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Richard Garriot Argues Against Stagnant MMOG Design
The creator of Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa and well-known designer Richard Garriot spoke at the Develop Conference in Brighton, England on the subjects of stagnating MMOG design and the NCSoft deal with Sony. His commentary on Massive game design is fairly direct: "If you look at the vast majority of MMOs that has come out since Ultima Online and Everquest, you can look at the features and they are almost exactly the same. Even though the graphics have got better and the interface is much slicker, fundamentally the gameplay is unchanged. Worse yet, there are many things that have become standard that I look at and even though they are powerful enough to encourage the behavior of people obsessed with playing these games, I don't think they are the right way of building the future."
The challenge is making a game where everyone can "start a merchant empire, overthrow a king, or build a village". It's easy to do in single player games, but far more difficult when you've got millions of players. Here is the only one that comes close and the graphics are far better than Tabula Rasa. But even in that one, players complain that the outcomes are heavily influenced by the starting conditions.
You can't please everyone.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Dude! That game you linked sucks. It is only playable in hardcore mode, there isn't enough starting gold, you can't reroll and most of the other players are complete jerks.