At their inception, MMOs were weird. The progenitors of the genre—MUDs, Ultima Online, EverQuest, and RuneScape—were strange sandbox RPGs that delivered what was, at the time, the magical experience of being surrounded by other real people in a digital space. Then World of Warcraft happened in 2004. It became a household name and over time terms like "raiding" and "guilds" became common cultural parlance. And mainstream MMOs have been treating WoW like the blueprint ever since.
I grew up in the era when every new MMO wanted to be the WoW-killer and frankly, none have ever really pulled it off. Not only is WoW still one of the best MMOs 20 years later, but nearly everything else we consider the best is derived from it in some fashion. I've easily spent over an entire real year's worth of hours combined in Guild Wars and its sequel, The Elder Scrolls Online, Black Desert Online, Final Fantasy 14, and others. And aside from BDO's nice combat and management activities—and some other outliers like EVE: Online and Destiny 2—the lot is still fundamentally clutching at WoW's coattails.
