I personally haven't had the opportunity to play the World of Warcraft beta, but browsing through fan sites and bulletin boards the consensus seems to be that WoW is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. In other words Blizzard has chosen to refine and polish an already existing genre rather than strike out and make something completely radical and new. That said, it's only a matter of time before something radical and new does come out.
Games like WoW and EQ2 probably represent the pinnacle of the first generation of MMORPG's. What will the second generation be like, given the issues that confront makers of MMORPG's today?

Anyone who's ever killed the Evil Vampire King in Game X knows what their reward is: they go outside and find all of the Evil Vampire King's guards have respawned along with his pet schnauzer Billi. The pathetic peasant who tipped you off to the presence of the Undead in his village in the first place will thank you for saving everyone and then immediately go back to whining about how his daughter and the local livestock are being drained dry. "Thank the Gods, you've saved us all! Your name will live forever and our grandchildren will sing your praises and oh God help us an evil vampire is stalking our village, he's made off with my daughter and our pet sheep..." If they're truly unlucky the Evil Vampire King will respawn while they're still in his throne room and stab them in the back. How much more satisfying would it be if the Evil Vampire King stayed dead for once, not only for you but for everyone on the server?

Dynamic content is only now making its way into the next crop of MMORPG's but there's little doubt that it's something that interests game manufacturers. Games like Horizons and Shadowbane promised to incorporate it, with varying degrees of success. Both WoW and EQ2 promise server events run by game masters. Finally, Mutable Realms is producing Wish, an online game with true dynamic content in the form of non-repeatable quests and a dedicated story team whose sole job is to move events along on the server.
Once the technical hurdles are overcome, how could dynamic content effect some of the issues confronting MMORPG's today?

The Ten Month Barrier

Getting information about their subscriber base from any of the major MMORPG manufacturers is like pulling teeth. That said, SOE spokesperson Tamara Sanderson revealed to Gamespy that the average EQ subscriber only plays the game for ten months and there is considerable turnover in the ranks. There's no way of telling if that number is typical of the industry as a whole, but given that EQ is undoubtedly the biggest and baddest of the American MMORPG's it doesn't seem like a bad place to start. The obvious question is "Why only ten months?"
The likely answer is that ten months is enough time to see everything in the game world. By that time even a casual player has probably come close to raising a character to the maximum level and has had a chance to see the entirety of a game's content. First generation MMORPG's emphasize a leveling "treadmill"--players kill monsters and level up in order to kill higher level monsters and level up. Eventually a maximum is reached and boredom ensues. Second generation games may emphasize new content as a reason to play instead, which has direct implications for--

Casual Fridays

Games like Everquest may boast of subscriber bases in the hundreds of thousands, but games like Super Mario or The Sims sell millions of copies (Super Mario World for the SNES has sold about 20 million units, for instance, compared to about 2.5 million copies/downloads for EQ and all of its expansions. Many companies view the barriers MMORPG's present to casual gamers as a key impediment to mainstream success. Not only do game mechanics tend to be fairly involved but the time requirements associated with online games tend to be steep, often too steep for anyone not on summer vacation.

Dynamic content would allow companies to de-emphasize the leveling treadmill or perhaps even discard it entirely. A short leveling curve would allow even casual gamers to reach a high level in a couple of months rather than years. The current focus of the first generation games is on leveling.
The second generation may focus instead on things like plot, exploration and new content and eliminate the need for a lengthy leveling process.

Wrapping Things Up

In 1982 fans of science fiction writer Harlan Ellison who worked at Atari asked him to review the "Empire Strikes Back" video game. Ellison was horrified to discover that no matter how good you got or how well you played the result was always the same: the game rolled on and on until you lost or got so bored you threw the controller away and headed to the kitchen to make a sandwich. In the years since then game designers for single player games have by and large made some attempt to cater to the human desire for resolution by introducing story lines into their games. Even the hoariest of video game genres, the side-scrolling shooter, typically has something resembling a plot with the player fighting through waves and waves of the enemy in order to face a level boss and finally a game boss whose defeat wraps up the game. In fact it's hard to think of a single player game released in the current era that doesn't offer some kind of "ending". In contrast to the single player market however there is one genre where endless and unending play is the rule, rather than the exception: online multi-player games, which right now are in a stage of infancy comparable to the one the video game market as a whole was in when Ellison wrote his review.

Dynamic content could make possible new and radical modes of gameplay that might offer something akin to the resolution of single player games. Given that most MMORPG's are based in a high fantasy, swords and sorcery setting it's somewhat surprising that none of them have chosen to incorporate the "good vs. evil" theme that's so popular in the genre. Imagine for instance a PvP environment where players choose one of two sides engaged in all-out conflict with the other. As one side accumulates victories it would be able to drive deeper and deeper into enemy territory, finally culminating in a decisive siege of the other side's capital city and final victory on that server. The entire process might take a couple of years with the game manufacturer introducing new servers every three months to allow players to restart the conflict on virgin territory.

Generation 3 and Beyond

Predicting what direction the next generation of online games takes is a difficult proposition. There's no guarantee that the next generation of games will even be played on personal computers. NCSoft, the Korean company behind Lineage, has announced plans to enter the console market in 2005.
Even more intriguing are games like Mogi, produced by French developer Newt Games and released in Japan to take advantage of the massive cellular phone base there. Mogi is a persistent, multi-player collection game which provides a data layer over the physical geography of Tokyo. As players move through the city shopping, going to work or having fun the Mogi client on their cell phone displays a game map indicating the position of nearby items and creatures as well as other game players. Programmers at Newt Games have used the to their advantage: some monsters only come out at night, others favor specific locales like parks. Newt Games also provides a client for PC's with expanded capabilities which allows desktop users to interact with players using mobile phones, conjuring up visions of hardcore players at their PC's issuing directives to armies of guildmates.

Given Tokyo's pedestrian friendly culture, low crime rate and excellent public transportation options Mogi may be a game which could never make the transition to places like the United States where hanging out in parks at night is first and foremost an excellent means of getting to know your local heroin dealer. But it's easy to see how the game addresses issues like user base and market penetration, despite the fact that it's still technically a fantasy game. If online gaming ever achieves mainstream success it's likely that new games will leave behind escapist genres like fantasy and science fiction for their backdrop to focus on more popular genres like sports.

And massively multiplayer online games probably will spread beyond its current market. In the final analysis human beings are social animals and as computers grow more and more important in the daily lives of people it seems only natural for people to socialize in the online world as well.

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