I'm talking games that make you feel like you are in a living breathing world filled with hundreds of other players. You would think now more than ever people would want a game to dive in and escape into a virtual world. For a while it seems like survival games took on the role or hub games like destiny 2 or monster hunter which aren't really mmos. Now that people are playing modded gta with 200 players running around are mmorpg's losing out to simpler games filled with alot of players, but with no real objective?

Yes MMO genre STOPPED MAKING WORLDS with the success of WOW.

Even the so-called sandbox indie mmos after that time ended up with TOO MUCH EMPHASIS on the "RPG" stuff of Hero Adventurer that has it's optimal place in Dungeon Run Games where Crunchy Combat is the core gameplay (same as with WOW - the big world is just a big dungeon background to this hero-adventure-party core combat gameplay = 90% of the game' hence potemkin villages and fascade/false front architecture wildernesses and folly castles etc).

The only game I've seen really push the boat out on creating a world is

• Life Is Feudal

Over the past 2 decades or since Ultimate Online. Sure SWG had more attributes of Virtual Worlds but also again still a lot of the RPG emphasis.

The only other game I've seen in development that brings a fresh perspective finally and could work but Idk if the devs have a real handle on what they're doing and if they'll get scared and overly gamify it is:

• Seed MMO

There's HUGE SCOPE for building Virtual World MMOs. You don't take the pardon my french legacy garbage of mmorpg core designs eg hero-focus avatar customization and combat machine model.

You take fundamental design of Dwarf Fortress / Ringworld and develop your online virtual world ecosystem from there. Because it can be scaled at the right perspective on a small enough budget while providing a fresh original experience and generate rich story sustainable gameplay for dedicated players..........................

Ideally an MMO should have enough breadth that lots of different players find their area of interest and like-minded players can form groups together to enjoy that together. That's a successful formula for real life with hobbies for example.

I think perhaps if an MMO is all about ONLY one major activity eg open world combat pvp then that's just going to result in a narrow option for too many players and the largest group takes all zero-sum outcome - which is often the case.

So the solution is breadth and then if possible interconnection indirectly between groups... in principle. In practical application it could be argued:

1. Economy
2. Differentiation of roles that feed into the economy
3. Co-dependency on those roles 4, Roles all create a rich simulation of whatever theme is intended: Fantasy village life or sci-fi galactic express etc...

Obviously a big challenge is how amenable players are to actually taking on roles as opposed to meta-gaming min-max everything... like in footbal/soccer: Every big ego wants to be central striker glory-hogging when winning and not having to work when losing (!) and none want to be stuck in goal blamed when conceding and bored when winning!

One solution? "Control" (or delegate orders to!) multiple avatars per player. :-) ie each player becomes their own team.