Game Creators need to realize that graphics don’t make the game, they simply limit the players. Sure, if you think it looks like life, you’re more likely to believe it, but as you’re running through some random dungeon at 4 FPS, you realize it’s not worth it to sacrifice gameplay for graphics.

I guess my point is to make whatever game you find necessary, don’t overhaul the graphics to make it special, but make it your own.

I think what might work is for someone to make some form of backend engine-that instead of graphics, they automate or provide tools to maintain servers, support, billing, and troubleshooting. If they could automate the day to day aspects better and let the developers focus mostly on creating content, you could see more niche titles arise.

One, middleware would be great. The “Hero Engine” that Studio 38’s Copernicus is being built on looks pretty decent, but WoW releasing their engine (not unlike the Unreal engine) would be a very interesting development for the genre. It could arguably be the planned endgame of WoW itself, actually, once Blizzard has bled the population dry as much as possible with the game itself and released their “next-gen” game.

Two, devs need to start small and grow organically, rather than plan on starting big and getting bigger. Three Rings (Puzzle Pirates), CCP (EVE) and King’s Isle (Wizard 101) all started modestly, and have built their games up to reasonable success. It’s smarter to do that than swing for the fences trying to kill WoW, only to whiff and wind up in bankruptcy. To be fair, high risk, high reward has its fans, but we’ve seen that WoW is a freak success, not a solid indicator of what to expect from the genre at large. It’s one thing to think big, it’s another thing entirely to gamble at the high stakes table. Some people like that rush, but the house always wins in the end. It’s no way to build a game like an MMO that really needs long term planning to succeed.

Of course, there’s something quite amazing about the single EVE-type server. It’s very cool knowing that everyone exists in the same universe and any action one person has may effect everyone else.

I think that smaller games do get overlooked, though. In Meridian 59, the smaller servers meant you were part of a much tighter community, in general. A new name on the server was easily identified. (Unfortunately, this usually meant the person was suspected of being an alt looking to spy on enemies….)

One thing I’d love to see more of is games with different rules sets. You see a bit of this with different PvP server rule sets in some games. Different PvE rule sets would be interesting. Perhaps a server where killing monsters gives more xp than quests, for example. This is impossible in a “shardless” system like EVE Online.