Older MMO's, like Everquest or World of Warcraft, were pretty blatant skinner's boxes. You were lucky if a NPC sending you out to collect bat-wings got a littl

Older MMO's, like Everquest or World of Warcraft, were pretty blatant skinner's boxes. You were lucky if a NPC sending you out to collect bat-wings got a little bit chatty. Some more recent MMO's, such as Bioware's The Old Republic or Cryptic's Star Trek Online, are much more story driven. STO, for example, has enough single-player instanced story-driven content to reach the maximum level, at which point you either quit or dive into the skinner's box that passes for an endgame. That being said, single player games still seem to set the bar for story-driven content. It's a simple matter of how resources are spent. A MMO has to be able to suck people in long-term and be interesting for at least some players after they've put hundreds of hours into the game. A single-player game can end after 30-40 hours and not be called "too short" by reviewers. The budget for any given minute of gameplay is therefore much lower for MMO's than for single player games. We're probably going to see a blurring of lines between single player games and MMO's in the near future. Games will have a high production value, story-driven, single player component that's all a lot of people will want to play, but they'll also have an open-ended MMO component. Some games will start players out in single-player and, at the end, dump them into a MMO universe, trained and equipped well past the newbie stage. The upcoming Star Citizen is apparently going to use a model similar to this. This solves the newbie-training problem that MMO's often struggle with while allowing players enamored with a single-player game's universe to continue inhabiting it, albeit by consuming content made with lower production values. So, no, the MMORPG is not dying. It's just having lots of sex with single player RPG's and producing mutant offspring.