Syp over at Biobreak is working up a nifty little timeline of MMO’s, including release dates, expansions and even shut down dates.  Lo and behold one of the things he’s determined is that nowadays, companies are a lot more afraid to take risks than they were back in the day.

There’s an undercurrent of frustration for many old school MMO players at the post-WoW generation, who never really saw the genre before Blizzard came on the scene.  For the new kids on the block, WoW was the genesis, and everything else is the follow-up; for the oldbies, WoW was a descendant of wilder, more risky titles that pioneered a path into the 3D MMO-space.

In subjecting yourself to even a brief survey of these older titles — Ultima Online, EverQuest, Asheron’s Call, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies, Anarchy Online, City of Heroes — you’ll see that the only constant was that there was very little they had in common with each other.