For years and years, the only kinds of shooters were unrealistic, future fantasy games with completely unrealistic physics, and deathmatch was the only flavor. The games that tried to do realism all crashed and burned. “No one wants to die in one shot,” claimed many a designer. Now it’s impossible to imagine a shooter without a sniper rifle.

Yep. Now, it seems all you can get is realism. Unreal and Doom are seen as cute genre anachronisms in a genre that’s now dominated by WW2, Vietnam and the ‘realistic’ physics of Half-Life. The ideas behind the games that got us off of Deathmatch seem so simple in retrospect.

Here’s the catch – it turns out that the revolution didn’t come from just slapping on a fantasy set of paint (i.e. Heretic, Hexen). It came from fundamentally challenging how the game had to play to support their new fiction.

The reinvention of the genre of MMOs will start with us finding a marriage of a game concept that’s highly repeatable with a universe that’s inviting. When it comes, we’ll be shocked that no one saw it coming.