MMO pioneer Raph Koster, best known as Ultima Online's lead designer and Star Wars Galaxies creative director, says the enduring success of World of Warcraft has had a negative impact on the genre's diversity.
Chatting with GamesRadar+, Koster says MMOs have been "in a rut for a long time" and that "we haven't seen a lot of innovation in the space." Why? Well, because World of Warcraft became so massively popular that it made a new rulebook for MMO devs to follow.
"The template set by World of Warcraft continues to kind of dominate, and it's narrowed down what used to be a much more diverse genre, right?" Koster says. "MMOs used to have far more variety, and we've seen spin off genres come into being to help meet the demand, I guess, for the kinds of gameplay and features that used to be in MMOs and aren't anymore."
I'm picking up what Koster's putting down. Ultima Online, Runescape, EVE Online, Everquest; most of the MMOs that pioneered the genre and were popular before World of Warcraft's time had much more prominent social elements with player and community-run events, as well as player-driven economies. They were also generally far less structured in terms of progression, quest design, and exploration.
These unique features are the reason two MMO subgenres emerged at the same time; sandbox and theme park MMOs, with the latter encompassing more scripted and less player-driven games like World of Warcraft and the vast majority of modern MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 and Elder Scrolls Online. There are still sandbox MMOs, and, in fact, Ultima Online still has official and private servers, while Star Wars Galaxies is still playable via private servers. That said, it's undeniable that theme park MMOs have completely taken over the MMO zeitgeist. I mean, just look at our list of the best MMOs to play in 2025; they're almost all theme park ones.
Koster's new studio, Playable Worlds, is working on a new sci-fi game called Stars Reach, which he tells us will modernize the sandbox MMO experience. "Our whole point was, let's revitalize the MMO genre by bringing in these ideas, not the way that they were 20 years ago, but what, what would be the modern version of them that we can bring to market? We see that as a really large open space that isn't being served."
Stars Reach has no release date, but you can learn more about it and Wishlist it on its Steam page.
