First WoW was not the first of anything, it perfected things much like microsoft did with its OS.

Second.  Yes, there will be a more successful mmo.  It will feature full terraforming like minecraft with better graphics

City building like shadowbane, with minecraft/lego style blocks allowing custom city designs

UO style house placement and customization

Sandbox elements in every aspect of gameplay

completely player driven economy

complete crafting customization system with player developed content

FFA full loot

Full seige system with Full diplomacy system

Safe zones

player cities can have custom rules

meta game crafting system that is a game in and of itself

people want to customize their own content, allow them to do so.  Players making quests for other players sort of like geocaching in real life

its crafting systems and diplomacy systems will transition seemlessly to a meta game that you can still keep up with and continue playing on your phone or tablets, prolly the auction house type system too.

on and on.

There are so many unexplored ideas i could talk about this forever tbh, wish someone would hire me...

Well people tend to have no clue of time so saying nothing will surpass Wow is rather silly.

Evidently many here seem to be able to know the future. Humans could very well be playing video games for 100's of years and seeing how everyone will have portable gaming devices more powerful than gaming pc's now in 10 years or less I'd say online games will do nothing but grow. 

There will be an uber mmo of some sorts replacing Wow. Wow will age too much for Bliz to bother to update at some point and true virtual games will appear with entirely different user interfaces than what we use today. We will like see games fully integrated with the mobile tools we require at some point that it won't be 10 million signed on but a hundred million and more. Not saying this will be soon but it will happen. In fact I can see your online choice being so highly fought over that eventually yet another monopoly will form sucking most people into it offering both light/casual or hardcore/fulltime interaction.

God help everyone around us then as nobody will be able to interact with anyone in the real world without distractions. There will need to be laws put in place disabling such things automatically for things like driving. 

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Originally posted by Tamanous
Well people tend to have no clue of time so saying nothing will surpass Wow is rather silly.

 

Evidently many here seem to be able to know the future. Humans could very well be playing video games for 100's of years and seeing how everyone will have portable gaming devices more powerful than gaming pc's now in 10 years or less I'd say online games will do nothing but grow. 

 

There will be an uber mmo of some sorts replacing Wow. Wow will age too much for Bliz to bother to update at some point and true virtual games will appear with entirely different user interfaces than what we use today. We will like see games fully integrated with the mobile tools we require at some point that it won't be 10 million signed on but a hundred million and more. Not saying this will be soon but it will happen. In fact I can see your online choice being so highly fought over that eventually yet another monopoly will form sucking most people into it offering both light/casual or hardcore/fulltime interaction.

 

God help everyone around us then as nobody will be able to interact with anyone in the real world without distractions. There will need to be laws put in place disabling such things automatically for things like driving. 

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Basically this. Some crazy shit that we havent even thought up yet is going to be at the right place and time and make WoW look like chump change. It'll probably be after this genre is dead and gone. After all, you cant make a comeback if you never go away.

Originally posted by Tamanous

Well people tend to have no clue of time so saying nothing will surpass Wow is rather silly.

 

Evidently many here seem to be able to know the future. Humans could very well be playing video games for 100's of years and seeing how everyone will have portable gaming devices more powerful than gaming pc's now in 10 years or less I'd say online games will do nothing but grow. 

 

There will be an uber mmo of some sorts replacing Wow. Wow will age too much for Bliz to bother to update at some point and true virtual games will appear with entirely different user interfaces than what we use today. We will like see games fully integrated with the mobile tools we require at some point that it won't be 10 million signed on but a hundred million and more. Not saying this will be soon but it will happen. In fact I can see your online choice being so highly fought over that eventually yet another monopoly will form sucking most people into it offering both light/casual or hardcore/fulltime interaction.

Think you're missing the point.   People most people by "ever" mean mmorpg's in current shape and not some virtual reality games using diffrent technologies.  

ALSO does not mean that there won't be a game that have more than 10 millions regular users. There already are and were games like that in China that never touched western ground.  Dungeon Fighter Online in China had 3 million concurrent users, 3 million people playing at one given point in time. That mean that there were way more than 10 million people playing regurarly / month.  Althrough it can be debatable whenever that is mmo or not. To put this into perspective Aion that had at it's peak over 4 million subs (wildly successful in Asia esp. Korea) had concurrent users peak around 0,5 mln.

What I mean by no is that no mmorpg will be able to dominate over whole market like that.  
When you talk about some kind of "true virtual games" then you're talking about some new genre or even whole new kind of games that might come in future and not about mmorpg's or even mmo's anymore. 

You're talkiing about future online games.

I believe the most successful MMO was called Maplestory, an asian one, don't know a whole lot about it, but reading stuff I've seen one quote of 39 million user accounts and 8 million global accounts, but there could be 2-3 versions of the game as they made localised versions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapleStory

There's the wiki info about it, look under financial reception

Blizzard brought a smooth, fun, easy, polished game at the perfect time when everquest was becoming extremely popular only for everquest 2 to fail horribly. No game will even come close to the success of WoW as it is the Mike Tyson of online gaming. Mmo's in general are dying as they are all becoming way too familiar and failure is about 10 times more likely then success.

Hopefully console RPG's bounce back cuz if GW2 is supposed to be our MMO savior go ahead and shoot me now.

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Originally posted by fenistil

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Originally posted by Tamanous Well people tend to have no clue of time so saying nothing will surpass Wow is rather silly.   Evidently many here seem to be able to know the future. Humans could very well be playing video games for 100's of years and seeing how everyone will have portable gaming devices more powerful than gaming pc's now in 10 years or less I'd say online games will do nothing but grow.    There will be an uber mmo of some sorts replacing Wow. Wow will age too much for Bliz to bother to update at some point and true virtual games will appear with entirely different user interfaces than what we use today. We will like see games fully integrated with the mobile tools we require at some point that it won't be 10 million signed on but a hundred million and more. Not saying this will be soon but it will happen. In fact I can see your online choice being so highly fought over that eventually yet another monopoly will form sucking most people into it offering both light/casual or hardcore/fulltime interaction.

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Think you're missing the point.   People most people by "ever" mean mmorpg's in current shape and not some virtual reality games using diffrent technologies.  

ALSO does not mean that there won't be a game that have more than 10 millions regular users. There already are and were games like that in China that never touched western ground.  Dungeon Fighter Online in China had 3 million concurrent users, 3 million people playing at one given point in time. That mean that there were way more than 10 million people playing regurarly / month.  Althrough it can be debatable whenever that is mmo or not. To put this into perspective Aion that had at it's peak over 4 million subs (wildly successful in Asia esp. Korea) had concurrent users peak around 0,5 mln.

 

What I mean by no is that no mmorpg will be able to dominate over whole market like that.  When you talk about some kind of "true virtual games" then you're talking about some new genre or even whole new kind of games that might come in future and not about mmorpg's or even mmo's anymore. 

You're talkiing about future online games.

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You should make a new thread with all your criteria attached. The op asked a straightforward question and the answer is yes. Your addendum makes it a no, so we either need op clarification or a new thread entirely

There would be if people would get rid of their preconceived notions that all MMO's are WoW clones or comparing to WoW.

Just play the game and enjoy.

Originally posted by botrytis

There would be if people would get rid of their preconceived notions that all MMO's are WoW clones or comparing to WoW.

I always found this sentiment ironic, seeing as WoW essentially started with game systems and mechanics cloned from many of the MMOs of the time, like EverQuest and AnarchyOnline, just to name a couple off the top of my head. 

WoW did a good job of optimizing them, though :B

Originally posted by velmax
We all know the most successful MMO was WOW, with 12 million players at it's peak , its nearly impossible for another MMO to reach this number, in my opinion. Were starting to see a pattern here withe every new MMO, tons of players at launch, then it lowers down again untill it goes F2P. Another reason i see it impossible, is because of the number of MMO's out their, their's over 1,000 mmos and the number is growing, so if 1 mmo steals all thoses subs or goes over 5,000,000+ its highly rare. Indie games are going crazy in the market, look at Minecraft and Dayz, Indie games are getting more attention adding a new group of players. My last reason, is the decreaseing of subbed based games, years ago in the good days, all you saw was subbed based games, so it was either sub or not play at all, when now adays we see a vary of different types of paying options. Overall, i would like to know your opinons on this topic.

I think there will most likely be another game that sets the "standard to beat".    With the saturation of the market, I don't think any MMO game will get back to the level WOW was when it came out.    There are just so many fantasy MMOs out there that players probably just don't have the time to play all of them.  

If we are talking by stick player base, it might be possible if a hugely popular MMO came out that was FTP from the beginning.  But then the sup count wouldn't be there.  I honestly just think that allot of gamers don't want to pay for subscription games when there are so many FTP equivalents out there.   Just look at all the "WOW clones" there are.

Probably not.

Blizzard created plenty of faithful fans over the years, but they've also created plenty of bitter ex-fans.

Yes, population is rising and internet access with it.

See no reason why some moos might not have hundreds of millions one day.

Imagine the people in china and india and other now not so developed countries catching up, having more spare time and more money.

Well there could be a game that could crush wow and its the only one that can.

The game I am talking about is World of warcraft 2. 

successful is a point of view.

most points of view would say that wow is a huge success it makes tons of money.

my point of view is wow is a huge travesty to the MMO genre. because of the money it has made, we now have tons of MMOs all trying to copy it. and now we are left with a bunch of dumbed down sort of MMO games that hold our hands and walk us threw panzy land makeing sure we get everything along the way.

and if you die its ok nothing happens. infact alot of games people die just to travel faster.