As for your second point: yes, several games already have twitch combat, a fact which only strengthens my point - MMOs are evolving and one thing that will change is the archaic tab-target combat.
Its pointless to talk abot it as an "Evolvement" since the playing style excisted way before in the 90', before the MMO's there were single player RPGs with both playing styles, then when MMOs started to appear the target based style games were more common, but there were always many of these twitch games released too (they just didn't get the attention), maybe you just missed them, if fact they always existed.
So i would rather call it a "trend" and not an "evolution" since its nothing new at all.
First of all I'm not talking about playstyles but about MMO design. What people do in single player games are beside the point.
Also, It doesn't have to be new to be genre-changing and evolutionary. Even though there of course have been twitch-based MMOs in the past, most major games have had tab-target combat, for several reasons (the primary one perhaps being that it's easier to implement).
Open worlds are nothing new either; in fact the first MMOs were open world games (UO). Still, if one type of design dominates the genre - like tab-target combat, classes and instances do now - a "trend" that moves towards another type of design means that the genre evolves into something else, not back into something old.
Just like the EQ/WoW-style design evolved from the old UO-style design, the next generation of MMOs will evolve from the themepark, lobby-based, tab-target instanced games of this generation. However, this does not mean that games will become like UO again, since the technology, the market, the playerbase, etc have all change drastically since 1997.
Since we're talking evolution, allow me to use an analogy from nature; convergent evolution means that a given trait and/or form (like eyes and flight for example) evolve independently in several species, in different times, in different places. Squid and humans both have eyes, but they evolved independently of each other. So did flight among insects, birds, and bats - flight was nothing new when mammals learned to do it, but it was still an evolutionary process.
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First of all I'm not talking about playstyles but about MMO design. What people do in single player games are beside the point.
Also, It doesn't have to be new to be genre-changing and evolutionary. Even though there of course have been twitch-based MMOs in the past, most major games have had tab-target combat, for several reasons (the primary one perhaps being that it's easier to implement).
Open worlds are nothing new either; in fact the first MMOs were open world games (UO). Still, if one type of design dominates the genre - like tab-target combat, classes and instances do now - a "trend" that moves towards another type of design means that the genre evolves into something else, not back into something old.
Just like the EQ/WoW-style design evolved from the old UO-style design, the next generation of MMOs will evolve from the themepark, lobby-based, tab-target instanced games of this generation. However, this does not mean that games will become like UO again, since the technology, the market, the playerbase, etc have all change drastically since 1997.
Since we're talking evolution, allow me to use an analogy from nature; convergent evolution means that a given trait and/or form (like eyes and flight for example) evolve independently in several species, in different times, in different places. Squid and humans both have eyes, but they evolved independently of each other. So did flight among insects, birds, and bats - flight was nothing new when mammals learned to do it, but it was still an evolutionary process.