I haven’t done a “Next Great MMO” spot in a while, mostly because MMOs have sort of slipped from my mind a bit. Of late I’ve been spending what I call my “long term game time” in Minecraft, exploring a few different servers in the hopes of finding a ruleset I like. That experience has made me wonder just what will make the next great MMO truly great, and as far as I can tell, nothing currently in development has what it will take, not even Star Wars: The Old Republic.

I wrote a longer piece about the ways SWTOR – one of the most anticipated and ambitious MMOs out there – will fail. I’m sure the game will still sell, but I don’t think it will make a dent in WoW’s numbers. It’s too similar a game and it fails to innovate in the genre. Here’s a quick excerpt from my article:

This is the experience most MMOs fail to deliver. Instead, games like “WoW” and “Champions Online” and yes, probably “SWTOR,” present the player with a paradox. The player is told he or she is going to be a great hero someday, defending the world from some great evil, and yet, as long as the player is playing the evil persists, the villains respawn, and the game world remains virtually unchanged as a result of that player’s presence.

For the full article, head over to our parent site, Bullz-Eye.com. Be warned, there’s a lot of Minecraft talk, so if you aren’t down with Mojang, it’s best not to click through.

From what we know, that probably means Star Wars: The Old Republic from Bioware. That would be about as major as you can get. It’s definitely at the top of my MMO wish list. There are other options, though. He could be talking about Need for Speed: World Online, which I really hope isn’t the case. There’s also the very slim chance that EA has a hush-hush project in the works, but I doubt that’s going to happen either.

Instead, I think it’s safe to start dreaming up bounty hunter names.