The Daily Grind: How do you define MMO?

@Ardan I believe CORPG is what Arenanet called it. So officially it is a CORPG, but everybody else just called it an MMO.

@Ardan
CO-RPG is not an exclusive category with MMO. Guild Wars is both a CO-RPG and a MMO. Personally when I think of a CO-RPG that isn't also a mmo, I think of Borderlands. I am sure it is pretty obvious how different Guild Wars is from Borderlands, despite having many commonalities.

@Quidveritas

I couldn't disagree more. I don't think PvP is even needed for a game to be a MMO.

What I think is needed is the opportunity to interact, in meaningful ways, with other players.

What I think really kills the massive feeling is the need to manually manage groups when players try to play together, plus the amount of content meant to be done solo with no multiplayer counterpart.

This is why I'm looking towards GW2 as the game I will actually play with others. It won't require grouping in order to play together, so anyone can just join without having to ask for a group invite, and the whole event system is meant to draw the players to a small number of changing locations, so they actually meet each other and are given a chance to play together. Plus, the reward system is meant to never reduce the per-player reward when players group up (loot is not divided, each player gets loot as if he had done the content solo), so there should be no motivation to avoid other players in the name of farming efficiency.

Also, GW2 will feature scaling with the number of players in most of it's content, so while most of the game is accessible to solo players, it should also accommodate (and challenge) groups.

@Quidveritas

SWTOR has gotten a lot of people thinking on this, and I think its the stem of this article as well.

I think the big question is not whether the game is an MMO or a CORPG. It is a MMO. Its massive, a persistent world and allows interaction at any given time.

I think what has been lost is the difference between an MMO and a MMORPG. For me this classification has lost meaning.

MMO is a game set in a persistent world like WoW or SWTOR, but doesn't encourage interaction until the later stages of the game. Through Raids or Battlegrounds. Operations or Warzones. These would classify as MMO's to me. These games have rails and set goals.

Now an MMORPG to me is a game that isn't so much on rails and encourages interaction. It has a more predominant social aspect to the game. Old school FFXI would be a decent example of this. It had a set goal of reaching lvl cap 75. But a long the way you met hundreds of people, building relationships with them good or bad. You didn't just level to cap then start doing raids or operations.

No you had Nation missions. You had Zilart or CoP missions to do. Kazham keys to progress your leveling. You unlocked certain Jobs (classes) through quest chains. Genkai. There was so much involved on your journey to end game that made the game great and interactive. There was solo, but you needed to be a beastmaster to do it.

Thats what separates an MMO and a MMORPG for me.


These newer games feel extremely shallow in content compared to games predating them. Class story is great, but extremely linear and encourages you NOT to interact with others because they will slow you down, having to sit through there class story as well.

@smartstep
I do like your subdivisions here, except IMHO all of these subdivisions fall under the larger umbrella of MMO.

@h4ngedm4n

What's the diffrence between Warcarft or Starcraft and Portal2 ?

Why you have put them in other 'dividsions'?

@h4ngedm4n
All squares are equilateral but all equilaterals are not squares.

@smartstep
The difference is Warcraft (3) and Starcraft have the Battle.net matchmaking service which is quite massive. Portal 2 on the other hand, while it uses steamworks, emphasizes playing with a friend. One does not simply play with random strangers in Portal 2 as in the Battle.net games.

@h4ngedm4n

What about games like Civilization that have massive forums that people use for findind opponents ,but they don't have matchmaking service created by game creator?

What about games using 3rd party matchmaking services?

What about games that do have matchmaking service or in-build server lists but almost no-one play them anymore?

They are massive still or not anymore?

@smartstep
I'm not familiar with Civilization's 3rd party matchmaker to have an opinion on that. In general, I think 3rd party matchmakers are indeed MMOs. For example, in Yahoo! Games, yahoo! is really a 3rd party matchmaker for games like chess, bingo, dominoes, and causes those games to become MMO as a whole with the matchmaker.

Not really sure about the games with no one playing. If I wrote a game right now in which each user is only a pixel on a large image, and only a few people play it, is it a MMO? Personally I lean toward "massively" describing the typical amount of people actually play the game.

@Valdur
Precisely! All MMORPG are MMO but not all MMO are MMORPG. :) Took me a while to figure out what you meant.

@h4ngedm4n

Ok. Now I have answers to all my questions.

Well - then I don't agree with you and think you're wrong.

Still everyone have right to have their own opinion.

@Eric37

You are joking right? Run across the map of Alderaan or Tatooine, no loading screen and each one of them is bigger than anything in WOW. No loading screens and the environment is completely seamless (no direct transitions from forests to sahara)

@(Unverified)

that definition just makes the term massive meaningless.

by that definition, anything multiplayer that is popular is massively multiplayer because there are masses of people playing it simultaneously in multiplayer mode. even if was just a bunch of groups of 3-6 people on a local area network, totally seperately from each other. quake 1 back in 1996 would then be included under the umbrella term MMO. which hopefully you can see is a ridiculous concept.

in order to have a meaning (and that is the WHOLE POINT of using words/language), there's got to be more than your standard number of players, playing in the same INSTANCE/SPACE/SERVER, who can potentially see and potentially interact with each other.

otherwise there's no way to communicate effectively with people about the kind of games you play and are interested in. you have to install and try them all out in order to see any difference between any form of multiplayer game. a hell that people like me have been reduced to because of the prevalent abuse of the term MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER.

come on people..... lets try to preserve the meaning of the words, so we don't have to fumble around while a new term is coined and adopted, and ultimately abused and destroyed like tthe term MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER has been.