However, the linchpin that really riled up gamers was when they realized The Day Before wasn’t actually an MMO but an extraction shooter zombie game, despite what previous advertisements would have you believe.
Is an extraction shooter not a kind of MMO? Is it because, although there are many players, there are only a limited number of players per map?
If that's the case, then there are a bunch of games I think of as MMOs that aren't, like Phantasy Star Online and Path of Exile.
By that definition an MMO has never existed as all of them are divided by servers.
But!
Let's say an MMO becomes unpopular and there's only one server left and at most 70 concurrent players, is the game not an MMO anymore because some games with 100 players on the same server aren't considered MMOs?
While the servers are indeed likely to be joined, I highly doubt there isn’t an instancing system in case every eve player decides to travel to the exact same coordinates at the same time.
Otherwise a large enough corp could essentially “chunk ban” an area.
poeple are bored shitless with fps style multiplayer games, and after that, bored shitless of crappy lead tier mmos likes WoW, NW, GW2 etc whose endgame is really shit. Compared to Champions of Regnum or DAOC, all the lead tiers are boring as hell. Zero endgame creativity -- the only thing that makes mmos worthwhile is solid endgame RvR open pvp. If ur mmo doe not have it, then you will perish like The Day Before.
The number of players that determine if it's "massive" will be subjective, but there's more to the definition than just that. A CoD game isn't an MMO just because it has a 16vs16 lobby for example. Gameplay design is still always going to be a big factor into the genre definitions.
Correct, they're not. PSO appears to be 4 players. PoE appears to be 6. You could call them "MORPGs", but that term has never really been common. They are certainly not massively anything, and I've never seen them described as MMOs at all.
The "traditional" definition involves tons of players (whatever that means for the time period, platform etc) active in the same world/server/instance. Even games with a zillion concurrent players would not fit, as long as those players were "isolated" to smaller servers.