Unknown

The long-dead Ultima Online Worlds: Origin project had some intriging notions along this line. If I remember correctly, there were plans to track your actions (both quest-related and everyday tasks) along the lines of the 8 Virtues Of The Avatar, and that would have in-game implications in terms of the weapons you could use, potency of magic effects, etc.

Having various ethical dilemmas in quests, Bioware-style, is all fine and good, but really unleashing the potential in an MMO game would be weaving morality throughout the world and mechanics. Making a quest choice is very much a conscious decision - it's much more interesting to see what people do when "no one is looking".

As fun as they are, live events are a losing proposition for all the reasons commonly cited by the WoW devs:

1) Concentrates players in one zone, leading to instability
2) Poor content yield for the amount of effort invested. Once the event is over, that content is essentially trashed.
3) Scale works against you - more players/servers means more live teams, and manhours are some of the most expensive resources around.

I think this is one area where pen'n'paper style games still rule the roost, and will for the foreseeable future. The first MMO to pass the Turing Test will be a wondeful thing indeed, but that's a long time off.

"It's basically fatalism: nobody cares about the story because they know that nothing they do can possibly affect it. If they felt personally connected to it, they would care very much indeed."

Allowing players to meaningfully affect a storyline in any sort of macro sense just isn't feasible given current technolgy. Branching storylines are hard enough to implemental in single-player RPGs, and MMOs function under an order of magnitude time crunch. World events could be improved if you had the technolgical chops to build them to run in a hands-off fashion over dozens of servers simultaneously (the AQ War Effort in WoW was actually not a bad attmept, it's a shame they didn't try to expand on it with the Scourge Invasion).

However, I don't even think it's necessary to affect the content to be engaged by it. Every other form of media can successfully draw the viewer in emotional despite being entirely passive. I think comic books are the best model here - frequent, constant, varied updates that makes the player want to check back in with his/her favorite stories every update. And by frequent, I mean monthly at the least.

It's a shame the IP was so completely destroyed by the time The Matrix Online launched, because they seemed to have a good plan and tried to execute well on it. Whoever makes this work is going to have made a significant breakthough in how fast and cheap they can produce high-quality, bug free content.

When the fate of MC/BWL/AQ was first raised in the runup to The Burning Crusade, Blizzard's claim was that everyone was sick of those zones, and they'd rather serve up 100% new content than make you go kill Core Hounds again.

Personally, I think it's a mistake for all the reasons listed. It makes the world feel not just static, but dissonant. In a world of level 80 heroes marching on Arthas, Onyxia seems like small potatoes. I'd love to see all the Azeroth raid content exiled to the Caverns of Time and the zones repopulated with new mobs/quests to reflect the "defeated" status. Getting Blizzard to put real dev effort into story/lore/narrative content is like pulling teeth, though, so I doubt we'll see it.

I suspect they've got market research to back up their decision - people don't play MMOs primarily for a story experience, which is why none of the upcoming releases have a dynamic story/world as a major bulletpoint, as The Matrix Online did. Because of the way you have to continually throw out old content as well as create new, it would be an expensive proposition (unless you had a truly revolutionary creative pipeline) and expense means you can't cater to a limited niche.

"Every type of programming imaginable. All there for you to find and choose what you want, when you want it." Every type (speaking of broad genres), but not every show. Not even close. Where can I buy broadcast quality downloads of Veronica Mars, The O.C., or The Sopranos over the Internet? Preferably not from a middleman such as iTunes. Preferably including the entire back catalog of episodes. As far as I know, I can't. So it would seem that we're still very much in the beginning of an on-demand, a la carte world. The best stuff, the most desireable stuff, is still sitting in closed silos only accessible through various forms of hobbled (either due to quality or format) streaming. In ten years, maybe an entirely new array of programming will have developed in the online-only (or online-first) space. Stuff that people watch in quantity, stuff that can be paid for via either advertising or direct sale. But that still seems a distant goal, not a description of the way things are now.