How could an MMORPG set in the universe of the blockbuster movie series and featuring some of its characters not be cool? When the project was announced in 2002, the answer to this question was that it couldn't. The first film had been a huge hit, and the level of anticipation for Reloaded was exceptional, even though it was still a year away. The game's story would be canon, and combat would surely incorporate elements like bullet time and martial arts moves.
The Matrix Online was a very appealing concept that turned out to be extremely hard to implement because a movie is a passive visual experience while a game is interactive and participative. The designers incorporated activities like hacking, picking locks and disabling security devices. Unfortunately, doing such things over and over again proved far less entertaining than watching Neo do them once. Similarly, bullet time felt far less cool after the first few times you saw it - plus it wasn't under your control; it just happened.
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Also, the game didn't launch until the spring of 2005. By then, both Reloaded and Revolutions had released, in May and November of 2003 respectively, and they had failed to build or even to maintain the IP's original pull. This hurt trial, but the primary problem was so basic that I suspect getting more people to try playing wouldn't have made a big difference to retention; even though some bits were fun the first few times, MxO wasn't particularly entertaining overall, especially not in ways that would promote long-term loyalty.
From the first time I saw any gameplay with my own eyes, I felt this might happen. Given I'm generally optimistic by nature, this portended rather poorly. Yes, there was still a lot of time in which changes and improvements could be made, even significant ones. But frankly, this doesn't actually happen very often, and MxO continued through to launch without any of the major fixes that I would have liked. In the fall of 2005, the game was taken over by SOE, which finally shut it down in mid-2009.
A life management simulation that was released for the PC in early 2000, The Sims quickly became that platform's best selling game. Within months, an expansion shipped and the IP was on its way to the long-term prominence it still enjoys. It wasn't my cup of tea, but since the concept was about creating an avatar and deciding how it would live, it seemed natural enough to shift it to doing so within a virtual community made up of other players, not just NPCs.
It's not clear when work actually got started on TSO, but by late spring 2001, it was ready to be shown to the media, albeit hands-off, and was projected to launch early in 2002. This date wasn't met, but the game did go live in mid-December. Even at that time, this meant the project had a short development period for an MMOG. This wasn't fatal per se, but neither was it a favorable indicator. Even more questionable was the slow rate at which information was released. Considering the endeavor's enormous rumored cost, it seemed pretty curious that EA didn't do a lot more to build hype, even during the last few months before ship.
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At the high concept level, TSO was about the same things as its predecessor - create a Sim, give it a home and learn various life skills. However, the online implementation was, in many ways, quite a departure from what players of the standalone game (i.e. members of the core target audience) were used to. For instance, if they made appropriate resources available, the were accustomed to the AI taking care of needs like hunger and hygiene. Instead, they had to eat and bathe. It wasn't hard to do such things, but there were lots of them, enough to alter the overall feel of the game experience.
Also, the skill element didn't adapt well to group play. For instance, reading cookbooks raised your culinary ability a good deal faster if you did it together with others. The idea was undoubtedly to promote social activity, but in effect, it was like forced grouping. Players mainly did it because they thought they had to, not because it was more fun. In the same general vein, earning in-game currency was faster when you worked with others, but the tasks were highly repetitive, even more so than grinding mobs.
TSO lasted until mid-2008, but never managed to gain meaningful traction with its core target audience, players of The Sims. Like my other selections, TSO is on this list because I believe both this possibility wasn't hard to envisage or even to expect long before the title entered service. Neither did the project ever have any real appeal for MMOG veterans. So even at best, it was doomed to its actual fate as an expensive and almost certainly highly unprofitable marginal offering.
