Massively multiplayer online games are the future of gaming. A few years down the line, standalone games will be few and far between. Human beings by nature are unpredictable, and people like that when playing a game. Simply by the in-depth features which we are adding. A dynamic world is the source of playability.
Static worlds become tiresome and boring quickly.
Asheron's Call was the first to create a world that was truly dynamically changeable, however the design behind the game wasn't in-depth enough to fully make use of it. The other lesson is bigger is not always better, it's sometimes only bigger. Management of a team is everything, and focus is the only tool that will carry a product from conception to a box. Horizons is so much more grand than Demise that it's hard to make any comparisons. The Horizons project is a multi-million dollar project featuring leading edge technology, where Demise was a tiny team of seven to nine people that wanted to make a cool game.