Ugh… MMOs. The genre I initially hated as a teenager, that I allowed to win me over in some ways, that I now have extremely mixed feelings about. I probably should’ve just stuck with that initial dislike of them. First, they’re designed to take up time, which I find especially heinous in this age where the majority of video games expect me to spend a huge chunk of time on them. Even a relatively short game now expects me to spend 30-40 hours on it, and genuinely short games are extremely rare outside of indie games. It’s not that I want every game to be over in 5-10 hours, I just think there must be a better middle ground to be found between 10 hours and 100 hours. “Over 100 hours of gameplay!!!” now feels obligatory, rather than a specific design choice. The big problem is that an MMO wants to be a lifestyle, not a game. So, even if I think an MMO is a good game, I still have a hard time liking it because I know what it wants is to eat up all my time. The thing is, I know myself. MMOs turn me into my own worst enemy. When I played Destiny, the only game I wanted to play was Destiny. The reason I quit Warframe after breaking the hundred hour mark, even though I really liked the game, was that I could see hundreds, thousands of hours of Warframe stretched before me, and I didn’t want to be a person who only plays Warframe, just like I didn’t want to be a person who only plays Destiny, especially when there are so many other interesting games to play out there. I feel like my thoughts about games are more nuanced, interesting, and beneficial to myself when I play a wide variety of games. I like Destiny and Warframe, but I don’t want them to be a lifestyle, and that’s really the only way to play an MMO as it’s meant to be played. That’s the core reason why I can never really be a fan of MMOs. Like the quarter munchers of the past, they’re just designed to consume something, and that thing, time, is something extremely valuable to me. When I played Phantasy Star Online 2 a few times over the past week, I could feel that MMO player tendency rising up in me, that insatiable urge to complete every quest and tick every box and gain every level and collect everything and just do for the sake of doing. No matter how cleverly it’s disguised in an MMO, you’re not really doing anything. It’s a game that would eat up my life if I let it. This is why to me MMOs feel… oddly predatory. My second big problem with MMOs is this: when it’s well done, I really like that sense a game can give you of inhabiting a different world. In MMOs, I can’t help but feel that it’s a world made of cardboard. Even outside of microtransactions, everything in an MMO is transactional, everything is a thinly veiled coercion, everything is nagging me towards inevitable and meaningless progress. The end goal of an MMO is to make you feel like playing an MMO some more. I resent it. I resent it enough that from now on I kind of just want to stay away from MMOs on principle. It has game mechanics and classes and monsters and items and systems, but it seems pointless to go into any of that, because I feel like all I have to say about PSO2 is that it’s an MMO. You put time in and nothing comes out.