What is an MMORPG? 

"Massive" when we started UO was hundreds as opposed to LAN level multiplayer at 32 or so. By the time we finished UO, it meant UO's 2500+ per shard, as opposed to Meridian 59's 250+.

A game with a lot of players and fishing.

The Nerdslayer and Josh Strife Hayes crossover we didnt know we needed. Amazing work as always.

I just started playing flyff universe (for nostalgia) and it feels more mmorpg than most modern ones do. Lots of people running around spamming for groups, selling items, setting up shops, buffing people, randomly grouping to kill bosses or grind mobs. It really is refreshing.

What would be a nice concept would be Rise of a Game, like Monster Hunter World, Elden Ring, or even some underrated games. EDIT: Another good idea would be gaming series revived from the dead like the Doom series.

It's like searching for a RTS game, it can be genuinely infuriating how many games are mislabeled that clog up the entirety of the search results which just makes me give up looking for anything at all.

This was really interesting, also I think you hit the nail on the head by saying "Massively" was/is simply a marketing term coined by Garriott and the industry has run with it ever since without paying attention to what that word should actually entail. I'd like to see you discuss the sandbox vs. theme park design in future, I think your perspective would be interesting. Sadly in a landscape with "Games as a (Live) Service" I think the genre is only going to fade further into obscurity going forward.

I started my depression train of X-COM2 with your intro ringing through my room and the collaboration halted me completely. Loved this.

I've always seen the heart of an MMO to be the ongoing public situation. The embedded game mechanics and content are just the contextual foundation. How the player base as a whole engages with it is where the real game happens. Think of guilds progressing through raids in WoW, or the player-operated economy in EVE Online. Cooperation and competition within the community is, by extension, an MMO's lifeblood. When it stops flowing, i.e. the public is no longer interested in the situation for whatever reason, the MMO dies.

Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/nerdslayer - Enter promo code NERDSLAYER for 83% off and get 3 extra months for free! Thank you Surfshark for sponsoring this video. I am recovering nicely from COVID, don't worry about me too much detectives :). We also are in the process of redoing all of the art (including the intro) on the DOAG show, please stay tuned :).

Social interaction with many different players to overcome a challenge and help each other, is to me one of the pillars of a MMORPG. I hear so many people say they play MMORPG over a singleplayer game, cause they like the feeling of other people around them, but they don't want to be forced to interact with them. That in my opinion is fine if that makes them happy. What isn't fine is when they complain that due to there wish to avoid interaction with other players, they are excluded from content as it require teamwork.

I just really want to see devs actually design their games to fully utilize being a MMO. I can barely tell the difference between some of these games except "This one allows you to set up a house party, this one doesn't."

That little dig at Rens when defining "Massive" helped solidify the concept. If you don't see other players or the hustle and bustle of their activity, can you call that game a living experience.

What is a MMORPG? A miserable pile of secrets!

I feel like I need to add that Magic Legends was first announced as an MMORPG but later redefined quietly as an ARPG. And not many people liked the change nor the new direction, as evidenced by it closing in mere months

I very much appreciate the grocery store analogy in the player interaction segment. One of the BIGGEST things for immersion in an MMORPG and a concept I feel is lost, is the ability for players to passively engage in the world with other players. Like sitting in a coffee shop or going to a movie theater, you are engaging in the world, it's social and economic structures without the obligation to invest time and active participation. Players are able to walk in to a cantina in star wars galaxies, watch performers and receieve their buffs. They are engaging in social interactions, giving purpose to other players and their non-cpmbat roles and engaging with the gameplay loop intricately designed by the developers. It is crucial for virtual worlds and crucial for the longevity of an MMO's success.

As a Philosophy Tube enjoyer, I do welcome this trend of bullying definitions back into making sense

I love how your new thumbnails are visual distinct and not easy to scroll by

Getting real annoyed with these new age game devs labeling their indie game as "MMO" when it's just like 50 players max on a server...

I love that this isn't just a technical definition. you actually explore the philosophical aspects of an MMORPG that truly give them soul that makes the genre unique.

My guild died the DAY we made a Discord. Mmorpgs were all-in-one games that covered gaming and social needs. Now? Sit in Discord. Doomscroll. You'll never truly engage in an mmorpg again because they too have 50 discord servers to keep tabs on.

I've been thinking lately, what would you classify modern No Man's Sky as? During Expeditions, when all players spawn in on the same planet and try to complete the same challenges to get loot, it feels like an MMO. You see players meeting up at rendezvous point planets and setting up their own bases everywhere. You can team up with other players and explore together or attempt missions like scavenging in derelict freighters, fighting Sentinels and giant worms, etc. Yet NMS lacks a lot of the features one would expect from an MMO. There's no classes, no armor, and no skills. But there is still very much a grind when it comes to earning money, nanites (used to advance through the tech trees), and just explored the galaxy for the the good procedurally generated ships, guns, upgrade modules, etc that you want

Sadly most companies make MMOs now and forgot about the RPG imo 😪

Thank you for this video. It is frustrating when a game claims to be an MMORPG and then the way that it achieves those letters is a little bit wrong. Games like Raid Shadow Legends come to mind, they technically meet the criteria that you set forth, but calling them an MMORPG always seems a bit disingenuous. Maybe if we had a different term or categorized MMORPGs like we do MUDs so that it would be easy to identify what the game actually is. I am also fascinated by the shift from Guild Wars to Guild Wars 2. I think that it was a great choice of how to do things starting with an morpg and then adding once they spent a bunch of years learning how to do that well(imho) the next outing they did everything bigger.

This was a great video, would be interested in a similar definition for "RPG" games. Since it seems that the genre has shifted alot with the likes of more triple A studios introducing RPG elements in their titles, like Assassin's Creed and Zelda. Is it character progression only, or something deeper?

The aggro system, the in-depth character builds, and a focus on killing mobs more efficiently over just finishing an encounter using whatever works is something I've found from MMOs. Having an economy is also a nice boon and having other new people around to positively interact with is also nice.

Thank you for mentioning this in the sequel vid. I some how missed this video when it first came out, so reminding me that it existed let me double back and watch a video I would have otherwise not seen. Thanks

If Kotor Online hadn't marketed itself as an MMORG I might've actually played it. I liked the first game and loved the second even with it's unfinished ending, but had zero desire to play the MMO and never intend to.

In some way, we also lost what "Role-playing games" mean. You don't play these games like a tabletop role-playing game. You hardly get any choice on what to do, as the story is already laid out for you. The "choices" you make just puts you on a different branching path or may be inconsequential to the story. There are often MMORPG players who play to maximize their stats and be the strongest possible, but don't care much about the story or the "role-playing" aspect. If they were to play a tabletop rpg, they would be called a "munchkin", and they are often frowned upon as the point of the tabletop rpg is to live, act and make choices through a story as your character would, not to maximize stats. However, MMORPG encounters are built TO make the player stronger, while the story is often reduced to text boxes and the player generally has little agency. MMORPG quests are simply kills x mobs or gather x things, simply to distribute experience and some items. Sometimes you'll get dungeons to go through, but they are mostly played to gather loot and gain experience points. Raids are also built on the expectation that players will Min-Max their characters for the best chance at winning, and raid groups generally won't tolerate players who do anything less. "Role-Playing" in MMORPGs are generally reduced to just typing out actions in chat and doing emotes.

Woah another nerdslayer video already?? Well appreciated:D

Thanks for mentioning Anarchy Online, even tho the footage used was from the later version than the Noob Island version.

I get so nostalgic every time I hear the NWN OST. Such an epic OST, and that is on top of the years I spent playing it in SP and MP. I agree with your assessment, that persistence is important for the MMORPG genre, same with massive. To me, massive is when you meet a few players here and there. I can give an example. LOTRO is one of the medium to small MMORPG, but it feels massive to me, since I often come across other players. Plus, the game world is huge.

I still feel that MMORPG means "many men only role playing as girls".

The timing of this is actually crazy, I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine maybe an hour or two ago about how most modern MMORPGs have shifted greatly in style and structure from older school MMORPGs (to the detriment of the genre as a whole), partially because they've lost the MM part of the term, and how the definition has shifted greatly in the past 20 years or so. Very much looking forward to the rest of this series!

i still remember in 2008, when i was playing Perfect World Online. the MMO aspect feels amazing

For me its a lot of grinding until you get to the endgame, with builds that advance at a snail's pace and do not always have the most exciting options at level up. Then raids and PVP open up, creating an even greater loop of repetition for endgame gear. Occasionally there will be new content drops, most of them paid. The difference between MMO and MMORPG is the number of concurrent players supported by a server. However, I probably missed a lot of details, since I am not a fan of the massive time sink and grind they usually require. The one that caught my attention the most were early parts of The Secret World, mostly by the creativity of investigation quests, the dialogue and the fascinating lore.

neopets was one is the most successful mmorpgs of its time, change my mind persistent world check, persistent character check, automated rules and systems for players to interact check. arguably one of the most detailed and extensive economies and fleshed out worlds there is in all mmorpgs.

12:10 another problem whit the Korean "MMO" flashines is that it prevents scaling. really I remmber trying a korean MMO and when every class got spells and abilities that when you play single player fills the screen and then try and do a 50 vs 50 PVP battle you littarly could not see anything. another thing I dislike is that when just the basic attack is flashy how do you make that 1 hour cooldown ultima attack stand out? by making it even flashier meaning that battle that you could littarly not see the ground and other player over all the flashines crashed peaples computer. also another thing I see missing is the MMORPG (the RPG part) been applied to game that have no right calling themself RPGs. my take on the massive part is at least 200 people in a room whit another at least 1000 player in the same server (if operation "wake-up call" that was a raid on crossroad contains 100 player whit the goal of getting the players from Orgrimmar to leave Orgrimmar and getting stuck in Crossroad, hits the server cap so that our main force that was hiding outside Orgrimmar could not do there part. then whats the point of the server if the server does not support several larger gathering happening in different part of the world at the same time especially when the reason why said large gathering are caused by action and interaction between each other. what I mean whit that I played HL2 mod that supported 64 vs 64 player and I would not call that massive in any shape or form. then whats the point of the server if the server does not support sever

Meanwhile bungie thinks destiny is a mmo because it you can have 32 players in the social space..

What's said at 17:15 Yah feel that.

I cannot tell you how happy I was when I heard Uncharted Worlds playing in the video. I'm so glad you brought up how Destiny is an ORPG. When Bungie announced the Shadowkeep expansion, they also announced that Destiny 2 was going to be labeled as an MMORPG. To say that I laughed so damn hard at that would undersell just how hysterical I was at that moment. I was laughing to the point where I wasn't even paying attention to the information being revealed for the expansion, but was instead still laughing at their insistence on calling Destiny 2 - a game that only holds upwards of 24 people on screen - an MMORPG.

Here we go again..., look man, been a long time fan of your channel, and especially your DOAG series. I fully respect and acknowledge you as one of the best content creators on RU-vid and will so in the future. But all your arguments about MMORPG just doesnt make sense at all. If we take your definition of what a MMORPG truly means, then there never was a MMORPG since the 90's and early 2000's. Your claim that FFXIV isnt a MMORPG or ESO or GW2 or whatever MMORPG thats out right now just doesnt make sense at all. Even your beloved Runescape example doesnt fit your description, no single game does. Your Darkfall Online argument that you so often bring up too is being disingenious too. It didnt had a persistent world, trading was limited and it was based around an event economy, how can that be a MMORPG then? Not too mention, both Darkfall and Ultima Online used a shard system, that not a MMORPG either then, right? Just using your own argument against you here. A MMORPG is a MMORPG because you as a player interact with other players online. Simple as that. Wether thats through a hub based zone style design or an open world doesnt change that fact. Just let it rest Justin, really. It really deters you from being the best on the platform.

Most people don't even rattle off MMORPG any more when discussing these games. It's sort on antiquated term with simply Online RPG being more common and used to contrast Single Player RPG as being online one assumes it is multi-player. Cute video, but as I've said before when this subject comes up it's an argument of semantics and MORPG will never catch on. This is just beating a dead horse.

RPG is the most slap on term used for games, and is the hardest to actualy give meaning as any game where there is a safe state and you dont repeat your personal daily life can be defined as a "RPG" the other parts. "mmo" can be classified clear definitions, if the game is a "multiplayer online" experiance wether or not there is solo gameplay, there has to be interation with other players and not just exclusive to your already established friend list but the pure term online and multiplayer would have different meaning on a game where the terms are seperated to the 2 as just online is a service game and a multiplayer can be pure established players and would still fall under the term but as the multiplayer online are part of the whole "mmo" the meaning changes as stated before. Massive has to feel that way and is more a feeling as in the video, you cant call warframe massive just because you play a session with 4 player there is definition needed on wether this is deterministic of the size of the world, the amount of content or the amount of players which eather is hard to define specifics for, personaly for me having a large group just standing in a hub area does not make it massive for me where if you would take 1 tile from planetside and you just think about the chaos that happens you would call it massive but on top of that, the map is even bigger and multiple of these chaotic tiles are just a 1 minute drive away from each other. i think the easyest definition for "massive multiplayer" is atleast 50 players or around that ballpark for a minimum. if someone can make a great example how to establish wether a game can't be classified as a RPG, than i would like to hear it. As how i see it every game is a RPG but only the MMO can be defined where after that, if it is an "mmo" game i think it is a MMORPG.

17:10 best explanation begins here

Weird, this video somehow didn't show up in my feed even though I activated the bell. I only noticed this video because of the newest one mentioning this...

Excuse me, how is BDO not an MMORPG? How does it not have open world content?

I'd agree that the term Massive requires over a thousand players, but I'd add that those players need not necessarily be in the square block or "on camera" at the same time. I need only see the impact of those players o the world, such as player built shops or housing, which lends to the Persistence of the virtual world as well.

new intro rocks

Could someone tell me what game is showed at 14:00 during the Persistence section?

Oooooooh this almost slipped through the cracks. Glad I caught it though. Also, hope you're feeling better!

What is the name of the game shown at 0:52?

What is the game at 01:20 called?

I would like to add a little thing: What is a Role-Playing-Game? Frankly, I cannot come up with an easy to say term for this type of game but when I just look at the words any digital game can be considered an RPG. If you *PLAY* a *ROLE* in a *GAME* you are playing a role-playing-game. RPing, to me, is more like acting. RPG has lost all it's meaning in my opinion. I know stoic fans of traditional RPG games that have fought tooth and nail to try and justify what an RPG is and why the games media and even developers just don't know what they are doing when they call something an RPG. Like Monster Hunter World being called best RPG. They refused to accept that. But I think it is pretty realistic to call it that. What would you define as an RPG? What makes an RPG? And can we condense those elements into a better term? I know Josh Dry Face and Callum have had talks about this before.

The RPG part, I feel, should only be granted to games that actually have any Role-Playing. It seems that anything that has randomized loot or doing whatever to get to the meta build these days call themselves RPG.

Hmm... I honestly wonder where BioWare's Neverwinter Nights, or, for that matter, Minecraft are in this. I mean they're notionally single-player games with multiplayer option. In practice, they're more like a network of private MMO servers....

We'll done, a long time coming. "MMORPG is for marketing." Yep. That's how we got this pile of shit.

Maybe they changed black desert later but at the start it was just an open world game with open world pvp , sieges , and raids. The story elements were lacking but it was in my mind and actual mmo.

I hear the lotro music, but I see no lotro game and I am sad. It's so gooooooood!

What's in an MMO nerdslayer edition

When will the video What is life? Come out?

Online Open-world Cooperative RPG?

could you do onigiri by cyberstep?

how you missed rf online and seal online, ryl, and tantara online

Tibia is still the best mmorpg around, it's filled with 25 years worth of content and has a great investment on roleplaying

Red dead online needs a death of a games players even giving it a funeral

Personally,The social part of a multiplayer game ESPECIALLY MMOs needs to be at least decent,I may be a bit nostalgic to the time we had to actually talk and make friends and touch virtual grass,But I miss the time when groups weren't just a bunch of randoms and were actually a friend group who met either IRL or in game who party up and have a blast and/or suffer through the content of the game,Obviously Content and playability are the most important things but Come on I can't be the only one here.

Hmmm interesting video. EVE online definitely counts as a MMORPG, and i THINK Planetside 2 might counts (a FPS at heart i know, but the scale and number of players id say fits). Another game that comes to my mind is Albion.

Yo nerd slayer one of my family members said they used to play dark age with you

You say both terms so fast that I can't tell them apart.

I'd like to define an MMORPG as a game where you get to meet, play, and interact with other players during and most of the time, off the main storyline. Most of the games released these days are soooo "solo player" based and then slap the term MMO in it because there are other players that you can see on your screen but you don't really need to interact with them because you have your own storyline to deal with. I hate that. I want a party-based system where I can't level up if I don't party with people or have a dungeon where I have to meet other people. If other players want the solo-based system, go ahead and play an offline RPG instead. But that's just me.

MMORPG - Many Men Online Rope Playing Girls

Emergent gameplay is certainly a term that hasn't been well defined either. At least in the terms of what each style of genre can offer from MMO or MO. The key is of course multiplayer but that can have many different meanings depending on the context of gameplay as I just mentioned. I'm sure you could create a sliding scale of theme park vs sandbox. Of curated content vs player generated content and the tools they have to make it. Something to think about.

Red dead online death of a game would be appropriate and interesting

Looking forward to seeing PSO2 in the next video. Not looking forward to seeing the flopped PSO2 NGS that shoved OG PSO2 into maintenance mode.

The best mmo i played so far is still archeage. Damn if only it wasnt pay2win

If you find fallout 76 or gta online a MMO then you don’t know what a MMO is

I started with Ultima Online, and found myself explaining the concepts in your MMO videos over and over again, whenever people asked me why I don't like MMOs from WoW (inclusive) and on wards. Thanks for making your MMO videos, saves me from having to explain everything when I can just link these.

BDO is complete open world, what do you mean it doesn't have open world content?

Great video!

And here I disagree with you already at the very beginning. 3:12 you say an MMORPG is a "persistent" game, and here I gotta disagree. There is nothing to say that an MMO has to be "persistent". Sure games are allowed to be persistent by being online, but they don't **have** to be. We are so used to what's always have been, we don't even consider what else there is or could be. For me, an MMO needs to be Massive, Multiplayer, and Online AND to have gameplay and mechanics that utilize all 3 of those things together in ways that other genres cannot. Now one can argue what counts as "massive", but I like to think the other parts, Multiplayer and Online are far less subjective. I'd like to say a "Massive" amount of players is when normal, person to person social interactions break down due to sheer numbers. You MIGHT know everyone in a class of 40 (raid size), but would you know everyone in a class of 100? I think there are even studies suggesting you can only maintain around 150 relationships tops. Surely "Online" has to mean "persistent", right? What else can you do with an Online space that isn't persistent? I'd like to introduce you to Space Station 13. Space Station 13, or SS13 for short, has always been a niche title, but it's been growing in population steadily over the years, with the top servers averaging at 100 players, and I'm expecting them to reach 200 in a year or two. To you that may seem like a small amount, but in-game that means a lot. In Runescape a world may have 1,000 players, but the world is so big and wide the space between players is spread pretty thin except for hubs like the G.E. In Space Station 13, the maps are far smaller allowing for a more dense population and oppurtunity for interacting with others. But here is the real kicker, SS13 is a fully realized sandbox with atmosphere pressure mechanics and chemistry, the players are just as malleable as the world around them. If a fire breaks out, people can get stuck and hurt from congestion from all trying to escape through the same exit, if a virus breaks out it can spread rapidly, massive server wide events can occurr that lead to opposing factions. It's more meaningful than the experiences I've had to with a lot of AAA MMOs. So what does this have to do with persistency? SS13 worlds tend to only last 1-2 hours long, everything is then reset. You don't **need** persistency to have fun; I would even go so far to say the Online part of an MMO mainly just means ease of access compared to say, LAN. I fear we as people are forgetting what "Multiplayer" even means, and I think it is reflective of the real world. With people becoming more and more independent of one another, we're forgetting what it meant to play **with** someone else and are confusing it with just playing something with others in the same room. Design wise even the biggest "MMOs" largely are solo experiences. Runescape, despite having some of the best quests in the genre, only have 2 quests that require another player.

FFXIV is a mmo.

Great video dude! I learned a lot.

no mention of LOTRO ? ☹. Amazing video otherwise :)

IMO at its very core an MMORPG needs to be an RPG but an RPG needs to have freedom. An MMO with FREEDOM as it were. If you're not going to let me kill and take all your items, we're not playing an MMO. If I have no way to become the villain and you the hero we're not playing an MMO. Simple. FF14 can fuck right off.

Does Diablo 4 is considered an MMO and why please 🥺😊

I had to wear a mask while watching the video because he has covid and I don't want to catch a computer virus

Hell, we still haven't defined what a 'woman' is buddy, and you want to define an MMORPG? 😉 We should celebrate and embrace whatever identity a game wants to be. What counts is what the game itself identifies as... 🤣

a genre you should never play

A MMORPG is a massive-multi-online-roleplaying-game. No need to complicate things with a 20 minute video.

Albion Online is so underrated

This is such a useless video and attempt to stretch concept of MMORPG. First of all, your own definition includes subjective criteria of x amount of players necessary to be called massive. In one of the comments to you state GW2 is bigger Guild Wars 1? Yet you provide no rational and seem to contradict yourself as it matches on criteria: size (a bit on lower end, yet you say its subjective, so as per your own definition it should not be a problem if someone considers persistent game with 100+ players on a server and interactivity to be MMORPG), it has social features and persistency. Once again for definition to be relevant you would have to provide a reason why, yet those ramifications are never mentioned? Could you elaborate?

No game calling themselves an MMORPG released since WoW: TBC is an MMORPG.

How does a video about MMORPG's not talk about FFXI or FFXIV? Prolly just as influential as WoW tbh...

First

One description that always bothered me and I used myself is "mmo"-style quest which is just a quest that is meaningless canon fodder where you have to gather x amount of things. It is mostly used in a negative context and rightfully so because those quests are the kind of a grind that is boring.

Star Wars Galaxies shaped my view of MMORPG's, after that, it was City of Heroes. Both truly legendary games that I grew up playing, and will never forget to appreciate.

To be honest, I stopped assigning any value to categorizations at the point when CoD got tagged as an RPG because they added some kind of leveling system.

These days it feels like the ''Role Playing Game'' part is really diluted, be it single player games or multiplayer, it seems that many/most mainstream game devs are too scared to put limitations on the player, and the end result boils down to your character becoming an omniscient god who is good at everything, and following that the only difficulty games have is increasing the HP and Damage numbers of enemies.

I'm a die hard single player game lover but I love learning about different types of games. Great video