Online Gaming since 2000

By the turn of the century, game companies were eager to capitalise on the new online gaming market, with role playing games and their ability to 'suck in' the player becoming the most financially promising. The next generation of MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) included the medieval PvP-oriented (Player versus Player) Dark Age of Camelot, a 3D medieval fantasy game that revolves around the war between three realms at the end of King Arthur's rule: Celtic Hibernia, Norse mythology inspired Midgard and Arthurian-inspired Albion. Ultima Online 2, whilst greatly anticipated by its community, was cancelled in order to provide additional support for the original Ultima Online. Another game, Anarchy, released first in June 2001, was saddled with crippling technical problems, mostly due to an inability to handle its huge playerbase.

In 2002, Final Fantasy XI was released for the PC and Playstation 2, and then later for the Xbox 360. This game brought fans of the single-player standalone game to online gaming, gathering over half a million subscribers. It is still one of the leading MMORPGs on the market to date.

A 3-D virtual world game called Second Life was released in 2003 by Linden Lab. Although referred to as a game, Second Life does not have points, scores, levels, an end-strategy or most of the other characteristics of games. Users (known as residents), can visit this virtual world, exploring, meeting new people, buying items and participating in individual and group activities. They may also learn new skills and learn the culture of the virtual world. Competitors in this relatively new subgenre (non-combat-based MMORPG) would come to include Entropia Universe, There and Dotsoul.

In April 2004, another significant title was produced for the PC by NCSoft, called City of Heroes (and in 2005, City of Villains). Although these games did not introduce any major innovations in gameplay, they featured the most extensive number of possible visual character appearances, offering millions of combinations of body shape and appearance and costume pieces.

However, by far the most popular and most-widely subscribed game of the new millennium so far is Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft (WoW), released in November 2004 for the PC. World of Warcraft takes place within the world of Azeroth in the Warcraft Universe, a fantasy setting introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994. WoW immediately overtook all other games upon release, dwarfing all previous monthly-fee MMORPGs by attracting a total of over 8 million customers.