I didn't buy the latest World of Warcraft expansion. So if you would have asked me last week whether I was still playing MMORPGs, I would have said no. Instead I am playing other stuff. Just recently I started playing Destiny 2, a game I picked up for $12 as part of a Humble Bundle Monthly. And I was thinking of the game as being just a shooter. Then this week I couldn't play one evening, because there was a big patch and the servers were down. And I realized that Destiny 2 was a MMORPG after all, in all but name.

You have a character, complete with a level, a class, and gear. You do quests, or you participate in public events. There are lots of other players around when you go to town. There is a PvP system if you want (I didn't). And while I never did it in Destiny 2, I remember from Destiny 1 that you can also play in a group. So except for the fact that combat is done with guns instead of sword and sorcery, Destiny 2 plays very much like a MMORPG.

In some ways the genre of old style MMORPGs is dead. The big excitement is over, there are very few new MMORPGs of the old style coming out, and especially the subscription model of MMORPGs is on life-support. But some of the elements, the "lots of players on a server playing together" stuff, and some elements of progress and game flow, are very much alive and can be found in lots of new games. My hope for MMORPGs to develop in living and breathing online worlds never came to pass, but the genre sure developed into something else, more violent, and more competitive, that I am not so much interested in.