Can You Play More Than One MMORPG at a Time?

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I just got back from a business trip to Chicago. This was my second time in the Windy City. Thankfully, it wasn’t so windy. The four days I was there were fairly mild — mostly 60’s and 70’s with 10-15mph wind. As a Southern California shorts-wearing flip-flop-card-carrying member, I did get chilly in the evenings when I would adventure out looking for food. Since I’m not really into the whole food scene or the city scene — especially at night in Chicago — I spent a lot of my time inside.

Back in the day I used to bring a laptop and play games. Even the older MMOs could run on my janky laptop. I would have loved to have WoW running on my iPad Pro or Surface Pro, but was left watching Netflix and playing old school games from GoG.

I had some time to read forums and browse around. I found a topic talking about whether or not you like playing multiple MMOs at once, or if you prefer to stay loyal to just one.

As someone who has definitely tried doing that in the past, I have some opinions here.

The idea of playing multiple MMOs as once is appealing to me. I certainly juggle lots of non-MMOs. In the past 6 months I think I was juggling 4 or 5 big games. Some nights I felt like playing Skyrim. Others I felt like playing Kingdom Hearts. Switching between non-MMOs is easy for me.

Every time I try to play more than one MMO I end up feeling ‘off’ somehow. The hardest part is playing with people who don’t play both. Let’s say I have friends playing one, and family playing another… or online friends in one and online friends in the other. It’s hard for me to split that time well, and I end up feeling pulled in opposite directions.

If WoW is one of those MMOs — which in the past it was — I’d feel like I couldn’t play anything else. Right now there’s nothing else to play, so WoW has carte blanche.

Have you ever successfully dabbled in multiple MMOs? As I just typed that sentence I realize I used the word “dabble” — I think that’s the word I used because ‘playing’ a MMO to me is such an engrossing experience. It’s hard to do much else than make that MMO my priority during my ‘dedicated play time’.

  • Practically speaking, I have learned over the years that I can play one fantasy MMORPG and EVE Online at the same time, but not two fantasy MMORPGs. I can’t segment my time. I generally want to dive into one fully and the second gets mostly ignored.

  • Chicago is nicknamed “The Windy City” not becuz of the weather but rather due to politicians blowing hot air — just so much wind.

    Born and raised there 😉 Well… NW suburbs, but Chi-town so dominates the area, we just all say we’re from Chicago, even when we’re not.

    • Tried to put this in last night, but the site went down for me. Weird.

      Was just going to add that in response to the question asked, I can’t ever seem to play 2 MMO’s at the same time. I’ve tried it a few times, but invariably one takes up all the “gaming oxygen” and the other is simply ignored.

      Tried EQ2 and EVE at the same time. Was semi-able to balance that, but still focused MUCH more on EQ2. Tried Rift and SWTOR at the same time… Rift fell by the wayside. Tried FFXIV and ESO… ESO lost that one. Just haven’t been able to split my attention like that.

  • I find three or four MMORPGs in parallel is the sweet spot. I like to have a main MMO, which gets around 50-75% of my playtime, a secondary (which I usually play later in the evening or at the weekend), which gets maybe 20-25% and one or two others that I am indeed dabbling with. Currently I’m playing GW2 as my main MMO and EQ2 as my secondary and I’m making very solid, satisfactory progress in both of them. Outside of that I have a couple of dozen MMOs that I drop in and out of for a session here, a session there.

    I have had times where I was playing half a dozen MMOs each week and that was enjoyable but its hard to sustain long term.

  • I tried at one stage I was playing 4 MMO’s at once it was a gruelling experience Keeping up with 4 groups of people really wears you down.

    I restrict myself to 1 MMO at once now.

  • If I’m properly engaged by one then I prefer to devote my attention to a single game. As soon as I start looking around for a 2nd to play it’s usually when I’m getting bored or running out of things I want to do in my primary game.

    This is happening currently with WoW. I’ve basically run out of things I want to do. I’ve run some mythic+ but failed to establish a network of friends to run with consistently. Unless I hang out in Boralus for hours every night to catch a guild group it just doesn’t happen. I don’t have an interest in pugging that content.

    As it stands I login twice a week for the raid but I’m already getting bored with that.

    I’ve been dabbling in LOTRO and have already cancelled my WoW sub. BFA was fun for a short time but it feels like Legion 2.0 and there’s not enough to keep me interested at this point.