With any game, I always hit a point where I cease to be immersed in the game as a world and start thinking about the mechanics, the way the game actually works. In Counter-strike, it was the day I learned to jumpcrouch. Suddenly this game-changing mechanic turned me from a terrorist running about desperately trying to stay alive into a hopping ball of impossibly accurate death. In Halo, it was the way grenades would explode once they sat still. I perfected grenade trapping on every map, so there was always an extra burst of damage where and when I needed it. With Oblivion, it was discovering that I could beat the game at level one by choosing primary stats and never leveling them up.

WoW suffers from this immersion problem as much as any game. Creating a class for the first time, you rarely think about the different racials. If you’re going to PvP, though, it’s obvious that human is your best choice. I always loved Beast Mastery on my hunter because I got to have a big scary pet and, in Wrath of the Lich King, unique pets, but when Blizzard nerfed BM damage into the ground, it pretty much killed my favorite way to play the class. Hunters lost a lot of flavor for me that day, and it was because of a mechanical change.

The thing I’ve always loved about MMOs is the flavor of the different classes. While I love to try different things, I’ve always been a player who settles into the class I enjoy most and really identify with. Every time mechanics intrude on my class immersion, I wonder how the next great MMO will deal with it. I started taking a look at RIFT recently, a game that has been getting a lot of positive attention in its beta phase. To me, the game looks too much like WoW for me to seriously consider it. If I’m going to pay a monthly fee for WoW or a game that looks an awful lot like WoW, I’m probably going to stick with WoW if only because I have so much time invested in it. Still, I was trying to keep an open mind on RIFT, until I read the talent trees for the different classes. They’re basically the same kind of boring crap you get in Warcraft. Increases your spell haste by 3 percent. Increases your damage from this spell by 10 percent. Gives you a chance to get a free spell cast. None of that stuff is fun or flavorful – it’s all mechanical. It helps your name climb up the damage meters. It doesn’t make the game any more interesting than it was before you put your talent point there.

My hope is obviously that someone will find a way to blend flavor and mechanics for an MMO, but it’s going to take someone with serious vision. I think a lot of developers confuse depth with complexity. League of Legends is a great example of a deep gameplay experience without a super complex experience. The fact that my hunter in WoW has 50 action buttons on the screen seems to me like a design failure. With so many different skills, I’m immediately sucked out of the game to worry about where to put my latest macro. While the four button approach for LoL may be too slim for the MMO experience, there has to be some happy medium, one hopefully much closer to four buttons than 50, that allows me to engage with the game world intuitively and simply enjoy my class for what it is.

I’m starting a new column to talk a little bit about the next great MMO. When I’m playing WoW regularly, I can’t help but think about what’s coming next in the MMO world. It’s a conversation I have often with my gaming friends, and I’ve talked with them about starting this column for a long time.

There are a lot of games in development that might finally try to be something other than a WoW-clone. Most every major MMO I’ve seen since WoW has failed because it tried to emulate the industry’s gorilla. The latest batch looks like it will break that mold, which can only mean good things for us players. If you’ve seen any of the Guild Wars 2 development videos, you know developers are at least thinking about ways to re-imagine virtual worlds that characteristically function and persist without interaction from the player (If you head back to the Alliance starting area, you’ll still find Hogger milling about, despite the millions of times he’s been killed and, if you kill him, he’ll keep coming back).

I woke up the day after Christmas to find the latest installment in BioWare’s teaser series for the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic. It included a look at another class, the Trooper, but more interesting (to me, anyway) was the section on Crew Skills. Crew Skills give you access to the profession system in SWTOR without requiring you to spend time building those things up. Some of you probably read that last sentence and cringed. Part of what makes the world engaging is that you spend time doing things and then see the fruits of your efforts. I agree with that to a degree, and I’ll probably do a bit of the profession work myself if/when (more likely when) I play SWTOR, at least for my first character. Past that point, though, professions can be a bit of a chore. It’s annoying to fly around for an hour or two just to farm up some ore. Automating that process means I’ll be able to see the benefits of my professions more quickly, and I get to keep doing the stuff I love while I play. I’m going to spare you my own description of the Crew Skills at work and trust that you’ll just watch the video.

I love the concept, and it’s nice that BioWare has finally given us something other than lightsabers and wristrockets to get excited about in SWTOR. The next great MMO isn’t going to have shinier purples, it’s going to have a more streamlined player experience, aimed at keeping your character solvent even if you can only play a couple hours a week.