I see a lot of votes here for World of Darkness, but I'm not sure people are thinking clearly about how well this game would translate to an MMO... it wouldn't.
World of Darkness is a Role Playing Game, not a Roll Playing Game. D&D and others are more about getting that perfect 20 and slaying the monster, but WoD is far far more about stabbing that Ventrue bloodsucker in the back for some slight on your honor from 150 years ago. Not a whole lot of game mechanics replicate this very well.
I mean, if you want a game where you can play Vampires and Werewolves, then maybe they should make an Underworld MMO since all they do there is fight. However, if you want to do WoD justice, then it needs to be 75% political maneuvering and 25% fighting which doesn't typically make for captivating games.
D&Ds roots is the miniture game "Chainmail" and you can certainly see it but already the first ed AD&D had rules for building your own castles and were already in the 70s used for intrugue gaming as well.
I agree that classic dungeon hack 'n slash is easier to make into a MMORPG then anything else. A Vampire MMORPG would probably be more like a massive version of Vampire: Bloodlines then anything else, CCP probably tried a little too hard and couldn't get it to work just right. But a massive version of Bloodlines could still be fun.
If you want something truly combat oriented in WoD you can as I said earlier only do a Werewolf or Hunter game.
I dont think teh D&D that was made impressed the D&D crowd...It had some success but I dont think it was with the pen and paper role players.
Biowares Neverwinter nights were popular though and it was not that far away from a real MMO (64 players max). But it felt far closer to the source material then DDO or Neverwinter.
I don't think making a good D&D or Pathfinder MMO should really be hard, Turbines problem was that it was pretty low budget and really a CORPG, not a MMO. Cryptic made their game way too fast, based it on the not so popular 4th edition and they were really far from the actual game.
Use a good world (Forgotten realms, Dragonlance or the Pathfinder world would be fine), stick as close as you get to the original rules and lore and I don't see how you could fail if you have a talented team and an acceptable budget.
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I agree that classic dungeon hack 'n slash is easier to make into a MMORPG then anything else. A Vampire MMORPG would probably be more like a massive version of Vampire: Bloodlines then anything else, CCP probably tried a little too hard and couldn't get it to work just right. But a massive version of Bloodlines could still be fun.
If you want something truly combat oriented in WoD you can as I said earlier only do a Werewolf or Hunter game.
I don't think making a good D&D or Pathfinder MMO should really be hard, Turbines problem was that it was pretty low budget and really a CORPG, not a MMO. Cryptic made their game way too fast, based it on the not so popular 4th edition and they were really far from the actual game.
Use a good world (Forgotten realms, Dragonlance or the Pathfinder world would be fine), stick as close as you get to the original rules and lore and I don't see how you could fail if you have a talented team and an acceptable budget.