The Daily Quest - What Do You Want for MMO Christmas?

As we all prepare to take the weekend off (don't worry, we have loads of features prepped through Friday), it's time for a little exercise in wishful thinking. If you could have any one thing in the MMO world, from a new game to an old game, or anything in between, what would it be?

I'll go ahead and start things off...

I have trouble whittling all my many wishes for the genre down to one main thing. But if I have to pick, it's pretty simple. I really hope players, developers, and investors alike don't give up on what I still feel is the greatest genre in the history of gaming. 

You guys know me. You know I'll find the good in just about every game, even when they're particularly bad at most everything they seek to do. I'm an optimist at heart, and a good critic can find the good in a work just as easily as he can find the poor. 

But I'll not be content until a game like Ready Player One is reality.  This genre has far too much potential to be content to just say WoW was the apex.

The MMORPG has evolved into a great many divergent lesser MMO-types over the past decade plus. But no one has really pushed the acronym that gave this site its namesake very far since Azeroth began to dominate the airwaves in 2004.

Thing is, that's just one kind of MMORPG. It's just one form this genre can take, and many more have tried and failed to build upon the potential WoW only made visible 11 years ago. The money that flooded the genre is gone, now funneling itself into mobile, then MOBA, now "hero shooters". It may never come back to the MMORPG, but I don't think it'll stay gone forever.

There are dozens of MMOs being made now. Many of them on shoestring budgets, some on astronomically unbelievable fan-funded budgets. And from the throng that are set to release over the next few years, I still hold out hope that one will ignite passion in its players, imitation in its contemporaries, and greed in the folks with funds to try and outdo the new king of the hill.

In the meantime, I'll have fun with what I've got while wishing for something better. So, yeah... it's a Christmas Wish after all, it's not supposed to be plausible. Now it's your turn. Aim big, aim small, just give us your wish. 

(My second wish would be for Ultima Online to get a full visual makeover...)