… where every character got their own story. Where the server would create an individual “path to glory” built around choices you make during character creation. You could factor in race and class (assuming the game had these notions), as well as other data you would provide, such as:
- Is your character good, evil or simply opportunistic?
- Is success for your character defined by money, fame, leadership,…?
- What is your character’s sexual preference?
- …?
Of course, the game would still be built from pre-canned collections of story arcs, but the designers would make sure that they could be mixed and matched in many ways, and the details could be subtly altered, so that it would really not be possible to build a hint site that showed the one true path through the game.
The amazing thing about this game would be that other players, as in real life, would be driven by motivations that didn’t exactly align with yours. Nor would they necessarilly be fighting over the same loot drops. Very cool.
Of course, in practice, I suspect that detecting all the possible ways that the variant quests could interact, and preventing bad interactions (or even deadlocks) would be NP-hard, but I can dream, can’t I?