I do that all the time, it's called Unreal Tournament 2004! :)

I'm only partially joking. You, or course, are correct in a strict sense. I believe this will not be the case forever because having one shard per party (group of 5-6 players) will be possible at some point and AI simulation will get really good probably faster than we think.

You've never had a game you truly enjoy disappear out from under you, have you? My first (and last) experience with that was Earth and Beyond. If you don't remember it, it was a space combat/trading/exploration MMORPG. It was shut down just two years after its release (actually, two days shy of two years). Had I known that might happen, I would never have even tried the game in the first place, or perhaps I might have tried it, but I would not have invested so much time and effort into playing it. That one experience colored my impressions of all MMOs to the point where I have actually never played another one, even if they look like something I might enjoy.

The worst part of the whole thing is, for several years after E&B went under, I kept my original install disks in the back of a cabinet, in the vain hope that someday someone would revive it and I would be able to play it again. Alas, it seemed like that would never happen, so during spring cleaning a while back, I finally threw them out. About 6 months later I found out about a fan-made emulator project that would turn the game into an open world single player game... if you still had the original install media.

And this is why MS gets huge points in my book for how they shut down Allegiance.

Especially with something as story-heavy as TOR seems to be you would think it would be possible and relatively cheap. We always read about assets and such being the expensive part of game-making, and that is already done in an MMO.

Similar to being okay with DRM if they announce plans to patch it out after a certain period I would be totally okay with the MMO model if they stated ahead of time they would release files which made it playable offline or on a player-run server should it ever shut down.

Personally I'm still undecided about TOR.
I really liked KotOR, but I usually don't like MMOs.
The fact that it might shut down someday certainly isn't in its favor. I don't really obsess over it, but if I enjoyed a game I definitely wouldn't feel good if I suddenly couldn't play it.
I usually replay the games I like, especially the RPGs, after all. Knowing I possibly couldn't is a turnoff, no doubt about it.

Still, if some of my friends play it, I might too, even though after DA 2 I'm not really willing to give Bioware my money.

The only downside wouldn't be whether or not they kept enough but too much. I don't think I would be too keen on the damage sponge model of boss fights that seem to plague most MMOs. Nor would I be too keen on the overly grindy gameplay. Even without subscription charges (which remain the most obvious deterrent for me) the gameplay would need to be adequately adapted to its new single player nature.

As for TOR, it seems like it wouldn't be too difficult a conversion.

The only real concern is how they'd go about selling it. If they could sell it as a single player game - even to those who played it as an MMO, then it might be worth their while. It's a pretty untested practice though and there's no way of knowing if it would work financially.

MMO's arn't games though, they are competitive chatrooms for men. People think they are games because they look like them, but they certainly aren't.

I played WoW for about four years total, off-and-on, and Lord of the Rings for about a year and a half. MMOs certainly have their appeal, (that's why they've made so much money) but ultimately I have several issues with them.

1) You aren't in control of your own game. At any point, a patch could come out that could take one of your meaningful skills away, or change it into something useless, or buff your whole class into an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction. Alternatively your guild could collapse and you can't go raiding anymore. Or the game gets shut down and is gone forever.

2) Secondary to the above, you can't modify the game unless you want to run it on your private server. Being able to modify my games to some degree is a huge deal for me. Nearly every video game I own has been modified in some way.

3) There's only so much grinding one person can handle.

4) Character growth and development is basically nil. Any character at a given level will be virtually identical to any other, apart from gear. The only other genre that can get away with that sort of gear-dependence is the FPS. But with an FPS, player skill makes a *HUGE* difference. In the modern MMO, gear outweighs skill by so much that it's almost pathetic. For instance, in modern WoW, the only important thing about a player is their gearscore.

5) You have to pay rent to play the game. Every month. $10-15 may not sound like too much at first, but it adds up, trust me. I estimate spending over $650 just on subscription fees for my time.

I had a great time playing MMOs, but ultimately the reason I enjoyed them was the personal interaction and the social aspects, more so than the actual gameplay. I highly doubt I'll ever play another one, but it's not from fear of the game's collapse, but rather the issues I have with the genre at large.

Meridian 59 is still going after 15 years, and in a completely free to play state, so whether or not it goes under depends entirely on company choices. I was surprised that Tabula Rasa went under as well, due to it being a very fun game and a nice change of pace from WoW, EQ2 and the like. (I still like guild Wars better though)

It occurs to me that there is one MMO I miss, Everquest 2, but it's actually still running. I miss it because it's consistently changed for the worse over the past few years, and because my guild has shifted into playtimes that don't suit me. Thus, I don't really feel that it's worth playing anymore. I guess the game doesn't have to shut down for it to "end" for you; it can just as easily become something you aren't so fond of, and you can't go back to the way it used to be (unless you run or join a private server, I suppose).

My take on MMOs is that they're kind of like going to see a lame movie or a mediocre band with your friends: you'll probably have fun because you're with your buddies, but if you go alone, there's generally not much payoff. I still play them now and then between single-player games, but the greatest moments all happen with friends and guildmates. You can't revisit those.

EvE is the only MMO ever made that I care about... because it is simply better.

From a technological point of view, it blows WoW out of the water.

As long as there are folks interested ther will be MMO's. Most of these games can be found even today on private servers and can be played for free. I would imagine that this would be the case if the "original" were to go away. After all you can still play any number of text based MUD's that have been around for many many years.

This I Totally Agree With cogadh

I wouldn't know, actually. I started playing right after Echoes of Faydwer came out, so you were probably already fed up with the game by that point. :p I know the game had already changed dramatically since launch by the time EoF was released.

I actually really enjoyed the game the way it was at that time, but although there have been some improvements and some nice new features, the content goes to hell after level 70 for a number of reasons, and each new expansion mucks up itemization and mechanics more than the last.

I think Domino does a great job with what she's been given, but the rest of the dev team is clueless. They might have attracted me back to the game part-time with the new f2p options, but they messed that up, too.