I don’t really think a level-up approach would work, but refining a bit of your characters skills and unlocking new gear is still possible. The main thing that will improve as you play is YOUR actual skill at the game, just like in most FPS’.

I’m not saying an MMOFPS based on CoD would be easy. Obviously it isn’t since we’ve yet to see a successful MMOFPS on the market.

Consider – what is a BF2142 Titan assault but a climactic end-of-level boss battle? No NPCs, no PvE, just clever scenarios for the players to interact within.

Alien invasions, machine AI, nuclear experiments gone wrong… Those concepts aren’t necessarily as fantastical as dragons, ghoulies, and golems.

The mechanics would be tougher to work out. I don’t think you could really follow the traditional MMORPG progression but you could mimic aspects of it, like in Oblivion.

The CoD franchise though worries me even more. The CEO is talking about the game’s natural evolution. Talking about evolving a series in to something else without ever mentioning parallel development – ugh.

I doubt that MMOFPSs will conform to the existing MUD/MMORPG conventions. The opening generations of such games are much more likely to simply be an extended lobby system, instanced maps, with a regional factional overmap, and short-term cyclic resets. Ie, pretty much the current game BF2/2142 mechanics with some logic about the map queue, and score bonuses for the winning faction.

Moving an FPS to a fully persistent non-instanced world requires the solving of Horrible Scaling Issues and would, as you say, probably change the game experience into something the potential target audience would not be interested in playing.

To illustrate my point, the new Battlefield game looks downright dumb to me. BF2142 was a great step in the evolution of the BF series. Taking the ideas of this new Battlefield Heroes game (Ideas like the persistent struggle) and adding them to the original model would be an incredible experience. But no, they want to try their “business model” wacky way of thinking. Such a waste.

Yep, it was Square Enix. FFXI was successful because its fantasy based (and a great game btw). You could have an alien pop out of the sky to defeat, you can have dragons, demons, monsters, humans, anything. You can do anything because its fantasy. Gear, actions, and the look of everything can be just as varied. I truely believe the “varied” is what makes a good MMO because it appeals to everyone. I just don’t see how CoD can do anything other than work with all aspects of the war genre which isn’t so broad. That’s why I feel its more like PotBS. You have a ship, you have trade, you have PvP. How far can you take it and still stay in the pirate genre?

It’s quite funny how these game studios all seem to be saying, “We have a good game, lets go online and call it an MMO.”

There’s also another way to hybridize the MMO income model to traditional video games. Take for instance, Team Fortress 2 in the Steam network.

All you really need to do is:

1) Make a game and charge people $XX.XX to play it

2) Dedicate a smallish team to produce quarterly update patches introducing new content, bug fixes, etc. just like traditional MMORPGs do and charge people $XX.XX / 4 per update

3) Continue to support your game community and earn additional cash every quarter.

4) If people quit buying your updates re-evaluate your situation… are people not buying the updates because they suck or because they’ve moved on to something better?

So many traditional console or PC games come out as one-shots and the developers fail to offer continued support. One would imagine you could make these quarterly patches a lucrative business model with the right balance of investment vs. return.