We're going to be entering the age of VR pretty soon.
Yet there will never be a MMO which does combat, exploration, progression , and the social aspects right.
Never mind the microtranscancer, rehashed wannabe fantasy lore and the same, stale, over designed armour sets every MMO does over and over.
At most an MMO will do two things right and then be horrendous in every other way.
We'll never live the lives of our dreams online from the comfort of our own basements.
We'll suffer in RL forever and ever.
Hold me broskis. Hold me tight.
this video is really good
i mean it's hard to make a perfect game but to make a perfect mmo they first have to break out of the blueprint that is WoW and it's success
level based progression, x y z quests, skill trees, that stuff is considered synonymous to MMOs only because of how WoW did it, not to say WoW was bad but because it was what worked so well at the time, developers never took risks, with the exception of EVE
I love reading about EVE but I'd probably never play it, the freedom it gives the players to write their own stories and events are fueled by real intentions and prizes with real stakes, im not exactly sure about how it works, but if you're fighting for X area in space, there's only one of that area to conquer, unlike raid bosses which have been killed several hundreds or thousands of times before you, or a legendary "sword" either blocked by a paywall or part of a quest others have completed, making it not really unique
MMOs are a big risk because of the amount of time and money it takes to create one, so it's understandable why most developers would play it safe and follow most of the foundation that WoW has already placed
basically, everyone's idea of MMO, or at least most means it must have things like set quests and skill trees and "get better gear with higher numbers so you can kill enemies with higher numbers"; at the basic level, all an MMO has to do is just have a massive amount of players in one instance at a time, and give them ways to interact with each other, and build around that
I'm not saying the next big MMO has to be a sandbox, but it doesn't have to be a theme park either