What is the best MMO? Most would say WoW and I can understand that. But here is a thought; there is currently not one MMO that is as good as it can be. Some are better than others, but all of them have something missing.

Having been playing MMOs since the very beginning (barring Ultima Online), I have played a great many of them. I’m always amazed at how people say that this feature was “stolen” from that game as if this is a bad thing. If that was the case then UO did most of it first and if “stealing” features was forbidden then the MMO market not have seen some of its current gems.

While I’m very happy these gems exist and have played / play most of them, I want that one bar of platinum. So here is a list of features that I would like to see in one game.

Classless progression. The old archetypes of tank, melee DPS, range DPS, healer, controller are done to their end. I have a friend that plays a tank archetype but has twisted the skills and items he wears so much that he is now the best melee DPS. I also feel that defining a class for a gamer leads to more standard deployments of skills (the templates that many sites have) than if you leave them alone to choose what they think is cool. Games that did not have classes were riddled with people that had completely different skill sets and they were enjoying themselves more because it was their character.

Strong player driven economy. While most would think that WoW is a good example, I would be willing to bet that most of them don’t know about EVE’s market. Plan for big economy please, with a crafting system that can make many things but output only a limited amount of items, just like EVE. I think all future developers should take a deep look at EVE crafting/market system and learn from it. Don’t give me a crafting profession that makes the top tier item in 40 seconds, give me a way to make (random numbers to follow) 1000 items, all of some value or need, top tier items to be made in hours, not seconds, and a way to make 10 of them at the same time.

Purpose. DAoC still stands in my mind as the single best game in terms of purpose. Spent a year leveling up my character and then three years playing the same character in which he never changed his items, instead he was getting new skills from PvPing. Saying that in today’s world seems insane to most. No new item in three years? Yes, back then the world was much simpler (or confined); if you wanted items and raiding you went to EverQuest, if you wanted persistent war you went to DAoC. It worked, and to a degree still does as there are servers open for those games. Modern equivalents are Warhammer (for DAoC) and WoW (for EverQuest). But here is the difference; Warhammer even has raiding in it, while WoW does not have any significant war elements. Battlegrounds and arenas are PvP raiding providing nothing for character progression other than more items. The world itself needs to feel alive and changing. You cannot understand the feeling of spending two or three hours in one map fighting over the castles in the area. It was not two months ago that I enjoyed such a feeling in Warhammer when we were trying to defend a castle for three hours. I cannot make it justice with words alone.

Early Travel method. Champions Online is not to be praised for a great many deal of things. However it has nailed one thing; early travel powers. Running around a vast area does not add to any game. Give players the means to go where they need to or want to. Let them appreciate the content, not the pretty rocks the path is made of.

Keep it simple, stupid! Photorealism means nothing unless it is perfect or damn near perfect. It is something that robotic engineers (of all people) have stumbled on when trying to make their life like robots. People accept something easier if it has characteristics of human nature but obviously is not human, than a near copy which might even make them afraid of it. It is an instinctual response to dismiss something that tries to be something it is not. The closer something becomes “like” the thing, but not, the more apprehensive we become of it. It needs to be VERY similar or clearly dissimilar. Look at all the realistic graphics (Vanguard, EQ2, etc.) and you can easily see the differences, no matter how impressive it may be. Impressive wears out. Now look at WoW and Aion, both are completely stylized to their respective fields (Western and Eastern feel) and both are beautiful, and more importantly smoother than Vanguard ever was…

More to follow.