[2021] Is Ashes of Creation the future of MMORPGS

Ashes of Creation is not the future of MMORPGS. Ashes of Creation is not a next generation mmorpg. In order to push the mmorpg genre forward in mmo needs to capture enough of the player base so that there design becomes the standard. Ashes of Creation will not accomplish this because they do not have a vision of what they want to be.

They divide the PvP player base between competitive pvp and casual mmo pvp. Players that like casual mmo pvp will be attracted to Ashes of Creation and that is at most 20% of that player base. The rest PvP in battle royals, mobas , fps and fighting games because they are skilled base which is built for PvP. MMO pvp is lackluster because it is built on character progression and power which negates player skill. Open World PvP MMO is an oxymoron it should really be called open world bullying.

Player agency is a myth in mmorpg really this should be called developer giving meaningless choices that leads to the same end. In an mmorpg players have to reach the same end in order to retain the massive and multiplayer aspect. In Ashes each server will have a different story but players are on one server so they will only experience one server.

Forced group content does not build a social community it builds a toxic community that hates each other. That is the worse mmo design decision in the modern era. Ashes seem to have the four quest chain then the forced group content. Spoiler Alert 95% of the player base will quite, delete their account and uninstall the game when they reach this step because they will be wasting to shouting for a group only to have the group fall apart once one person makes a single mistake.

Ashes of Creation design is antithetical to mmo design and Steven is way over his head. As it stands now this game is just a bunch of overhyped feature list to elicit the FOMO. The only thing people are missing out on is the train going over the bridge with Steven as a conductor. The game design is more suited towards a Multiplayer Online Game. As an MMORPG this game will fail.