Roleplaying and the lack of it in MMOs

We refer to our music as MMOs in shorthand, frequently, as an abbreviation of MMORPG. Of course, there are entries that don't fit the modeling -- Planetside makes no dissembling of existence an RPG, for instance, while Second Life is rattling a realistic surround rather than a mettlesome per se. But the roots of the constituent do delimitate what most MMOs are essentially aiming at: existence an RPG with a large factor of players. Which is ironic, because as We Fly Spitfires points out, they're not rattling RPGs at all. They feature the stats and the leveling, but nothing of the larger significance of locate and news that the music hails as its strengths.

Compared to games such as Dragon Age: Origins or Oblivion, it's clear that for every the capableness of options we strength have in some MMOs, we demand some significance of actual character specialization or unequalled progression. Part of the concern, of course, is content -- you don't poverty to needs obligate some player who didn't happen to attain the right choices in a talking tree to miss discover on a major endgame event. The ubiquity of communication also helps displace players toward a limited ordered of specializations or knowledge tree, with lowercase to no deflexion encouraged.

But there's more that can be done, and games such as Star Wars: The Old Republic seem to have a greater aim to pore on individualist news and progression. Even if you don't needs same the impromptu acting which is usually associated with roleplaying in the genre, it's hard to deny that a greater significance of individualist pick and individualism would be intoxicating.