Sorry, I'll have to split quote like an idiot, and as I have limited time I may have to split my answers to this over a few days. I may not even be able to read the forums on the coming weekend.
Sure, the old roleplay MUDs would be an example of the higher creativity levels back in the old days because creating worlds is much easier when they're text based. [...] If they were easy to make then surely somebody would have made one by now?
I think you are basing this on a few wrong assumptions. There's a Venn diagram of what games are made, especially in the indie scene. The sets represent these points basically:
- What can I (successfully) make
- What am I interested in myself
- How big is the potential target audience for it
The last point is required if you want to make a living out of it.
Basically, for any type of MMO games the required combined skillset is much higher than any other game. My only claim here is that it is much easier to make one nowadays than it has ever been. Because frankly, engines, tools and servers are littering the landscape. The coherent "Vision" for a game, and the effort required to pull a team together is the biggest hurdle.
Cold, hard fact: There aren't as many players that want to play something EQ like it's 1999 again, as there are players that want to play WoW like it's 2004 again. This reduces the size of groups 2 and 3 in the Venn diagram.
Interestingly, there were enough TBC (and beyond) WoW Arena players, that they even made their own Arena-like games "without all that RPG leveling bullshit". I think one of them is called Arena of Kings on Steam.
Although not Albion which looks more like a mobile ARPG than MMORPRG.
Albion looks that way because it's very much in the vein of Ultima Online, at some points painfully so. Basically, that team did for UO what you want for EQ.
Correct me if I'm wrong but Hero Engine does not provide a full generic high fantasy asset library allowing for games to immediately have humans, elves, orcs, dragons, weapons & armor etc. Also if I were a developer I'd be concerned about becoming so reliant on that company instead of using open source and public domain options. (or a larger company like Unity) The FAQ states clearly that if your subscription lapses they will delete your world after some time and god knows what happens if they fold.
I think I made some wrong assumptions about what you want. From what I can gather is that you want a complete, but easily malleable game, start to finish, that you can set up a server for and hammer down to your liking, and not the bare bones of a game to develop the vision of your game from?
That will probably never happen, because frankly not enough artists would be willing to give up the copyrights to their work for someone else entirely to profit from it. The bigger the complete set of assets and more coherent it is, the more valuable it is. It's one thing to find people willing to work on a game, it's a different thing to expect people to tolerate their work to be used around the world for free.
The only way this could work, is if you lock everything down with appropriate licenses, like GPL3 for the code and CC BY-NC-SA for the assets. And even then it would be hard to find enough artists to create a complete game from start to finish. You'd have to pay them or something.
Also, it sounds a bit like that one guy on this forum whose name I forgot, that wanted to start his own game server and play GM/god, and punish people who "play his game wrong". He also wanted a solo EQ because he couldn't make friends.
I am very apprehensive about these kind of people, who I refer to "wannabe Reddit mod", because it smells like "I want to play god and be on a power trip 24/7" and not "I want to create something with my ideas and to my tastes."
