Launched 5 years prior in 1999, a massively successful MMO of a vastly different breed was king one whose like we have not seen since. While Blizzard may have taken the crown in 2004, the throne was hardly vacant before their meteoric rise to power.
Try as they might to dress it up with free-form class building (ESO) or throwbacks to old-school talent trees, the three-role meta had become–and remains–a staple.īut what of World of Warcraft’s progenitors? As much as a decade’s worth of stale Barrens chat would love us to believe otherwise, World of Warcraft was, in fact, not the first MMO. Heavy-hitters like Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and even Final Fantasy XIVwould all come to gravitate toward the formulaic triple-threat, and a trend had now solidified, for better or worse. With the game’s player numbers being what they were, many larger MMOs began to follow suit. The Tank, Healer, and DPS trifecta trend seemed to solidify itself over World of Warcraft’s tenure. For all of our unique classes and varied rotations, we are unavoidably homogenized into the MMO’s “Holy Trinity”: Tanks, healers, and damage-dealers (often referred to as DPS).Īt the risk of sounding like a “back in my day” curmudgeon, it hasn’t always been this way. Sure, there are plenty of classes to pick from with all sorts of exciting rotations to fit a given playstyle, but at the end of the day, players invariably wind up in one of three roles. For a genre that offers us a seemingly vast array of choices and paths, the realm of triple-A MMOs has become a rather limited one in recent years.