When you hear the phrase MMO what immediately springs to mind? Quite possibly you think of World of Warcraft or even Everquest, massive open world adventures where you travel around a land, earn loot, level up and ultimately interact with a huge community in real time.
Recently however there has been a shift in what exactly an MMO is. By all accounts, Blizzard considers Overwatch to be an MMO, however it isn’t nearly close to what we would describe as one. Many people call these types of games MMOFPS (Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooters) which typically describe multiplayer focused games in a first person shooter style.
Now games like Planetside 2 and such are more akin to the open world real time intractability that people think of when an MMO is described however perhaps the medium is changing. Games are so diverse and fit into so many categories that describing something as a Massively Multiplayer Online game really only scratches the surface as at this point it only really describes that it is multiplayer focused, much like Overwatch.
What do you all think about this? Do you consider games like Overwatch to also share the MMO genre flag or do you feel it’s being too generalist? Let’s have a discussion about this! That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.