MMOs—at least, the big boys that have endured from the massively multiplayer golden age—can sometimes be considered a smidge stale. Many design elements are, in a sense, solved. The Holy Trinity took over years ago, dungeon finders are a must, and heaven forbid if you're running something suboptimal in a pick-up group of hypervigilant strangers, with insults about your mum already bound to a macro and ready to go.
As games like Wildstar (and the ravenous way in which WoW players devoured Classic) proved, the vibe of oldschool MMOs is forever buried under the age of information and Icy Veins. That's not to say people don't enjoy Classic, they clearly do, it's just different. Subject to the meta like any other game.
A former WoW designer, Chris Kaleiki, who has 13 years of Blizzard under his belt, reckons that the only real way to keep classes fresh is to take a leaf from MOBAs and Hero Shooters like League of Legends and Marvel Rivals. That's as per a recent interview Kaleki conducted with GamesRadar+, where he explains:
- Former Ultima Online lead says MMOs have 'been in a rut for a long time', and that cozy games like Animal Crossing have been filling a non-theme park hole
- Instead of role queue, Marvel Rivals wants to trust players with the epic responsibility of creating a functioning team by themselves: 'We’ll be taking a little bit more of a Marvel-inspired approach'
"The only solution I think is you have to change the meta continually. If you look at Marvel Rivals, actually, it's kind of interesting what NetEase did. They have teamups where two heroes get a bonus if they play with each other, like Storm and I think Thor get something... What they're planning to do, which I think is smart, is that every season or every now and then they'll just change them."
Essentially, if you want the meta to shake up, you have to… well, shake it up: "Players constantly have to re-evaluate and think through 'what is best, what is the new meta?' That's the only thing you can really do … players like it and developers like it. League of Legends does the same thing, they flip the board every time they do a season. This hero that was terrible before is now the best. DOTA does the same thing. That's what we've been seeing and I think it actually works pretty well."
I do think some shakeups are healthy for any game—I mean, that's mostly why Season of Discovery exists, it's a version of Classic that operates in the spirit of 'what if we took a big bong rip before designing anything'. At the same time, though, your standard tab targeting fare has a little more than 4-5 abilities. Part of why MOBAS can shunt their metas around with relative freedom is because each hero only has a few moving parts—with a bigger roster to compensate.
It's also much harder to do in one-class-per-character MMOs like WoW, where player attachment to a specific character is a thing—I don't think anyone wants their main, the thing they're comfiest with, to be dumped in the crash with a changing wind. In other words, MMO designers do have to be a touch more careful.
As for Kaleiki's current game, Legacy: Steel & Sorcery—a PvPvE extraction RPG—he intends to shuffle the meta around by tackling resources, rather than abilities: "Maybe this season certain crafting materials are rarer than others and that can make different builds more common because you can create other items easier than you could last season."
