Recent trends in gaming have led to a strange new genre in the industry that I am dubbing MMO-Esque games. These are things such as Destiny, Warframe, Overwatch and other similar games. They all focus around multiplayer and as a result can’t really be played solo however the difference is that there is no true singular world but instead lots of missions/seperate instances that you play in instead of a true MMO singular location.
It’s an odd system that seems to help make a game seem more alive than just being a simply multiplayer shooter/RPG. You give the impression of there being a massive amount of people such as having a centralised trading hub or social area that contains massive amounts of people but when it comes to actual gameplay you are thrown into smaller, singular missions or play spaces that contain a few players that work together in squads. The trend of making games in this genre is increasing more however perhaps because it lets the concepts of an MMO such as player-driven economies or social communities grow and flourish while not being too ambitious or straining too many resources on maintaining a constantly living world.
Maybe I’m looking too much into this, perhaps this is simply the natural progression of MMO’s or maybe these kind of games will simply be another experiment in the grand scheme of the gaming industry. I suppose only time will tell. That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.