Launched in March 1999 by Verant Interactive and later acquired by Sony Online Entertainment, EverQuest drove fantasy MMORPGs into the Western mainstream. It was the most commercially successful MMORPG in the United States for five years and was the basis for eleven expansions (as of March, 2006) and several derivative games. TIME magazine and other non-gaming press featured stories on EverQuest, often focusing on the controversies and social questions inspired by its popularity. Asheron's Call launched later in the year and was another hit, rounding out what is sometimes called the original "big three" of the late 1990s (Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Asheron's Call).

MMORPGs in the new millennium

By the turn of the century, game companies were eager to capitalize on the new market, which had seemingly limitless potential. The concept of massively multiplayer online games expanded into new video game genres around this time, though RPGs, with their ability to "suck in" the player, were (and are) still the most financially promising.

The next generation of MMORPGs, following the "big three" of the previous decade, was to include the medieval PvP-oriented Dark Age of Camelot, the sci-fi Anarchy Online, and Ultima Online 2, along with two or three others which either never were completed or failed to capture significant market share. Anarchy released first in June 2001, but immediately had crippling technical problems, mostly due to an inability to handle the huge playerbase. Camelot launched smoothly four months later, introducing "Realm vs. Realm" PvP and other innovations, but still never attained the media attention or fame garnered by the previous "big three", which were still running strongly. Ultima Online 2, while greatly anticipated by its community, was cancelled when Electronic Arts decided that it would be more profitable to instead concentrate on the first Ultima Online. Growth of the 'big three' nearly plateaued, and some began to believe that the market had possibly been saturated. Of course, developers didn't stop trying, and dozens of MMORPGs continued to be produced.

Final Fantasy XI The first MMO to allow console and PC gamers to play together

In 2002, Final Fantasy XI was released, which hoped to bring in fans of the extremely popular (but mostly single-player) Final Fantasy series, which was particularly popular in Japan. Like the previous Final Fantasy games, this one was playable on a console, using a handheld controller, but bore little resemblance to gameplay in prior Final Fantasy titles. Though not the first console MMORPG (this was probably Phantasy Star Online, for the Dreamcast), FFXI was the first online game capable of supporting both console and PC users simultaneously. It was also notable for randomly selecting servers for new player-characters (instead of letting players pick for themselves), a practice which was highly criticized, but resulted (intentionally) in game worlds in which players would regularly interact and play the game with both English and Japanese. Final Fantasy XI still persists as one of the leading MMORPGs on the market to date.

Also released in 2002 was the sprite-based Ragnarok Online, produced by Korean company Gravity Corp.. Unbeknownst to many Western players, the game took Asia by storm, as Lineage had done. Gravity once claimed that there were 17 million subscribers of the game, though this number may not be entirely reliable.

May 2003 saw the release of Eve Online, produced by Crowd Control Productions, which had players taking the role of spaceship pilots and had gameplay similar to the cult series Star Control. Though not the first space MMORPG ("Earth and Beyond" was released in September 2002), Eve was able to achieve lasting success. One of the reasons for its success must have been the game's design, in which very few objects are actually modelled on the screen at any given time (often the player is alone in space, or fighting targets too far away to see). This allowed the game to perform well even with only one unsharded universe.]

In October 2003, Lineage II (NCsoft's sequal to Lineage) became the latest MMORPG to achieve huge success across Asia. It received the Presidential Award at the 2003 Korean Game awards, and is now the second most popular MMORPG in the world. As of the first half of 2005 Lineage II counted over 2.25 million subscribers worldwide, with servers in Japan, China, North America, Taiwan, and Europe, once the popularity of the game had surged in the West. However, the last "chronicle" or major installment for the game, Chronicle 5, went live on August 1, 2006. Game officials have announced that there will be no further chronicles for the game, fueling speculation about the sequel, Lineage III.