'People want MMOs', says veteran designer Jack Emmert, it's the publishers chasing WoW-level scope that are the problem

The MMO is in dire straits at the moment. Don't get me wrong, it's popular—but it's an aging genre, to the point where we even didn't have a single MMO make it to our Top 100 list last year, because while there are still many popular ones going, they've been losing too many points for recency and relevancy.

Meanwhile, when it comes to new MMOs, it's a bloodbath. They're either getting axed like New World or snuffed in the crib like Project Blackbird—and the ones that do truck along with a few thousand players are small-scale indie projects like Project Gorgon. Everyone else is an old dog in search of new tricks to keep humble playerbases ticking over.

Sharing my consternation over the state of things is Jack Emmert, an MMO veteran designer who has worked on games like City of Heroes/Villains, Neverwinter, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and more—many of which are still up and running.

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Speaking with Gamesindustry.biz, Emmert puts it plain: "People want MMOs, and the sales of New World proved it. But I don't believe that the infrastructure and the strategy was there to sustain it, and so ultimately they shut it down.

"I think that the idea that the MMO crowd doesn't exist is belied by the number of players who are still in World of Warcraft, or in my games, or in the Daybreak games … They want something new."

He still believes that the spectre of being a WoW killer is haunting newer MMOs even to this day—killing them via ballooning scope: "In [the publisher's mind], they needed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and they also needed to appeal to the widest possible audience.

"These new MMOs or MMO-adjacent games become so watered down by the expectations that it's got to be everything. And so you see games that are basically features, but without any soul... And so they fail, and you've seen it over and over again."

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The antidote—and it is a big ask—is a publisher that's comfortable with setting reasonable expectations, rather than desperately trying to make the next WoW or Destiny. They need to "establish a reasonable budget with a reasonable projection, stick to it, and have a very distinct vision of what you're trying to do."

He uses the example of Neverwinter, which released with a pretty straightforward set of features: "A major publisher would have said to this game, 'Oh well, you're going to need to build your own house, and you're going to need to cut down forests: What's going to differentiate you from World of Warcraft?'

"When I made Neverwinter, I never even thought like that. I was just trying to make the experience of what I had work. I didn't worry about competitors. I didn't worry about the X factor that's going to make me stand out. Just didn't even think about it."

Makes sense to me. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play: "Players don't mind, it's the publishers who thought you needed a bajillion number of things."

I think Emmert's assessment here is fair—I can certainly see echoes of it in the horror stories surrounding Anthem, wherein Mark Darrah said that the ability for mechs to fly was tossed back in very nearly last-minute as part of BioWare's "highly dysfunctional relationship with decision-making."

But sometimes a game just gets kneecapped out of nowhere even if it's doing fine. Maybe New World didn't have too much soul—but it's still very possible to make money off a game with 10,000 players. Perhaps Emmert's right in a different sense. There's a humbler, leaner version of New World that would've made its publisher comfortable with those numbers.