(11-27-2015, 11:00 PM)LiadansWhisper Wrote: I believe that both Eve and Archeage allow you to actually make long-term changes to the game environment.
They also offer "linear paths winding around the content that is largely static."
Both EVE and ArcheAge offer the ability to enforce some sort of legislation upon the game-world, and for ArcheAge, this is rather superficial to begin with (i.e., you can only control pre-designated areas, and build in pre-designated areas, and trade with pre-designated people). Even with EVE, if you go ahead and google "Is EVE a Sandbox MMO," you'll get plenty of debates on that very subject, with some people preferring to call it an "Open-Ended MMO" instead, meaning that this isn't nearly as clear-cut as people seem to think.
The problem is that people have different definitions as to what constitutes as "railroading" in an MMO. You can certainly say that some MMOs have more freedom of choice than others, but exactly how much Choice you must have in order to switch classification from one to the other is not at all clear-cut. If you wanted to, right now, you could log into WoW and pick flowers all the way to the level cap. It might be a weird choice, but that's a choice that the game allows you to make.
If you look at all games through the choice of what they "Allow" you to do, then you'll get a very different viewpoint than if you look at it through another lens. I'm not arguing that WoW hasn't lost a lot of the former open-ended nature that it had during Vanilla (even EVE has thrown some of this away; it used to be notorious for its lack of hand-holding, which they changed in future patches), just that at its launch, it wasn't strictly a "Themepark." However, unless we have a proper definition of what exactly the dividing line is, then we won't be able to resolve this argument.
