> FAANG huh... Major US based video RPG developers (to be fair there's like one and a half of them) seem to be chronically unable to craft interesting worlds in recent years. They're still doing fine creating gameplay that ticks all the boxes of superficial fun, but I'm not holding my breath that the design by committee approach is going to yield anything actually engaging.

I don't find it impossible that the "new WoW" might pop up from a FAANG-level company. They have the resources, the tech and they can acquire IP that's already made by indie and build on top of that, or hire talent and actually let them do their job. I know it's dreamy, but it's not impossible.

> So here's some MMORPGs roughly in order of current popularity: 1. FFXIV/Lost Ark, 2. OSRS, 3. WoW.

> They're doing fine without fancy cloud tech,

They mostly don't have it, so have to do fine without it. Also WoW: Shadowlands had massive lag for shared zones, fancy cloud tech could probably help a bit

> GPT generated nonsense will make any of these games worse (good side-quests aren't about having lots of text nobody reads),

Transformer models can be used for more than just text generation, and you can use other models to produce a lot of quirky content. I think if sprinkled on correctly, it would really give life to some NPC and locations.

> and players tend to not care about graphics beyond "is it good enough?" (Graphics sell games, they don't retain players).

Well good graphics on decent machines certainly don't shy players away either. Personally I like the WoW engine as it's somewhat timeless, but I would love to see a shiny new one with all the foo and bar.

> Speaking of AI in general... I think AI will be able to write, design and code interesting and fun quests about five years after it writes its first good novel.

I guess it could be used to manage biomes, regional planning, urbanism, random events, some needs for NPCs etc. Imagine the team of writers comes up with a 'harsh winter' event, where apart from the content they produce, it requires the "Weather AI" to create the conditions for that harsh winter. It would be magical to have this kind of creative control over the world and have NPC AI react to it.

Want to add a pirate event? AI can suggest realistic locations, NPC, maybe some storylines for inspiration that can be tweaked. Maybe the villager AIs would start having trouble from the raids so they would try to solve the problem locally by forming a militia and fighting the pirates. Maybe it wouldn't work, but that town's demographics would be forever altered. Famine could come next collapsing the village even though the pirate threat has been dealt with. I don't know if this level of world dynamism can be done without AI and AI agents.

> Looking at the RPG space in general, it would appear that creativity, craftsmanship, and unique opinionated design beats formulaic games with pretty graphics and cool tech every time.

Surely such an awesome technical feat such as the game I'm imagining, with perfect code and CI/CD pipelines, minimal resource consumption and an amazing team behind, it would be trivial to add handcrafted experiences in this massive world.