Do other players exist in the game?

First things first: Nobody's suggesting that you're hallucinating all of the other players in what is actually a single-player game. While that might make for an interesting albeit quite specific movie, that's not the scenario I'm contemplating today.

Instead, I started wondering if, within the context of the game, its NPCs, and its lore, do other players actually exist? Your character is widely acknowledged as existing by every quest-giver out there. You are the hero, after all. Unless the world is full of scam artists, you're the only person that needs to save the princess and escort the prince, and once that's that. The world shouldn't need rescuing more than once.

But is there evidence that other players are acknowledged by NPCs? Does anyone notice that there are a million other heroes running around too? Or is the game so focused on making you feel like you're the center of the universe that it engages in a blanket denial that there might be other axe-toting do-gooders out there? Am I going mad? Probably.

TH

MMOs require a suspension of disbelief, the man who wrote this article thinks too much.

TH

theres only the hunters and the hunted in mmos.

There is Dragoons and NPCs