{"id":1574425,"date":"2026-05-09T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/Dz4DFu2SnGoRUFkkveEc4L"},"modified":"2026-05-09T17:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T17:00:00","slug":"discussion-time-are-classic-tab-target-mmos-with-loads-of-keybinds-going-out-of-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/discussion-time-are-classic-tab-target-mmos-with-loads-of-keybinds-going-out-of-style\/","title":{"rendered":"Discussion time: Are classic tab-target MMOs with loads of keybinds going out of style?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Terminally Online<\/div>\n
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This is Terminally Online<\/a>: <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Ah, the tab-target MMO\u2014multiple glorious rows of action bars, dozens of abilities, spells, and skills to use, and the demand from the game designer to play your way through your rotation like a pianist, desperately contorting your fingers into all sorts of eldritch shapes just to stay in tune with your rotation while you try not to stand in the fire.<\/p>\n

I’m talking about needing shift AND control modifiers to hit all my buttons. I’m talking using all of my mouse’s additional real estate. I ask you this: if I’m not slowly developing carpal tunnel that’ll come back to bite me in my late 30s, am I really gaming? <\/p>\n

If you couldn’t tell, I like the old MMO traditions. As a matter of fact, I’ve defended them on this very site before<\/a>! But I can’t quite shake the feeling that they’re going out of style. Maybe it’s just because my game of choice, Final Fantasy 14<\/a>, is seriously thinning its amount of keybindings with the upcoming evolved mode<\/a> which, let’s face it, will probably be phasing out its “reborn” counterpart in a couple years’ time. <\/p>\n

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Lauren Morton, Lead SEO Editor<\/div>\n
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I was raised on Guild Wars 1, in the before times when only some MMOs had jump buttons. Despite my feverish nostalgia for that game, I am tired<\/em> of skill hotbars and tab targeting! I never want to look at a crowd of cooldown timers again. I want to look up from the bottom 10% of my screen to see action and backflips. Heck, I want to play with a gamepad and I’m not sorry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Even in newer entrants to the genre, no-one’s really trying to capture and perfect that keyboard-turning rhythm of eld. Even Fellowship<\/a>, which emulates WoW’s Mythic+, isn’t a fully-fledged MMO, but a shorn-down dungeon runner with a similar meta-structure to something like Darktide<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Which I think is a shame because, as Fellowship showed us<\/a>, there’s still innovation to be found. Still ways to make that two-dozen keybind, tab-targeting, classic MMO feeling all the slicker without so much as a dodge roll or a dedicated block button or a third-person-shooter camera angle in sight.<\/p>\n

But what about you? Do you wish an MMO would try and have another swing at the kind of game that makes one of those multi-button mouses<\/a> real appealing? Or is it being sent to a deservedly shallow grave? Head on down to the comments and let your loyalties be known. Or if you’re feeling shy, here’s a poll instead.<\/p>\n

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