Down with the goblins - Or how to make MMOs fun again

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We rip the genre apart, dig up its foundations, and then put it back together.

So with this wealth of experience under its belt, where has the MMO gone wrong? Well much like a leather-skinned, sixty-year old, Californian victim of extreme facelift butchery, it has gone so far in a single direction in pursuit of its goal that it has come right out the other side going in exactly the wrong direction. The MMO is all too often an inaccessible slog without any sense of wonder, which actually inhibits the player from bonding with their character. And partly, it’s down to the goblins.

For a start, setting RPGs in Tolkienesque fantasy worlds is less original than setting sandwiches between two slices of bread. Of course, it’s understandable that such game worlds became the staple for the genre. Role-playing games are after all about the escapism of playing a role; being another character in a world different to your own and experiencing another life. And nothing draws the line of distinction between the day-to-day, nine-to-five, meeting-to-meeting drudgery of normal working life and the escape of gaming more definitively than the ability to toast some fools with fireballs from your fingertips.

David Houghton
David Houghton
Long-time GR+ writer Dave has been gaming with immense dedication ever since he failed dismally at some '80s arcade racer on a childhood day at the seaside (due to being too small to reach the controls without help). These days he's an enigmatic blend of beard-stroking narrative discussion and hard-hitting Psycho Crushers.