MMORPGs are really the genre of my heart. While I do love RPGs and strategy games, I always want to return to MMOs and hope to find something to sink years into and find new friends to chat with. It is a genre I feel so strongly about that for over 15 years I have been designing my own MMORPG in my head and on paper just for my own mental play and have even written articles on this blog about my thoughts. I have considered at many points creating my own on my own and have made minor attempts at it through the years in various ways.
Yet looking at this blog, I haven’t mentioned MMO’s for 3 years… an article where I talk about FFXIV… before that… 2012… where I talk about upcoming MMOs that looked interesting (only Elder Scrolls Online really worked out and I never played it)…. and it has seemingly been about 10 years since I really talked seriously about MMOs from a design/analytical standpoint.
Part of this, I realize, is that over the last 5 to 10 years, I really just have vacated the blog sphere entirely. Life etc… The other part of it is that I have also almost completely vacated the MMO genre due to the WoWification of it. The FFXIV spurt of articles that I wrote came because I was really jonesing for the genre so I went to the best available game, which fortunately or unfortunately was FFXIV.
Since about… August… I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2. I have played this game periodically on and off since near launch. I think the most the game has ever hit for me previously was the 3 to 4 month timeframe. I did take a break from GW2 for about 4 to 6 weeks over December and January, but I seem to be back in… We are now sitting at probably… 8 or 9 months of play which is fairly substantial for me these days.
So this coupled with the recent announcement that GW2 will get a third expansion and so I’ve been contemplating things I’d like to see in the game for that expansion, coupled with a lot of downtime due to Coronavirus… and I’ve contemplating game design for MMOs again of late. To add to it, last year about this time, I got a promotion at my job where I am developing programs with Java, and while i’m still new at it… I think I’m pretty freaking good at it and so the concept that I could program my own MMO is resurfacing as a very real possibility.
So… short story long… I kind of want to get some of these mental discussions back into blog form with the extra time that I have been granted. The one thing doing this really does for me is that it helps me focus. Because I can take a single topic. Talk about it and my ideas on it. Really dig in… and because it’s getting written, i don’t circle around it quite as much.