a lot of people believe that action combat – Black Desert’s in particular – is by far the best combat achievable right now in an MMO.
I’m also aware that games like Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft – both of which use a tab-target combat system are very popular world-wide.
To this day, people still say that ArcheAge and Aion have some of the best tab-target combat available in an MMO – both with regards to PvE and PvP.
So again, what people deem as “great gameplay” is subjective. I’m a firm believer that innovative combat – things that are too complex alienate a large portion of the playerbase.
Combat that expands on what is available by offering improvements in areas other games may be lacking is essential to creating a game with combat that is enjoyed by fans of that style.
Take the newly released Eternal Magic. While not a terrible game at its core, the game plays like a more stiff, clunkier version of ArcheAge.
They had the potential to improve on what was already on the market but opted out of doing so.

Then comes the issue of content consumed versus content frequency.
We’re all accustomed to content droughts. It happens in every single MMO – every single game that has planned DLC and expansions.
Those months where we just sit there, redoing the same content repetitiously because we’re so in love with the game that we don’t want to drop it for any reason.
The struggle to maintain interest is especially evident for those of us that don’t push competitive content like high ranked PvP or the most difficult forms of PvE dungeons or raids.
I’ve done Extreme mode fights in Final Fantasy XIV, I’ve done Mythic+12 dungeons and Heroic raids in WoW but I just don’t possess the ability to push the most difficult content so there’s no need for me to grind as much as others.
And this is all because I have no life. I can’t imagine how little people that work 9 to 5 jobs get to push in terms of content.
However the issue is that people these days are more concerned with the endgame itself as opposed to the journey of getting to the endgame.
Let’s take a look at TERA or Blade & Soul as examples.
I’ve played both of them recently, having leveled from level 1 to endgame for Blade & Soul and to level 65, 66 in TERA.
Both of these games used to require you level via dungeons, main scenario questing, side quests, going out and completing optional objectives, harvesting, mining.
There was so much to do, and so many things to provide an alternative to spamming the main story.
Now, the games have truncated leveling experiences, with the tooltips reading “Follow the main quests to hit max level – avoid side quests and all other forms of world content to hit endgame as fast as possible!”
That’s not how you want to entice new players to enjoy your game. You want people to go out and enjoy being a part of the world you built, interacting with and engaging with the world and its players.
Final Fantasy XIV’s newest Shadowbringers expansion is a fine example of this. I played it day 1 during its Headstart and leveling wasn’t easy.
You had the main scenario quests to pursue, but if you didn’t run at least a dungeon or two each day, participate in various FATEs and do some of the side quests, you were going to hit a wall.
This made people work together to complete the more difficult FATEs, this made people group up for dungeons – leveling and max level dungeons both, this had people doing things together, as a community.
Yes I’m sure there were a portion of players rushing to endgame so they could claim they hit it first, but the reality of it was that there was enough content to warrant a large amount of time spent on the journey to endgame.

I’m well aware that “the big MMOs” like WoW, Final Fantasy XIV, and Elder Scrolls Online push out regular updates because they have significantly more funding than pretty much.. any other MMO on the market.
But if an MMO doesn’t feature regular content, it isn’t going to maintain player attention. If your game doesn’t hold their attention, then people are going to move on to other games that can.
A lot of MMOs don’t offer much in the way of leveling, nor do they offer much in the way of a stable endgame, leaving players to get bored without content – enough content being added at regular intervals.

Those are the three aspects of an MMO that I believe make an MMORPG good.
Innovation is great, but if you can produce an MMO that looks good – not amazing, but good, with gameplay that is enjoyable and an endgame experience that has players actually participate in a community to work towards a goal, I believe you’ll have yourself a solid game.
You don’t need to “push the boundaries of the genre,” or “make an MMO that is truly groundbreaking” like all these new developers are claiming their MMOs goals are.
All you need are the basics: Something fun, something that already works, but adds a few little unique things to keep players immersed in the game world you’ve built.
All these developers are trying so hard to make something new, making bold, grand claims and inevitably falling embarassingly short of their promises.

But that’s just my opinion – my impressions of what makes an MMORPG good to me, subjectively, personally. My opinion and mine alone.
What do you guys think, though? I’m curious what YOU believe makes a good MMORPG. Do you think graphics need to be of comparable quality to Black Desert?
Does the tab-target combat need to be at least as good as ArcheAge or WoW? Does the story need to be as good as Final Fantasy XIV’s new Shadowbringers expansion?
Let me know in the comments below and let’s start a discussion! I’m genuinely curious what you guys think.