Does that mean Raph Koster is Kevin Flynn?

[pxib]

Over on Terra Nova, Timothy Burke argues that Blizzard is CLU:

Kevin Flynn, trapped inside the Grid for more than a decade, discovers that his basic aspirations in creating a virtual world of his own were fundamentally misdirected. He sets out to build a private, perfect world populated by programs of his own design. The complexity of the underlying environment that he creates turns out to be a “silicon second nature” that spontaneously generates a form of a-life that uses some of what he’s put into the environment but that also supercedes his designs and his intentions. Too late, he realizes that the unpredictability of this a-life’s future evolution trumps any aspiration he might have had in mind for his world. Too late because his majordomo, a program of his own creation, modeled on himself, called Clu, stages a coup d’etat and continues Flynn’s project to perfect the world by eliminating contingency, unpredictability, organicism, redundancy. In exile, Flynn realizes that the most perfect thing he’s ever seen is imperfect, unpredictable life itself: the son he left behind, the life of family and community, and the life he accidentally engendered within a computer-generated world.

Which makes Bartle's Killers the ISOs. In short, Burke asks an old question: is the choice simply between warlord anarchy and perfect police state or is there a middle path? Now that we're here, and the police state has triumphed, where do we go?

Enjoyable as it could occasionally be to experience and create the sort of emergent content UO inspired, the vast majority of that content was of sub-dinner-theatre quality. Worse yet its most memorable theme was armed robbery. There may be a small group of masochists who wish to spend $10 a month to have an improvised performance of their own rape and murder acted repeatedly by the local homeless population, but not enough to keep enterprise profitable. As EVE has shown and WoW has codified, most of the players just want to grind in peace. If there is to be such violent theatre, they prefer to sit with the audience.

Is higher quality interaction too difficult to reward or just too much to expect?

[Ratman_tf]

"Open-world single-player games allow a range of interactions that Blizzard long since banished from the World of Warcraft. In the current expansion of WoW, I spent a few minutes trying to stab a goblin version of Adolf Hitler in the face rather than run quests on his behalf, even knowing, inevitably, that I would eventually end up opposing his Indiana-Jones-derived pseudo-Nazis and witnessing his death."

'Member the quest chain in Zul'Drak where you do the bidding of that Death Knight guy, knowing full well that it's going to turn into a "Ha Ha! Just as planned!" moment with the Lich King?

This is the kind of bullshit that I hate with a firey passion in MMORPGs. I agree wholeheartedly that open PvP was nonsense, but we veered so far the other way, I think I once compared it to a museum where you can see all the pretty stuff on display, but DON'T TOUCH!

 I do think there's a middle ground. It's just that we have to have a company that's big enough to take chances, but small enough to experiment.

[UnSub]

There may be a small group of masochists who wish to spend $10 a month to have an improvised performance of their own rape and murder acted repeatedly by the local homeless population, but not enough to keep enterprise profitable.

Sociolotron?

[Khaldun]

This could quickly be an argument about Trammel. Which we know is bad. But let's say this: every designer who ever had a good thing to say about virtual worlds is busy now trying to out Zynga Zynga. In any cultural business, that kind of scramble towards imitation rarely ends well for the imitators, and often not for the potentially interesting ideas they leave behind on the Island of Misfit Toys in their hurry to carve out a piece of turf on a territory that some other designer has already staked out, that some other designer understands better than the come-lately gang.

Designers are quick to blame players for the failure of worlds: players who didn't get it, who didn't want to work to make content, players who are assholes and griefers. They're not so quick to wonder whether the problem was bad designs, bad tools, or even just "wrong time, wrong place".

[pxib]

Designers are quick to blame players for the failure of worlds: players who didn't get it, who didn't want to work to make content, players who are assholes and griefers.

Not just designers. Players too. Also promoters, accountants, middle management, reporters, janitors, and helpdesk personnel. Then only time I hear somebody else blamed is when something actually works, like EVE. Compliments to EVE are specifically phrased in favor of design decisions and  in spite of its griefer community. Success has a thousand fathers, failure is born of players. Which is understandable: They're the new part of the MMO equation.

Burke, on the other hand, is implicitly embracing them... turning them into Flynn's miracle: emergent content. He portrays Blizzard's (and Zynga's) attempts to limit player choice as CLU's genocide, and asks if the imperfect world might have been worth the debris. The answer is probably: "Not if you want to appeal to a mass audience and make a boatload of money."

I disagree with his question. I don't think Blizzard is the villain in this story. They (again, like Zynga) are just the elephant in the room. There are a lot of games that have made worlds work, but for audiences so small that they no longer make the news. Worlds aren't mass market because only the most simple human interaction survives that sort of scaling. And like my sig quote says, that stuff pollutes. If you want people to interact in mature ways, you must assure that there are few enough of them that they can all still feel like they're contributing without needing to stab somebody.

[UnSub]

Having read the article, I think the author is either unaware or ignores titles that try to do what he wants and allow for emergent gameplay. They generally struggle to hold players, or at the far end of niche.

It just seemed like a long-winded way of saying, "WoW sucks, why can't there be a current-gen sandbox game that is successful? ... and btw go see Tron: Legacy".

[Malakili]

It boils down to escapism really.  The sandbox group wants their escapism to be in the form of a second, virtual, life.  The problem for most people is that that virtual life usually comes with the same or similar stresses of real life, where was the theme park variant can really server the escapist purpose by letting you shut down your brain a bit, get constant rewards that make you feel good about yourself no matter what is happening in real life, and actually make you forget about your problems rather than giving you a new set to worry about.

This is about to veer off into totally unsupported assertion land, but I wonder if those cut throat sandbox games are generally more liked by people who have less problems in their day to day lives and sort of have this desire for some kind of primal excitement associated with survival.  Again, no proof, no evidence, just musing.

[Khaldun]

I don't think the only reason to play a sandbox is escapism, but I do agree that the desire to escape is a big part of why sandboxes fail from over-expectation. I think the other big reason to play them is why people play Eve or even why they play Minecraft: to build things, to manipulate events and outcomes, to try to nudge a world this way or that. Not escapism but experimentalism.

[Ratman_tf]

I don't think the only reason to play a sandbox is escapism, but I do agree that the desire to escape is a big part of why sandboxes fail from over-expectation. I think the other big reason to play them is why people play Eve or even why they play Minecraft: to build things, to manipulate events and outcomes, to try to nudge a world this way or that. Not escapism but experimentalism.

Minecraft is a great example. And Dwarf Fortress.
I'm currently replaying Torchlight, (love that game) and wishing it were a bit more like the old Roguelikes. There's a few interesting things in TL, interactive floors, levers that reveal secret rooms, I'd really love an ARPG that put stuff to fuck with in the dungeons. Ride that line between chaos are boredom a bit better.

[ghost]

An issue that I think often comes up with sandboxy type MMOs is "What do I do now?"  Most people are, at their cores, completely unimaginative.  Eve suffers from this a bit, but it allowed for the creation of a point to the game, conquest and corp wars in 0.0 space, that is almost completely player controlled.  Sure, Eve as a game has been successful and it is probably appropriate that the author uses Eve as an example in his article.  I'm not sure that comparing it to WoW is relevant on the success scale however, as levels of mainstream success make it akin to comparing a Ferrari and a Corvette-  they're not even close.  You could very easily compare the two as to their quality, but when you factor in success it skews things toward WoW no matter what.  It's still a really good example of how to do lawlessness vs. police state in a reasonable fashion.  I'm surprised more games don't emulate it.  Warhammer started to have the right idea with PvP areas within a "safe" world but screwed it up by making the process overly complex.  Again, something to be emulated but changed for the better. 

As for the question of which is right, it obviously depends upon what the developers want to accomplish.  If they want massive success (which I don't think will be possible to the level WoW has achieved) it is probably best to avoid a grief sidled sandbox.  Such games will probably always be small market.  The idea of creating a grief sandbox that will be super successful isn't likely possible without some controls to the process, e.g. Eve, and even then some people will just never jive with PvP (And I'm assuming that many mechanics that will allow players to have a determined effect on the world PvP, even though it may not be as simple as walking up to someone and smacking them with an axe).

So when you talk about "higher quality interaction", I'm not sure exactly what you are asking for. 

Is it more/better player interaction?  Involving players as a key part of interaction can be inherently variable as to the quality of experience because players are inherently variable as to the quality.

 Is it better quests?  I think the quest mechanic has been pretty well worn out in its current format. 

Is it "world building"?  I don't know how to accomplish this and apparently nobody else has figured it out, either.  Maybe Minecraft will be a start in this direction and you've got Wurm and some others trying this.  It seems pretty brutal for the average joe gamer. 

[squirrel]

I don't think the only reason to play a sandbox is escapism, but I do agree that the desire to escape is a big part of why sandboxes fail from over-expectation. I think the other big reason to play them is why people play Eve or even why they play Minecraft: to build things, to manipulate events and outcomes, to try to nudge a world this way or that. Not escapism but experimentalism.

Minecraft is a great example. And Dwarf Fortress.
I'm currently replaying Torchlight, (love that game) and wishing it were a bit more like the old Roguelikes. There's a few interesting things in TL, interactive floors, levers that reveal secret rooms, I'd really love an ARPG that put stuff to fuck with in the dungeons. Ride that line between chaos are boredom a bit better.

Try Din's Curse. It's a bit ugly but it is very like DF in some ways even though it's an ARPG.

[Khaldun]

An issue that I think often comes up with sandboxy type MMOs is "What do I do now?"  Most people are, at their cores, completely unimaginative.  Eve suffers from this a bit, but it allowed for the creation of a point to the game, conquest and corp wars in 0.0 space, that is almost completely player controlled.  Sure, Eve as a game has been successful and it is probably appropriate that the author uses Eve as an example in his article.  I'm not sure that comparing it to WoW is relevant on the success scale however, as levels of mainstream success make it akin to comparing a Ferrari and a Corvette-  they're not even close.  You could very easily compare the two as to their quality, but when you factor in success it skews things toward WoW no matter what.  It's still a really good example of how to do lawlessness vs. police state in a reasonable fashion.  I'm surprised more games don't emulate it.  Warhammer started to have the right idea with PvP areas within a "safe" world but screwed it up by making the process overly complex.  Again, something to be emulated but changed for the better.  

Again I just don't agree here: I think this is what Raph and Mike Sellers and a lot of other designers fall back on. "We made worlds/sandboxes, but you guys don't have the right psychological orientation or imagination or whatever to use them properly, hence no one wants them".

There's something to this at some level, yes. Many SF fans know how to write, how to use text as a creation tool, but many wouldn't be able to create entertaining SF for themselves if you tasked them with doing it. And others try and create fairly painful and derivative fan fiction. But, on the other hand, one thing that we've learned through online communication and digital culture is that the subset of people able to craft engaging speculative fiction is much, much larger than you might have suspected, much much larger than what was published in old-style media circa 1950. Way more than anyone could actually read comprehensively, in fact.

You don't need every single person in a sandbox to be capable of or interested in building content, any more than SF literature needs every possible writer to be writing work for others. All you need is enough to provide sufficient entertainment and engagement for the typical or average participant. (Just as there are people who really do read every book written and complain that there are not enough, there will always be some small number of superusers who exhaust all the possible content and complain of ennui. Or indeed, as it is in life: there are people who do everything that can be done and complain that there is not enough to do.)

So the question is, have people turned away from sandboxes because there is so little content due to participants' unwillingness to make content? Name me the sandbox where making content was as easy in relative terms as writing words and you'll have the beginnings of a valid claim. Even text MUDs weren't just a matter of writing text and dumping it there in many cases. Second Life? Horrible content-creation system. NWN2? Worse. Metaplace? Difficult to create and I think many people didn't care for the look of the results, either.  That's what I find interesting about Minecraft: it starts at a much deeper, more elemental and simpler level of creation. If we had more sandbox systems with creation tools on that order, we'd have a meaningful test of whether people are willing or unwilling to make content, and therefore of whether there are people who like sandboxes because they're inclined to be creators, designers, dungeonmasters, what have you.

[Ingmar]

Yeah if sandbox MMOs were more like SMP Minecraft, my interest would be much higher. Instead though, they're like Wurm or Eve.

[Lantyssa]

I love sandboxes and I feel that way, too.  User content creation tools have been junk so far.

[ghost]

Even with awesome user content creation mechanisms those type games still won't be for the average gamer.  It's the same reason TV is so popular-  large swathes of our population don't like to think.  They like to be spoon fed.

Could the type of game you describe be popular?  Surely, but don't suppose that it would be as popular as WoW, or even Eve.  

Anyway, good points.  As always, I enjoyed reading what you have to say. 

[pxib]

So when you talk about "higher quality interaction", I'm not sure exactly what you are asking for. 

Is it more/better player interaction? Is it better quests?  Is it "world building"?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Interaction could include information sharing, trade, defense, or employment. As much as EVE makes most of the nitty gritty boring, it does provide all of these options. Very few games do. Information sharing is particularly difficult in an age of ubiquitous web databases, and works best when "quests" are somewhat random... based on a synthesis of elements rather than specific storyline.

For example: Imagine that rare materials are quest items and can only be gathered for crafting while a player is on a particular quest. These quests are created by crafters, and require specific materials or have time pressure: Collect 15 flawless sprigs of mistletoe from the haunted oaks of Caer Minnaht with a silver sickle. They must be returned to the crafter within twenty minutes of being cut so she can bless them. The player could do the quest herself, could ask other players to accompany her, or could hire another player to do it for her. Until she gets as many sprigs as are required for her crafting project she's a quest NPC, and can choose how publicly she advertises that fact.

A variety of quests like that -- created by crafters for crafting, by players for leveling, by guild masters for PvP, by whomever for whatever -- could mesh with established world quests that appear on a daily or weekly basis and support a variety of activities and rewards... all without a specific heroic themepark track.

In terms of world building, I think less is more. Let players define the edges of the world. Rather than making player-run towns they should be customizing, furnishing, and occupying existing buildings and locations. To avoid sprawl, player must want to share what other people have made rather than wanting to make everything on their own. Creation costs should be prohibitive, both in terms of time or materials required. It's also important to keep maintenance costs high, even if that maintenance is just use of the object, and attention paid to it, by different players. Only useful, popular, and well-placed creations should survive.

...and yes, the tools have to improve.

[ghost]

For example: Imagine that rare materials are quest items and can only be gathered for crafting while a player is on a particular quest. These quests are created by crafters, and require specific materials or have time pressure: Collect 15 flawless sprigs of mistletoe from the haunted oaks of Caer Minnaht with a silver sickle. They must be returned to the crafter within twenty minutes of being cut so she can bless them. The player could do the quest herself, could ask other players to accompany her, or could hire another player to do it for her. Until she gets as many sprigs as are required for her crafting project she's a quest NPC, and can choose how publicly she advertises that fact.

This sounds super cool and is a great idea.....if you have a good group of people doing the quest formation.  I also smell easy exploitation for the type that would be so inclined.  Interesting thoughts though. 

[Lakov_Sanite]

                                Sandbox/on rails
Second Life<----------------------------------------------->WoW

There is no utopia on either side and either way you're getting furries.

[Nebu]

A Tale in the Desert came close, but got a bit too hung up in pvp and tech trees.  If they could take the incredible tech tree of Atitd and add it to a game like Minecraft (survival server), I could see myself being happy for a while.  Perhaps Wurm will evolve in a direction that will make me want to go back to it again. 

[pxib]

My big problem with A Tale in the Desert was the sprawling crafting slums. Second Life writ small: Extraneous equipment and bad art projects everywhere. I think it's important that game designers build the beautiful world... I don't trust the players to keep the theme consistent.

[Khaldun]

I think that's why small multiplayer worlds (with large virtual environments) are one way to consider going. Not just small as in "fewer players" but small as in "trusted social networks with some kind of moderator or hosting function". There are groups of 50-100 people I'd totally trust to do themed content, but a random group of 4,000 players? Never.

[Kageru]

My big problem with A Tale in the Desert was the sprawling crafting slums. Second Life writ small: Extraneous equipment and bad art projects everywhere. I think it's important that game designers build the beautiful world... I don't trust the players to keep the theme consistent.

Just gather or instance it. In the world there is a tool / workshop / factory / town dedicated to working with a some number of crafter materials, housing or an adventurer skill. Inside it can be a chaotic mess with people setting up their own areas but outside the passer by doesn't have to observe all the clutter. Also gets people doing that craft in one place allowing the potential for group projects.

I was just reading some guy re-trying horizons (I have no idea why) and saying the amazing urban sprawl has meant that quest objectives and resource nodes often have houses built over them.

I don't really see the value in the term sandbox and holding a fight with... whatever the alternative is. All games are going to need some sort of central goal to drive the narrative (even if it's something as broad as the Just Cause 2 mechanic of "blow shit up" or Eve's goals of make isk / control space). I can see the current gameplay being broadened to have more alternative gameplay (for example a fantasy RPG with a full player driven economy) but that's a lot of extra work, if you want it fun and balanced, for games that are already having issues with content and costs.

Nor is user made content really the answer. Either you have to give your players "god" powers, in which case forget having any sort of coherent narrative or challenge, or you are just allowing them to re-paint the hamster wheel. On top of which most player content is either terrible or designed to exploit the system for creating it.

[Malakili]

I think that's why small multiplayer worlds (with large virtual environments) are one way to consider going. Not just small as in "fewer players" but small as in "trusted social networks with some kind of moderator or hosting function". There are groups of 50-100 people I'd totally trust to do themed content, but a random group of 4,000 players? Never.

I'd really like this model.  It'd be kind of like the old Persistent World servers of Neverwinter Nights, which I bring up every so often as some of my very favorite multiplayer gaming EVER.   I'd like a game like that, but that gives the ability to create things and alter the world in certain ways from in game rather than only through the toolset and altering the entire module.  Something like a private Love server maybe.  I'd be willing to pay a monthly fee for a game like that I think.

[Khaldun]

My big problem with A Tale in the Desert was the sprawling crafting slums. Second Life writ small: Extraneous equipment and bad art projects everywhere. I think it's important that game designers build the beautiful world... I don't trust the players to keep the theme consistent.

Just gather or instance it. In the world there is a tool / workshop / factory / town dedicated to working with a some number of crafter materials, housing or an adventurer skill. Inside it can be a chaotic mess with people setting up their own areas but outside the passer by doesn't have to observe all the clutter. Also gets people doing that craft in one place allowing the potential for group projects.

I was just reading some guy re-trying horizons (I have no idea why) and saying the amazing urban sprawl has meant that quest objectives and resource nodes often have houses built over them.

I don't really see the value in the term sandbox and holding a fight with... whatever the alternative is. All games are going to need some sort of central goal to drive the narrative (even if it's something as broad as the Just Cause 2 mechanic of "blow shit up" or Eve's goals of make isk / control space). I can see the current gameplay being broadened to have more alternative gameplay (for example a fantasy RPG with a full player driven economy) but that's a lot of extra work, if you want it fun and balanced, for games that are already having issues with content and costs.

Nor is user made content really the answer. Either you have to give your players "god" powers, in which case forget having any sort of coherent narrative or challenge, or you are just allowing them to re-paint the hamster wheel. On top of which most player content is either terrible or designed to exploit the system for creating it.

Actually I really agree with this. User-made content is one way to go, but it's not the only or even best way. The REAL thing is to make a multiplayer game where the the thing that changes isn't the character, but the world itself, where the pleasure of playing is to 'drive the narrative', to see how the story comes out. If you put me in the "Star Wars universe", I don't care about becoming a re-skinned Mace Windu who kicks ass and take names. I'm perfectly happy to an ordinary crime boss, a smugger, a mercenary, an Imperial commander, whatever. What I want is to play some role in shaping outcomes, to see the story progress, and to be interested and astonished and puzzled by the ways that other players are pushing the story, and what the aggregate results of story-manipulation end up being. That doesn't require user content at all, but it does require procedurally-generated content, some kind of agent-based AI, and some willingness on the part of devs to just let things unfold. Like if in Asheron's Call, the devs had been willing to allow the one server that defended Bael'Zharon's crystal from being shattered to just...end. Transfer all the characters off, that world is over, the apocalypse has come. I'm sure there are people who wouldn't like that, but I know that there are plenty of people who would love it. If the emphasis is on the world, on collective storytelling and narrative development, and not on building up a character, then you also don't have to so desperately attached to your character in the first place. So I lose one guy: if the game lets me get back into the narrative action with someone equally interesting, fine. I don't stop reading an interesting fantasy novel because one character I like gets killed or sidelined (well, not normally).

[Nebu]

Players need carrots.  If there's a chance that their world may end, the carrot starts to fade. 

While I too would like to see world events alter the narrative, I think it disenfranchises too many players in the process.  World changing events that occur at 3am do nothing for those players in game during prime time.  Casual players begin to feel marginalized as a select few determine the destiny of the server. 

The solution is to instance worlds such that everyone has access to the story as the world changes.  Unfortunately, this takes one massive world and converts it into a thousand time slices of the same world... and ultimately your game is back on rails.  In instancing, you just do a better job of hiding the rails. 

[pxib]

Then those players need more mature stories than "you helped save the world". Instead they protected a shrine, kept a trading house from going broke, or maintained a local leadership cabal. So long as there was some amount of risk, and the goal now has some degree of persistence, the players can feel as justly proud of their accomplishments no matter how minor they were. They can also hear the stories of other players succeeding in more impressive ways against narrower odds in the support more well-known goals... and feel vicarious pride: "That's a lot like what I did!"

What has to be avoided is player ability and advantage gained through destruction rather than creation and protection. Destruction has to take a lot more work and provide a lot less reward, because its results are so much less universally positive. It's why so few stories are about how a group of plucky heroes destroyed the world, and so many are about how such destruction is prevented. Happy endings are happy not because they promise eternal bliss, but because they allow for potential sequels. The story goes on. The final ending that destruction promises isn't nearly so much fun.

The shrine can be lost, but another must be found... if perhaps in a new form. The trading house may face bankruptcy, but another must be established... if perhaps with a new name. The cabal can be broken, but another must rise... if perhaps under a new regime or against more competition. The story has to go on.

[Khaldun]

Right. Think of Fallout as a model, multiplied by twenty or thirty factions, focal points, etcetera. I help the Thieves' Guild remove a rival gang from the mysterious city of Overmountain who've moved in on their pickpocketing in the Bazaar; maybe after two weeks of effort this hits a 'tipping point' and the Thieves retake their monopoly. The amount of pickpocketing increases by 10% in the city. Players working with the City Guard start hearing that the Thieves need to be slapped down a couple of pegs, and now suddenly I'm working to try and corrupt more officials in the City Guard against players who are trying to influence the Guard to take a more militant law-and-order stance. Then suddenly I get an update because the Shadow Thieves from Overmountain have hired the Assassins' Guild to take out the head of the Thieves' Guild because still other players have been pushing events in that direction and I have to decide which plotline to focus on. The Thieves have lousy magical security, so I work with other players to encourage them to upgrade their defenses. This results in the Wizards' Tower gaining 10% higher revenues during this period of time, and players who are trying to influence that faction now have something new to work with.

So no save the world stuff, just a lot of small shifting landscapes, things that could eventually produce a very different feeling environment, with the devs working to constantly inject novelty or new kinds of agents and factions that respond to where players have been pushing things.

[Yegolev]

Try Din's Curse. It's a bit ugly but it is very like DF in some ways even though it's an ARPG.

Wow, this is awesome and you suck for introducing me to it.

[ghost]

Right. Think of Fallout as a model......

So no save the world stuff, just a lot of small shifting landscapes, things that could eventually produce a very different feeling environment, with the devs working to constantly inject novelty or new kinds of agents and factions that respond to where players have been pushing things.

This actually sounds very similar to Eve online.  Eve has a great concept behind it and decent macro mechanics, but I just wish the actual gameplay was a little more compelling.......and that the lag would get fixed.  But that's another story. 

[pxib]

Which is why EVE comes up over and over again in Game v. World discussions: It does a lot of things right, and serves as a handy exception to the prevailing wisdom. Unfortunately, it's only good in the abstract. Paying not to play EVE very much is often more fun than paying to play EVE all the time, and both of them are only a hair more exciting than listening to the stories of people who play EVE... for free. Those stories take hours or days of boring effort, and weeks or months of offline grinding, and sum them up into 15 minute anecdotes.

Paying for the game just gets you a chat room grafted to a spreadsheet, with an animated planetarium as desktop background.

Maybe that's a feature, not a bug. Maybe the lack of mental stimulus from the game proper is what drives people to invest so much attention in being dangerous and entertaining. I certainly hope not.

[Kageru]

I think PvP is cheap user made content (here's a big space, go kill each other) but as prone to repetition in the macro as anything else. Eve advanced that with persistence, territory control and player driven economy but the cost is that a lot of those mechanics are more "work" than fun. And any game where the opposition can control your game time (from the web "build your castle!" games up to Eve) is asking an awful lot out of the playerbase and will be some flavor of niche. Even a modern version of Eve possibly wouldn't build up the political entities that gave the game momentum if it was released today.

I'd like to see a game in which the world did supply the story but the way you approached it was multi-faceted. I'm even planning on seeing if there's an open-source MMO foundation in which I can see if it's possible to do it (/dreams).

Basically I see a world in which the players start with one inviolable location, but one inherently limited in expansion, ownership and excitement. Say for example a last city directly under the protection of a god (or safe dimensional pocket, or superhero, whatever). Surrounding them are monsters in the fields, towns owned by the NPC opposition and somewhere far off in the distance powerful enemy forces who hate the players but thankfully spend most of their time in-fighting and thus haven't swamped them yet. The players can decide to master crafts to make items, gather resources to feed crafters or to strengthen the town (and its NPC defenders), go out and pacify the surrounding lands, gather resources, or even band together and recapture assets. In the process of doing so an NPC might generate a quest or an ambush which is going to be dynamically generated to fit the context (and since you can't chain run them it becomes harder to grind yourself to where the repetition is obvious). A captured resource, such as a town, could be owned by a guild (for some benefit as per Eve, say a nearby dungeon or mine which they get a cut of the output) which then also has a motive to build it up, defend it and make it an interesting place for people to visit (tax!). Unused and undefended towns fall and become once more monster owned. The further the town is from the safe core the more dangerous the challenge, which is enough motivation for people to expand out to a point of appropriate challenge. Maybe one day the players will be powerful enough to clear a path to an enemy stronghold, assault and raid it... but they'll either reveal a more powerful force behind them or more likely be unable to hold the territory long term.
 
Sort of like rifts or incursions if they were integrated into the foundation of the world rather than as circus sideshows.

Character progression would also be based on capability rather than power. Start with a really basic inclination to give some focus and stop people being masters of all (eg. "You are strong and enjoy physical challenges"). Require territory to be held ("the server has captured the fortress which has always overlooked the <safe-town>") and quests to gain capabilities ("within this fort warriors gather and will teach their skills"), use to gain experience (so you can get more capabilities) and limits on how much gear you can carry so while you might have the skill for every weapon and armor you can't adventure with all of them. Higher level versions of the skill take longer to gain (the Eve model), harder quests and maybe even further territories to be captured. And while your character will become tougher with skills it's nothing like the the power difference between 0 and cap in a diku model. Some character progression might be exclusive to certain organizations or force you to make a choice in direction. Effectively you could turn a WoW talent tree into a narrative in how you ended up with that focus. The main observation being that increments in power are as important for giving direction (a lot of the gains from Eve skills are tiny) as creating living gods (eg. current WoW where only elder titans make sense as opponents).

On PvP servers players can become renegades, seize towns for their own use, waylay players outside of player towns and raid player towns to loot and weaken them (but not destroy, so you can avoid the whole CTA bullshit). Of course a weakened town must be re-fortified or it becomes more likely to fall to the monsters of the world. Anti-PK players would have an interest in raiding bandit towns, once discovered, and protecting their area as they gain from the activities around their own. It would probably be good to have one faction per account so they have to live with a bandit economy (looted goods + whatever they build themselves).

I'd play that... but WoW and everything else after it has shown the way so expecting the above to be anything but niche, while needing massive amounts of development energy and careful balancing, is optimistic. The mass-market is the ADHD console generation that needs lots of on-screen activity, adrenal controls ("bam, smash, punch!"), no time-sinks (or time to chat), big rewards ("this one has twice as many points as that one!") and awesome opponents to be glorified, built up and disposed of.

[Malakili]

both of them are only a hair more exciting than listening to the stories of people who play EVE... for free.

This is the real issue for me I think.  I actually do enjoy EVE quite a bit.  I think that it is the case for me in MANY games (from EVE to Starcraft 2 as a totally different example) that I enjoy being "a part of" the game.  I liked being an EVE player as much as I liked playing EVE, and I liked being a Starcraft 2 player as much as I liked playing starcraft.  For someone who approaches their gaming in this way, EVE is a fantastic game.  I'm happy to curl up in my comfy desk chair and just press a few keys every mining cycle while reading, and in this way get to be a part of something huge.  It never bothered me when playing EVE that I wasn't out slaying dragons, or even in combat all that much.  It was in some sort of more general sense an enjoyable experience to be a part of it all, in a way that was often more satisfying or "fun" (I hate the word fun, I don't really have a good idea of where the line between "fun" and "I liked this but it wasn't actually 'fun'" is) than something visceral and immediately engaging like Call of Duty, or SC2, or whatever.

That being said, I can easily get a similar experience from EVE, like you said, by simply reading the write ups, where as with something like SC2 I am much more compelled to participate actively.

[ghost]

Those stories take hours or days of boring effort, and weeks or months of offline grinding, and sum them up into 15 minute anecdotes.

That sounds like a Kim Stanley Robinson novel. 

My point is that I'm really surprised that more games don't try to emulate what Eve has done with their setup.  It could work with a game like Warhammer, if done correctly.  One area where games continually fuck PvP up over and over again is the fact that you just can't do anything at all from level 1.  Eve fixes that by making "level 1" type players extremely useful as CC.  Then you lose that ability a little as you get more powerful.  Well, lose isn't the right word really, it just becomes much more costly to do said crowd control.  And this is just one area where emulation would be great.  Others include the overall setup of the world, crafting/economy, and player interactions.