Whatever happened to the MMORPG? In the early 2000s, the likes of World of Warcraft, RuneScape, and EverQuest dominated cyberspace, their worlds host to millions of players questing and raiding together. Today, Roblox’s titanic 123 million daily player count dwarfs the combined historical peak of this trio and many other genre stablemates of the time.

That’s not to say the MMORPG is dead. A brand new one, Aion 2, launched just this week and quickly found itself on Steam’s Most Played list. The long-awaited Guild Wars 3 is on the horizon. And many of the genre’s pioneering games continue to run successfully, some even 25 years on from their inception. But that’s become the genre’s norm – ongoing projects built on ageing technology, rather than fresh new blood. The “live-service” game has taken its place, but that controversial industry trend has stolen the crown that the MMORPG forged.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games were the first live-service games, long before the term had become common parlance. Both formats share a similar definition: at their core, they are online multiplayer games that are continually expanded, evolved, and developed beyond their initial launch, with that process often buffered by microtransactions or subscription models. The one key difference is that the modern live-service game can be anything from a tight 6v6 battle arena to a galaxy-spanning looter shooter. MMORPGs, meanwhile, typically take place in large fantasy or sci-fi open worlds, inspired by (or sometimes set in) the likes of Dungeons & Dragons or Star Wars, allowing players to act out long-imagined fantasies together.

Their replication of a world, with cities to visit and countries to travel across, means there’s an innate communal core to MMORPGs – like in reality, the game’s digital population becomes a community. It’s a notably different feeling compared to the communities of many modern live-service titles, like Apex Legends and Overwatch, which often focus on short, trigger-happy play cycles. People don’t admire Fortnite’s often rebranded islands in the same way they do World of Warcraft’s Nagrand or Stormwind. One is a battlefield, the other is home.

MMORPGs evolved from multi-user dungeons, or “MUDS”. Back in the early days of the internet, MUDs functioned like a virtual chatroom hinged around a fantastical adventure. They were D&D for your desktop instead of your tabletop. As entertaining as they were, multiplayer gaming took a huge step toward how we understand it today in 1997 when Ultima Online launched. It is the game from which the term ‘MMORPG’ came from, coined by Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series. Directed by Starr Long, it was an ambitious spin-off from the mainline Ultima RPG series that gave players something brand-new: a world that could change whilst they weren’t playing.

“The idea you could play in a virtual world with thousands of other people was a pretty novel idea at the time”, Long tells me. “It was like, ‘Wow, I can play D&D with my friends without even needing to be in the same town.’”

Ultima Online was one of the earliest pioneers of many aspects that are now baked into almost every live-service game, including monthly subscriptions and digital currency purchasable through brick-and-mortar retail stores. It became the first MMORPG to reach 100,000 subscribers and it did so within six months – an unexpected success which led to severe performance issues. Players responded by staging a digital protest in the castle grounds of Garriott’s in-game alter-ego, Lord British, over-indulging on consumables in order to fill the area with vomit.

“That was the turning point where we realized, while we are the game creators, this is the players’ world,” says Long. “We’re just facilitating it for them.”

The success of Ultima Online was analysed by many, including EverQuest co-creator Bill Trost. “The whole Ultima series was a big influence on me throughout high school,” he recalls. And in 1999, just two years after Ultima Online, Trost, alongside co-creators Steve Clover and Brad McQuaid, launched EverQuest. Its 3D game engine demonstrated just what an MMORPG world could be, and led to EverQuest’s immense popularity.

While EverQuest’s world looked significantly more advanced, Ultima Online’s success had taught Trost that the most important thing was the communal experience. “My world-building philosophy was to build a world with integrity, but don’t design it to death,” he explains. “The world we built and situations we set up made people bond together.”

Trost attributes EverQuest’s ongoing success to the team’s light touch, allowing players to make sense of the game themselves. It’s a sentiment echoed by Long: “We realized that running one of these games is more like running a government. Your people are your citizens,” he says.

These expansive communities changed people’s lives. It was in EverQuest where Jeff Kaplan first met Blizzard’s Vice President of Game Design, Rob Pardo, via the Legacy of Steel guild. That fateful meeting led to Kaplan joining the World of Warcraft team as a quest designer, a position from which he eventually rose to become game director.

Kaplan loved EverQuest, clocking up over 6,000 hours of play, but always felt like there could be more to the game. Joining the World of Warcraft team was his opportunity to make that “more” a reality. Blizzard needed something special because the competition was tough – it not only had to battle Ultima Online and EverQuest’s existing success, but stand up against the hype for EverQuest 2 and Star Wars: Galaxies, both of which were on the horizon when World of Warcraft launched in 2004.

“Everyone said, ‘Who is this RTS company? Who do they think they are to make an MMO?,” Kaplan recalls. At the time, Blizzard was known solely as a strategy games developer, although its Diablo ARPG series, beloved for its online multiplayer, was perhaps the first sign that the studio would go on to make arguably the definitive MMORPG.

While Kaplan and his colleague, Pat Nagle, initially designed World of Warcraft’s quest system to match EverQuest, player test feedback told them one thing: the game needed way more quests. Of the many ways WoW revolutionized the modern MMORPG, creating a seemingly never-ending quest chain that propelled players through the world’s regions is perhaps the most important, setting the mold for quest systems moving forward. There are over 10,000 unique quests, and even the most hardcore players still find themselves challenged with new daily and weekly activities delivered by patches and expansions.

In the modern live-service landscape, World of Warcraft’s approach to questing is increasingly niche. The idea of the never-ending hobby game has drifted away from the concept of living a second life in another world alongside hundreds of players, finding new ground in the likes of competitive shooters – a genre with little need for narrative rigour and a sense of adventure. That has brought with it a shift away from vast troves of unique quests, with many games instead prioritizing lightning play sessions buffeted by the ingenious corporate creation of the ‘Battle Pass’. Games like Call of Duty and Apex Legends offer simple challenges like ‘eliminate four players’ or ‘get five knockdowns’ for short-term XP buffs, allowing players to make their infinite grind slightly shorter to get ever-closer to that mythical level 90 skin. For these games, narrative is now occasional lore drops, event-driven cutscenes, and seasonal set dressing.

But while live-service is now dominated by very different types of games, the MMORPG still remains. It’s a less stable genre than it once was – Amazon’s lavish New World launched in 2021 and will close for good next year – but a new Guild Wars is on the horizon, and Final Fantasy 14 has been a huge success for Square Enix. The three titans of the MMO’s golden age – Ultima Online, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft – all continue to run to this day. In that sense, they have proven the ultimate live-service games, generating revenue for multiple decades.

Why these three have survived far beyond the genre’s mid-2000s heyday is thanks to the three key tenets that Long, Trost, and Kaplan have all followed: learn from what came before and find gaps to innovate within; build an engaging world that intrigues players and makes them want to take ownership of it; and above all else, look to fulfil those clear wishes of gamers that haven’t yet been realised. As Kaplan mentions, you can’t create greatness out of a vacuum: “You have to take inspiration. You have to try and evolve the art form and move it forward in some way. It’s not about the idea. It’s about the execution.”

The trio’s legacies have come from constant communication not just with their playerbases, but with one another, too. They are a model for the ideal live-service game: living and breathing, open to change, headed by custodians who aren’t afraid to push things forward whilst acknowledging their contemporaries. So why, despite their servers remaining live and new content being developed, does it feel like these games have disappeared? Well, MMO developers have granted a lot of wishes since 1996. Perhaps there’s nothing left to wish for.

“Now we’re getting pretty niche, and it’s harder to fulfil [those wishes] for audiences. We’re seeing it across film and TV as well as games”, Long says.

Technology has rapidly evolved and expanded, and with it, the cost of investment. “The table stakes required to even be considered by the gaming public are now so high it becomes difficult to justify the investment it takes”, Trost believes. When even Amazon can’t make the MMORPG work, it’s easy to see why bringing a new one to life is such a challenge.

Even if you have the financial backing to launch your bold new MMO, the question remains: will your audience have the attention span to invest into it? “The market overall has moved to much, much shorter play cycles over the last two decades,” Long explains. The average playtime for World of Warcraft ranges from 10 to 20 hours per week, with each individual session typically demanding a few hours of questing. Raiding takes even more time. While this overall time commitment can easily be met by a shooter’s most ardent fans, particularly in the era of the battle pass grind, there is a notable difference between the way each genre makes demands of a player’s attention. The modern live-service game has taken the essential bones of the MMORPG – those massive populations playing together – but has shifted its core away from a long-term communal hub to a quick ‘jump in, jump out’ combat spree.

That transformation has impacted the way a game’s population develops. “The ubiquitous nature of community doesn’t feel confined to the game anymore – it’s fragmented out across all our social media”, Trost notes. In an MMORPG, the community exists within a shared world. They can meet in a particular city, quest together in a specific region. This sense of being a genuine population living together in a digital reality creates a very different community than those grown on a game’s sub-reddit. Deep, meaningful connections were formed in World of Warcraft through the many hours that players sunk into its world every week – many real-life couples and even marriages have formed from the time taken planning raids together. And while the same has surely happened as a result of a fateful lobby match-up, it’s hard to imagine many Fortnite players finding that same connection when each match takes place in a confined battlefield and lasts just 15 to 20 minutes.

This shift in how multiplayer communities are grown and fostered is just a small part of a much larger change. Gaming is like travelling to a new holiday destination: it transports you to incredible, unknown lands and allows you to play out transient fantasies of a different life. In the early 2000s, games were the destination; World of Warcraft, EverQuest, and Ultima Online all offered a centralized hub that was an immersive world to explore. In 2026, games are no longer the destination – they’ve become the airport. Call of Duty’s menu is a departure list made up of rowdy weekend getaways. Fortnite is a portal to thousands of unique, custom islands hosting events powered by charting musicians and massive brands. And Roblox not only offers a plethora of worlds-upon-worlds to explore, but has formed an alluring ecosystem where players can not only craft those worlds themselves, but also be paid to do it. Everything from Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty to Among Us and even Fortnite have been recreated in its virtual universe.

The Roblox community has evolved beyond players into mini development studios. These virtual worlds now belong to the players even more than the original developers themselves. During the era of the MMORPG, developers discovered that they were creating worlds for an autonomous population with wants and needs. Since then, player autonomy has rapidly evolved. It’s no longer about wondering when the next Warcraft expansion will come and continue the story. There’s a bustling embryonic mini gaming industry taking shape across these platforms, with a community that’s set to grow exponentially over the next five years. The real question, then, is can these platforms keep up? Because the era of live-service that came after MMORPGs suggests that’s a much, much harder task than simply designing a hit video game.

Next: How live-service turned gaming into a bloody battle royale.

Sab Astley is a freelance writer who has written for IGN, Polygon, TotalFilm, Rolling Stone, Radio Times, and Metro UK.