Haus
<Silver Donator>
You literally just described my wife... She watches MMO Champion just enough to know what mounts are coming in what patches and what she'll need to do to get them. The Traders Post in WoW essentially now guarantees her a reason to keep subbed and play some each month, which is Blizzard's holy grail of profitability. Users staying subscribed, and only logging in enough to do regularly scheduled content (so a lighter load on servers)The only IRL people I know that still admit to playing a lot of Retail WoW are three biological women all in their 30s who work in IT middle management and are also very active TikTok users. 2 are very high rated M+ healers, and all of them have like a bajillion pets and mounts. Like an unhealthy amount of mounts.
This is part of where I think the next "mmo" will be. But it won't be a traditional MMO like we have, it will be the joined/combined persistent world "lobby". It's pretty literally, as someone mentioned, Ready Player One. But I think the hinderance to this is not technology, but rather company/developer greed. They all want to be the ONLY one making the money off the sheep, rather than realizing that supporting a large ecosystem of gaming they could capture the full soul of the gamer. A Ready Player One "virtual environment" where you then jump into various games will probably be the way of the future. The biggest hurdle would be gaming companies finding a way to play nice with one another on topics like "How do you translate a players items between games, especially when they might be radically different genres, and how to monetize it while ensuring consistency and control of items in this universe. I'm pretty sure we already have the technology for that underpinning of assets between publishers/etc, but that's another topic.There's just a lot of different games that scratch different parts of the MMO itch but at different intervals.
Want a game where you loot a bunch of shit and if you get lucky you pwn a bunch of newbs for free? Play Fortnight or any other BR with colorcoded loot levels.
Want a cooperative/competitive pvp game about cumulative advantage? Play any MOBA.
Just wanna grind shit? Well, every fucking FPS game has Experience Points now.
Destiny 2 has a bajillion armor pieces and guns to collect, etc.
It's much harder to build "The One Game To Rule Them All" than it was a while ago. But people said there would never be a bigger pop star than Michael Jackson again, due to the breadth of the music scene, and then along came Taylor...
So yeah, I believe someone will eventually utilize AI combined with good design and other next-gen tech to produce something outstanding at some point that will command all of the industry's attention in the same way WoW did for a while. What exact form it'll take, I have no idea.
The traditional "one big world" MMO is probably dead at this point. But one big game environment that is persistent in an ecosystem of interconnected games, I think that has more viability eventually.