The Only MMO You Need?

You’re right! Minecraft isn’t a massively multiplayer online game. Think about the reasons why you enjoy spending time in your MMO of choice though, and you might realize that you can scratch those same itches in Minecraft. That’ll depend on the MMO in question of course, since the genre boasts more flavors than Baskin Robbins at this point, but there are plenty of ingredients that many MMOs have in common.

Exploration, for example.

While not unique to MMOs by any means, and despite the proliferation of wikis that seem poised to practically play your games for you, exploration is one of the reasons why many MMOs can keep us hooked for weeks, months, and even years at a time. Level up enough to leave our current questing zone safely, and we just know that the grass is going to be greener—or perhaps replaced with snowfields or lava pools—in the next. See a door, we want to go through it. See a mountain, we want to climb it. See a new planet, we want to land on it. We want to explore, and given that there are countless expansive Minecraft worlds waiting to be seeded, we can certainly scratch this particular itch with a blocky pickaxe in hand.

Even if we choose to spend most of our time exploring and questing in MMOs solo, the most obvious draw of these games is that they’re populated with other players to team up and otherwise interact with. The flipside, of course, is that they’re populated with other players, most of whom we want absolutely nothing to do with. Minecraft’s multiplayer support is very different, but unless we choose to play on servers with strangers, it affords many of the same benefits without the potential pitfalls. When we play Minecraft with a regular and perhaps coordinated group, we can accomplish things every bit as impressive as—and actually including—getting our hands on enchanted gear and downing an endgame boss. We can build castles, engineer transportation systems, and erect giant floating statues to honor our favorite Pokemon. We can literally move mountains!

Huge, impressive Minecraft builds are nothing new, but this recreation of numerous Harry Potter locations really is something special.

The similarities between Minecraft and many MMOs aren’t limited to exploration and playing with friends; online worlds that aren’t hosted by players persist regardless of whether we’re logged into them, we level up and obtain/craft better equipment as we progress, we have the option to tame pets that will hunt alongside us, we cook food that can be consumed to restore lost health, and at the end of every session we can return to a home furnished with items that speak to both our personal tastes and in-game accomplishments. Those homes, incidentally, are handled infinitely better in Minecraft than they are in many MMOs, even setting aside the fact that we get to custom build them one block at a time. Homes in Minecraft aren’t instanced for multiple owners, they’re not in short supply, and they can be constructed literally anywhere—as can pretty much anything else if we set our minds to it.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that playing Minecraft online—even with like-minded friends—might not result in a perfect to-scale recreation of Hogwarts or Azeroth. We’ll still make the world our own though, and get to swap stories of exploration and discovery for as long as we play together. Minecraft’s endless possibilities ensure that it can hold our attention for the same weeks, months, and years that the best MMOs can, and it doesn’t hurt that—custom server (or Realm) owners aside—nobody needs to pay a monthly subscription in order to play online.

Minecraft E3 2017 trailer for the upcoming Better Together Update and Super Duper Graphics Pack.

Later this year, the fact that we’ll be able to play together using Windows 10, iOS, Android, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and VR devices should make it easier than ever for us to convince friends to come and join us in Minecraft. Certainly it’ll be an easier conversation to have than the one where we’re trying to convince them to pay a monthly subscription to play an MMO that we’ve already invested countless hours into and which, as a result, we won’t be able to play together in any meaningful way until they catch up.

Minecraft isn't for everyone, and there are plenty of MMO staples—dungeons, player classes, color-coded loot drops, reputation grinds—that might never be a part of its ever-evolving feature set. For some of us though, Minecraft offers everything that we’ve ever wanted from an MMO and more.