The Think Tank: What past or future MMO do you wish you could play right now?

If you listen to our podcast at all, you probably know that Bree and Jef miss Star Wars Galaxies. If you've read anything by me in the past five years, you probably know that I miss Tabula Rasa. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and many of us spend a lot of time reminiscing about the good old games. But there's also the other side of that coin. The yet-to-be-launched games we're looking forward to seem as if they could be the greatest thing ever.

So I asked the Massively team members to tell us what currently unplayable games they want to play the most. Be it closed down or upcoming, there's bound to be something. Read along after the jump for our thoughts!

I want to play Glitch. I wish I'd played it more while it was active; it never once occurred to me before the shutdown announcement that it might be in danger of disappearing. And even though I never picked it up, I wish I could try Star Wars Galaxies. I know so many people who loved it!

If we are allowing for any detail in these fantasies, I'm going to go with SEED, a strange little MMO that never quite got past the "ugh, so many bugs!" stage of development and release. Basically, it was set on a massive seed ship and featured no combat. Players waged political wars and used crafting and tools to repair parts of the ship. I can imagine it being re-released inside the browser using an engine like Unity. So as long as it can come back as a fully functional and funded game (hello, Kickstarter?), I'd like to play SEED again. I enjoyed most of the bug-filled time I played it!

I wish I could be playing Star Wars Galaxies on SOE's original servers right now. (Yes, I know, there's the thing, but it's not the same, and we're not allowed to talk about it anyway, so don't go there.) I miss the real deal, with all of the upgrades and new systems and my homes and guildies and resources and stockpile of stuff that made it such a wonderful world to live in. Every once in a while something will remind me of the game, and I'll sigh and sink into silence remembering what we lost as a genre when SWG was closed. Jef calls it "The SWG Sigh." Runner-up: City of Heroes. I'll be going about my day and get a great idea for a new character name and costume and concept, and it still takes me a few seconds to remember... Oh. Right.

SWG.

Despite the bugs and the baggage, its feature set continues to make the rest of the genre -- save perhaps Ultima Online -- look wholly inadequate.

I think that out of sheer curiosity's sake, I would like to see EverQuest Next -- to see if it's worth waiting for, to see if it lives up to SOE's hype, and to see what the devs do in terms of dynamic content, sandbox features, and multi-classing. Either this will be the next huge thing that will rock our worlds or it will be a mixed bag of missed opportunities, and I'd like to know which it'll be.

I, like many others on the team, would like to be able to take another trip into Star Wars Galaxies. Though I dabbled in the game back when it was still alive, I never really got into it back then. After all the stories I've heard from die-hard former players (coughBreecough) and all the retrospectives I've read about the game, I immensely regret that. Tabula Rasa is probably a close second, however. I remember picking that one up on launch day and playing it nonstop for a few weeks before tossing it by the wayside, for whatever reason. I wouldn't mind having another go-round with it as well.

I am going to go with the least surprising option I can, because it's absolutely true: I want to be back in City of Heroes. My heart aches thinking about my (literal and figurative) guinea pig girl who lived in the sewers of Praetoria. She was the most entertaining, generally beloved character I have ever roleplayed in anything ever. I sometimes still forget that it's all gone. Failing that, I'll look to the future and say City of Titans. I didn't say it was a radically different future. I even plan to bring back the guinea pig girl, in some form.

Tabula Rasa! It's a game I really liked, had a lot of fun with, and I felt that it just didn't get the marketing love to make it work. I hated City of Heroes, and I never really had the nostalgia for SWG that others did. I think Glitch was pretty neat, so that's definitely my second pick. Of all MMOs that have closed, Glitch is definitely my greatest sadness because even though I didn't really want to play it as much, it was an amazing concept. I'm really sad to see a game like that go away.

I've been fortunate to get my grubby little paws on both WildStar and The Elder Scrolls Online, so if I could play any future or past MMO, I'd probably go with EverQuest Next. Not Landmark, mind you, but EverQuest Next proper. The reveal trailers looked amazing and I reminisce fondly upon my original EverQuest days. Actually, I remember long trains of orcs in Crushbone, losing levels on death, and corpse runs to reclaim your gear. So maybe they aren't fond memories, but I remember them, and at this age, that's a feat in itself!

The obvious choice for me would be to say that I'd love to run around in Tabula Rasa again, but I think its time has passed. Yes, I said it! I would much rather look forward to the new games we have in store and see how they can potentially improve the genre even further. So in that respect, I'd like to get my hands on the Pantheons and the Shroud of the Avatars of the world.

I have to say I would have liked to have tried SWG. I wasn't playing MMOs when it was around, but the way everyone raves about the game's crafting, I have to wonder about what I missed. Or maybe I should be glad I don't know what I missed.

What do you get when you throw the Massively writers' opinions together in one big pot to stew? You get The Think Tank, a column dedicated to ruminating on the MMO genre. We range from hardcore PvPers to sandbox lovers to the carest of the carebears, so expect some disagreement! Join Senior Editor Shawn Schuster and the team for a new edition right here every other Thursday.