I originally forecasted that the next advent in MMORPG's would be character driven MMORPG approaches whereby a flexible system allowed the world to react to the player's choices and seemingly mold around the character that the player was playing as. Here is the link to that thread: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=536424 I am writing now to continue to the projection and to admit I was wrong about one thing: these new MMORPG's showed up much faster than I had thought. I posted in May of this year, and have held this forecast as the way things will go since 2006. In the original post I held to the same time-line that I originally made back in 2006 (3-5 years), but didn't bother to pay attention to the fact that we are now in 2009, not 2006. It has already been 3 to 5 years. Someone pointed out Start Wars: The Old Republic to me. I had heard noise of it, but didn't really take too much notice since I was understanding that it was more or less Knights Of The Old Republic online, and that didn't seem like a brilliant break-through as I took that to mean, "Jedi online", and not the base engine of character choice storyline which Knights Of The Old Republic ran on. Since then, I have taken a bit more of a look at what they are doing, and found that what they are doing is exactly what I forecasted. They are making the next generation of MMORPG. Take a look at their system that they have shown and you'll see what I'm referring to. Or, wait and just play the game. If if SWTOR is able to gain momentum and spark excitement; in short, succeed in the market, enough, then they will indeed have set the bar for what defines the next generation of MMORPG's. I'm not saying this because I'm a fan of Star Wars or George Lucas, it could have been anyone, but it was these folks that have done it first, so it is up to them. Now, if it is successful, then there is only one forecast left that I can offer about MMORPG's before they reach the equal capability as Table-Top RPG systems. What will happen is that instead of buying expansion kits that offer more places and more equipment, players will pay for a supplement that will be added to their game. This supplement will be a story-arc set of options. You won't know when it's going to start, and you won't even be able to tell that it has started. You will go along your story in your MMORPG just as you have been, but eventually the system will start trailing you down the road of the supplemental storyline and you will go through that story, advancing your character and all, just as you had before, but in this side-tangent storyline. It will, at some point, end with a finale of a climax and afterwards return you to your "primary" story line. It will look something like this: The orange represents your actual choices, the black represents all choices possible, and the blue represents choices and possible story lines added by the supplement. Notice how the supplement adds experiences to the gameplay and then returns the player back to the main line of their MMORPG storyline choices. Now that the next gen is here, this is the next step after it; all in an MMO environment. And once again I say; The future, is wild.

I think it is much better than static quest storylines, but in the end, it is still pre-determined. The player is just connecting the dots between many pre-written nodes; kind of like a "choose your own adventure" book. Another player could make the same choices and take the exact same path.

I think another reason why MMORPG developers have shied away from these types of systems is because of the huge disparity in the "content creation" to "player experience hour" ratio. To make content that branches like this to keep a player playing for an hour would likely involve making 10 or more hours of content. It is true that they would have tons of replayability on other characters, but it could be a strain on the developers when making expansions. Most players want at least 30 hours of solid, new content for an expansion, but that would equate to 300+ hours of content needed to make sure the player with only one character who will only play through the expansion one time would be satisfied.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is still much better than having the exact same quests for every character. It will increase replayability, which is vital for an MMORPG to survive in the long term. As long as some creative design could be incorporated to decrease content creation costs and time to make a full player experience, I think this will pick up a lot of popularity. It is the next best thing to a truly dynamic world, which is very hard with single server populations over 2000 players each.

The old republic isn't really doing anything new. They are adding voice to otherwise commonly ignored quest dialogue and making instanced dungeons more single-player like.

What they are doing looks good, from what I have seen, it has spit and polish in all the right places. However, it is still building upon things previous MMOs have done before. In the end, the core game is not going to be that much different from any other MMO previously released.

jackolantern1;

Yes, and that is all that tabletop RPG's were.
The dynamic came in with the GM acting as the system that allowed the player to connect the dots.

And I agree with much of what you said there.

bakanoodle;
Of course it's made off of the same systems that other MMORPG's use.
It can't exist without them.

That's what a next gen does.
It takes it to the next layer of development by adding a function into the gameplay because the already existing gameplay functions are well enough established that resources can be spent on the new function since the previous functions now take less development time to accomplish than they previously did.

Raw mechanics driven MMORPG systems are the major rule of the moment.
Character story based MMORPG systems are now stepping their toe in the kiddy pool side of the ocean with SWTOR, and what I was saying is that as long as they keep their market earnings acceptable, they have a real chance at making this kind of system more prevalent where prior to it...they pretty much had zero chance of surviving.

And it is like I said to jackolantern1, just because these functions existed in single-player offline games doesn't mean this isn't an advent for MMORPG's.

Pulling off single-player character story concepts in an MMORPG system is truly difficult.
So difficult that it hasn't been done because there were so many other systems that needed to be ironed out for many, many years.

That's why I said in the previous thread in the original post that if you want to see where MMORPG's will go, just look at offline games.