Especially since I don’t believe it has to be all PvP all the time in a working virtual world. We’ve just never had good MMO mechanics for anything other than fighting or the economy.

The problem as I see it is that the integrity of virtual worlds is being eroded by video game companies that are seeking to mainstream them and profit from them. Good game design shouldn’t be motivated by the need to make money; it should be motivated by the desire to make a good game, a compelling world.

I wonder what companies like Blizzard and Zynga would do if they were given the task to recreate the ancient game of chess. I believe both of them would mutilate and dumb down the game for their own ends.

Even the notion of success has been changing. Now to be successful a MMO has to have millions of subscribers. People won’t even consider lesser MMOs if they don’t live up to the Blizzard WoW level of success.

All we can really hope for is that a time will come when technology will become so advanced that you won’t have to spend $50 million to create a MMO. The problem is that the power is in too few hands right now which limits the choices and options for players.

Rather than the spring/summer/fall/winter model, I see the MMO industry more in terms of evolution. I think it’s entirely possible that the WoW-alike dinosaur era is coming to an end, that they’ve reached a tipping point of player apathy and boredom that is an extinction event for anything that reeks of “WoW clone”… which could be bad news for SW:ToR, Rift and Tera. The question is whether the mammals scurrying in the undergrowth will step into the empty niche and grow to achieve greater heights than the dinosaurs ever did, or if the extinction is just too big an event and takes the entire genre with it.

Change is coming and people quite frankly don’t like it.

Having played SWTOR beta, I have to say some people may be left disappointed depending on their expectations. Guild Wars 2, I have enjoyed but there is still a lot we don’t know about the game and of course, “it’s ready when it’s done.”

The field is static and if spending large amounts of money promotes similar gameplay to their predecessors, I can see recent titles becoming smaller in budget until breakthroughs are made and companies are willing to make the risk.

To use your analogy, I think we’re at the end of winter and moving into spring. There are new takes on the MMO (TOR is not one of them) and the player market has shifted from “play 6 hours, 4 nights a week” to a more casual environment.

Instead of a saturated market with a small player base, games are changing their focus to accept any type of person, gamer or otherwise. The player base is expanding from a couple million to a couple hundred million. It’s a cool place to be.