{"id":167028,"date":"2023-03-28T08:00:02","date_gmt":"2023-03-28T13:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/?p=167028"},"modified":"2023-03-28T07:29:03","modified_gmt":"2023-03-28T12:29:03","slug":"whats-difference-mmo-live-service-rpg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/2023\/03\/28\/whats-difference-mmo-live-service-rpg\/","title":{"rendered":"What do you consider to be the difference between an MMO and a live-service RPG?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking more and more about the question — “Is Diablo 4 an MMO?<\/a>” — <\/em>since I currently play World of Warcraft<\/em>, am pretty heavily invested in\u00a0Diablo 3<\/em>, was into\u00a0Diablo Immortal<\/em> for a couple of months there, and was just utterly charmed by the open beta for\u00a0Diablo 4<\/em>. In particular, the way\u00a0D4<\/em> mixes things I’ve seen in each of the other games I’ve mentioned makes it difficult sometimes for me to really confidently say that Diablo 4<\/em> isn’t an MMO.<\/p>\n

I mean, I get that it’s a game I can play entirely in single-player for the most part, with closed off play in Dungeons and Cellars plus upcoming Seasonal play after it launches. But it also has always online play; I see other players on their characters every time I head back to town and out in the world — I even often found myself stopping to help them in world events and against giant monsters they were fighting.<\/p>\n

This is one of those times where I’m not even sure if it would be helpful to define\u00a0Diablo 4<\/em> in that way or in those terms. I’ve seen people call it a live service game, but a lot of the live service games I’ve seen look a lot like MMOs, and the line feels like it gets blurrier and blurrier with even\u00a0World of Warcraft<\/em>\u00a0adding the Trading Post with its monthly rewards.<\/p>\n

I mean, an MMORPG where I literally never have to group and can just play the entire game solo isn’t exactly a new thing.\u00a0Diablo 4<\/em> has clans (as did\u00a0Diablo 3<\/em>) like\u00a0Diablo Immortal<\/em>, but it also has couch co-op play and console\/PC cross platform play.\u00a0It’s not something most MMOs do.<\/p>\n

Does it matter? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s a question we’ve covered in the past<\/a>, but with actually having gotten to play in the open beta, I’m honestly asking it again. Because\u00a0Diablo 4<\/em> does basically everything I wanted\u00a0Diablo Immortal<\/em> to do, and improves on the things it\u00a0did<\/em> that I liked. Character customization (there could be more, but it’s still good), potential group play, a much better story — indeed, based on the first 20 or so levels, maybe the best story\u00a0Diablo<\/em> has ever had — so maybe I should just shut up and be grateful it’s so good. But what do y’all think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking more and more about the question — “Is Diablo 4 an MMO?” — since I currently play World of Warcraft, am pretty heavily invested in\u00a0Diablo 3, was into\u00a0Diablo Immortal for a couple of months there, and was just utterly charmed by the open beta for\u00a0Diablo 4. In particular, the way\u00a0D4 mixes things…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":166756,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,75927,75925,75928,75926,24],"tags":[77122,75991,5257],"yst_prominent_words":[9135,11404,8293,24303,40720,18660,9105,20305,8217,16800,8346,9486,15834,8186,8147,8144],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167028"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167028"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167056,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167028\/revisions\/167056"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167028"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=167028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}