Many MUD quests achieved this sort of emotional engagement. The barriers these days have to with a bunch of complicated factors, but they include (IMHO)

It is this type of narrative structure that might be impossible in a MMO. Imagine a quest that didn't give a promised reward. Player would send bug reports. How would the game dev respond? Can the devs say, 'We want the players to develop negative emotions to this NPC to enhance later quests? Therefore, we (the NPC) lied to you.' It would be exciting to see a MMO that controlled a story line like the series Lost or Heroes. But because of the issue of replayability, I'm not holding out.

GameSpy gives a brief review of 16 (16!) major new virtual worlds scheduled for release in the next 12 months or so. This adds to a market already loaded with big-hit recent releases Sims Online (currently re-vamping itself impressively) and Star Wars: Galaxies (clearly a high-quality offering). Meanwhile, new social worlds like Second Life and There crowd their way forward, old veterans Ultima Online and EverQuest hold on to their users, and Asian games continue to expand rapidly. Is the growth rate of user interest fast enough to make all of these games winners? No! User interest can't possibly grow that fast. It would defy economic reason. Surely a crash looms. Of course, if user demand doesn't rise quickly enough, we know that this crash won't be like other crashes. Worlds won't shut down. Once the development costs are sunk, it doesn't take many subscribers to keep the lights on. Rather, the main effects would be.

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