I wonder if it'll beat Tabula Rasa's big finish.

I might return to Anarchy Online if they re-do the game engine. My problem with it was the zoning issues. I didn't want to play it anymore after spending like 30 minutes trying to zone. That and not enough quests (I was paying for it incidently, not playing free). Sadly AO has some of the best ideas out there, but it needs a lot of things to fill in the cracks in my opinion.

*THAT* said, I didn't know The Matrix Online was still running. After the last movie in the triology I thought it would have died out rather quickly since it was riding on the popularities of the movie. From everything I saw and heard it was one of those "five minutes of cool" games. Basically for your first few hours you will think it's full of cool ideas, but it fizzles out more rapidly than most games, and was (as was pointed out) largely held together by the live events and such.

I never had much of a mind to try it as I heard very little that was good about it, the typical review was basically "played it, thought it was decent at the very beginning, then realized the appeal tapped out quickly and stopped".

As far as MMORPGs go, well I think one of the major problems is that the bar has been set very highly. Not only do you need good ideas, you need good writing above and beyond trying to produce something derivitive off of a successful license. Then if you have both of those things you need a good design team, but most importantly the raw budget to produce the thing and do it right, and to be willing to be patient as opposed to demanding a return on your investment as quickly as possible.

World Of Warcraft is sort of like "the Perfect Storm" of MMORPG development where all of those aspects came together. Except unlike a storm it wasn't luck, it was the people involved doing it right.

A lot of MMORPGs like Tabula Rasa have one or two interesting spins on things, but that isn't enough to sustain people's interest for years. The Matrix's big gimmick aside from the movie liscense was the "Interlock" system allowing for more animated battles than you get from other MMOS where weapons are swung and things don't quite sync up graphically, or at least that is what I heard.

Right now to seriously compete with WoW, you need someone willing to come up with a budget probably to the tune of a couple hundred million dollars. The understanding being that your not competing with WoW "when it first launched" but WoW now with all of the bells and whistles (like flying mounts, and bloody player driven steam tanks). Then you need someone to sit down and actually write/design a compelling game as opposed to spewing out a generic fantasy world with names that range from generic for the genere, to extremely obtuse and "exactly what you'd expect" for the most part, or a science fiction game where "The good races including humanity are at war with this horrendously evil species that wants to destroy everything...". Granted World Of Warcraft used a lot of generic fantasy stuff, but they were also drawing heavily from Warhammer (for reasons most people probably know) which was a fairly original spin on the fantasy genere. So you basically wound up with this sword and sorcery steampunk world where your passing by parked tanks, dwarven mortar teams, and other things right from the beginning, and eventually start running into techno-magic cyber demons running soul furnaces and stuff like that. Totally unique? Nope, but consider that nothing like it had been done as an MMO before. The cartoony, over-the top presentation with the colorful "chunky" weapons and such also gave it it's own vibe which set it apart from the more realistic takes on the genere.

To put things into perspective the current "end boss scenario" (there have been several) for World Of Warcraft is this twisted thing meshing norse mythology with the writings of HP Lovecraft. You've got this thing called Yog Saron (Yog Sothoth anyone?) corrupting "Titans" based on Norse Gods (Thorim = Thor, Freya = herself, Hodir = Hod, Sif = Sif, etc...) who eventually need to be freed to join forces with the party to take him on. Of course unlike Lovecraftian writing this guy's minions are these bloody robotic dwarves. The plot threads for this are spread all through the zones to find (even if you don't raid... it makes quite a story). The very first "gimmie" boss fight of Ulduar on your way to eventually take on Yog Saron (if you can get that far, I have yet to) involves plowing through an army of robotic dwarves, gyrocopters with laser cannons, and spider walkers using a formation of your own steampunk warmachines. Then you fight a giant bloody tank, which may or may not have access to satellite based weapons depending on how many of the relevent towers you destroyed on your way through the army.

Okay some people will think that's dumb, others will not. The point is that overall it's differant, and it's stuff like that (and there have been many things like that at differant points in the game's history, that's simply what is going on now as most people's focal point) which puts World Of Warcraft on top.

You produce derivitive fantasy stuff, your going to get crushed. WoW succeeds by capturing people's imaginations as much as anything. Honestly, when I've sat down and actually though about the entire Ulduar scenario and events leading up to it, I can't help but think that someone must have been doing some heavy acid while listening to german death metal to come up with that (and yet it works...).

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