I have to point out that its in my opinion that the modern MMO has sadly fallen into a cycle of copying eachother. Now what I mean by this is, every MMO that has come out in the last few years (since around the time of WoW) general feels the same.

Let me give some examples of this, back in the mid to late 90s when MMOs were getting off the ground you had some extreamly inovative games. UO for instance didn't just build a "game" but rather it built a "world". The point of UO wasn't to be the lev 50 uber mob-killing-raid-camping-spawn-smashing-equpiment-horidng beast on the server, but rather to "live" in this "fake" world, that held adventure as well as day to day life elements.

UO being a strong, and well played example allowed the player to prasue the Noble Lord, or the dreaded Bandit King, to be the worlds best and biggest shop holder, or to do a bit of everything, heck every town needed a drunk at the bar begging for coins... whats that begging was a skill? You bet'cha! The vast scope of the game was more than your modern MMO which focuses on mobs and instances and other such "new" methods of creating mindless repetative gameplay (not that that isnt fun from time to time).

Another strong example of this (and many of you may have never played it) was Dark Ages (not of Camelot... just Dark Ages). The game was a bit of a grind fest, I'm not going to say it wasn't... due ot the fact that it was developed before the "quest" age. What the game lacked in gameplay it made up with social aspects. A person could join a religon (or rather worship one of the games gods) and by doing so could actualy go to a mass that was being held by another player and recive a fair ammount of EXP. Players could make up a religous gathering (mass) based on a nomber of topics focused around their chosen deity. To further draw out the example all Guards in the game were actual players, who were elected into office (even mayors and judges were players).

The last major attempt at building a "World" and not a "Game" was in my mind the most ambitious of them all, SWG. Now before anyone boos or gets upset tat the mention of SWG you have to remember that when the game was released it gave the player a massive ammount of potential. Players could devote themselves to crafting, building a name for themselves and running massive and popular shops. Other players chose to dance or play music, and made a living out of it. SWG in the begining gave players a ton of freedome to develope who they wanted to be in the Star Wars universe, and its sad that the game was beaten so badly by its own development team. In all honest the game often resembled a mix of UO and the Star Wars franchise, and it worked for quite some time, I know a ton of people who liked SWG before they started to change it.

Whats funny is the modern MMO sees adventuring as the "only" fun thing to do, when you play games like WoW crafting is an after thought attached to a players character, this is also seen in LoTRO as well as TR. It seems that since the time of WoW, developers have moved away from world building and instead see MMOs as literaly only being "games". Its sad realy, games like UO (which still have small communities) haven't had the glory of being fully updated into the modern era, but rather have been left behind.

So I ask, where have all the worlds gone?

Originally posted by Graff

Cool picture. Nice to see a sizeable team in an office building are working on this game afterall, and not just some kid in a garage!  Damn, they must be making progress, show us some already!

I have to agree with you, it would be nice if they cold at least update the FAQs and give us an idea of what they are planing, you know pull the community in a bit.