Why do YOU want it to be massively multiplayer? Every time Disney comes up with a new animation, they make the animators justify why the want to use animated film instead of any other medium for their project. The answer can’t just be “it’s neat” or “I’m an animator”.
City of Heros has some of the best character creation I’ve seen. Your choices in looks, charater type, origins, and primary/secondary powers really allowed you to make almost any character concept. It was much more rewarding than the usual race/class thing where you are stuck in pre-defined roles. In WoW, however, the classes truely played different and required different stratagies (and appeal to different gamers) whereas most the powers in CoH where the same things with different names.
Other than character creation, CoH didn’t do it for me. The instanced zones kind of took the multiplayerdom out of it, and while the sidekick system that lets you play with signifigantly higher or lower level characters seemed neat, it took away some of the point to leveling. The world felt like a bunch of mortar holding up instances, and there wasn’t really enough in-game justification for those instances.
WoW does a better job, I think, with instances. In WoW, instances are always very extremely hard quests that absolutly cannot be done alone. They may sit in your questlog for a couple weeks because it’s not the sort of thing you can just go out and do- it’s a really really big deal. And then one day you are wandering around and you notice someone is getting together a group for an instance. It’s a grand adventure! It’s something so hard the masses arn’t doing it- only you guys, the great heros, will venture in. It’s something you can get through the game without, but you still do it for the cool stuff and glory of it.
The most obvious route for players to make a real dent in the world is through player interaction. WoW’s faction idea is a start, but it is riddled with flaws. The Sims Online tried hard to foster interplayer drama through ratings and elections, but it didn’t really work out. Perhaps the best examples were in old school MUDs, where player creation and a relative lack of greifers allowed a lot of fun. In MUDs, if you got high level enough you could not only affect the world, you could program the world, and create whatever quests or events or whatever that you wanted. MMPORGs will always be hobbled by having to play to the lowest common denomenator.
I think a good place for discussion would be some work on television vs. film. Television is characterized as a “hot” media, where things move faster and interaction with people and current events is common. Television is also a serial format, where you enjoy something that does not necceasrily have an ongoing plot and has no concrete end. You need to find things in an MMPORPG to keep people “tuning in” week after week. It’s a mistake to think that the only way to tell stories is through a single large and changing narrative. I think the future of stories in game is emergent behaivor- the things that players somehow create themselves. A Tale in the Desert plays a lot with this. I found it a bit too abstract for my taste, but it’s attempts to involve players in the world were not an abysmal failure like the Sims Online.
That actually might still be fairly fun (though a bit like the scene in Noises Off where three consecutive burglars, all the same character, break into the same house by smashing the same window and using the same opening line), but that’s also a pretty good illustration of the challenge of plausible storytelling with tons of people.