Gaming: Modern Mmo's Biggest Enemy Is Difficulty, Because Pleasing Everyone...

This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.

MMORPGs are monstrously complicated things—they run on huge, easily DDOSable servers, they have economies that can easily get knocked off the rails, are designed to run for decades, and require constant balancing and fine-tuning. If you work on an MMO, you are Sisyphus trying to get a boulder up a hill, except you also have a bunch of angry forum users calling you an idiot the whole way up.

Part of my job is understanding these complicated machines, and as I look at games in 2026, I'm starting to notice a trend that's really come to a head in these past few years: The main existential threat to MMORPGs of the modern era is getting the dang difficulty right.

I've talked about difficulty on this very column before, but through the lens of the hardcore/softcore divide and the perspective of tradition; Why those of us from the old are no longer satisfied with the ancient ways.

But after speaking to The Elder Scrolls devs earlier in the week, who highlighted overland difficulty as something nightmarish to balance, I've been thinking about it again. And you know, taking a long view of it? I'm inclined to agree. It's basically impossible.

I cannot think of a single genre that is so burdened with the design challenge of difficulty as an MMO is, because no other genre has to worry about it nearly as much. The MMORPG is almost unique, because it carries an implicit promise: You are going to be here for a while, and there will be something for you to do.

MMOs are designed to be digital third spaces, places where communities thrive. As such, they need to be tailored for everybody who might conceivably find one of their mechanics charming enough to build an entire gaming habit out of them.

Take WoW, for example: There are WoW players who quite literally stick around just to play pretend in Stormwind, there are WoW players who are just there for the fashion, there are WoW players who complete the main quest, fiddle around with a patch some, and then dip. Some play the game solo, some only do PvP, and so on.

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Even if we shear off all of that and only pick up the raiding

Source: PC Gamer