The Matrix Online

What fan of the Matrix movie series wouldn't want to live in that world -- Presumably while enjoying the beautiful irony of being a virtual character who portrays a person who had a virtual life in an virtual world, but has opted out and now lives in the real (but still virtual) world, while only visiting the doubly-virtual Matrix world to complete missions?

According to what I've read about the game -- having never actually played this, or any other, MMORPG -- it succeeds at being a relatively fun virtual world to inhabit. At least when Monolith was running live events (before SOE took over), the daily and weekly events and story arcs were impressive and enjoyable (and canonical!) extensions of the Matrix storyline. This level of narrative involvement in that universe surely stands out and the feeling you get when the "actual/unique" Morpheus dies (or whatever) differs greatly from killing some epic mob in an instance that you know will simply respawn for the next guy.

Surely, this use of rich background material stands out. If the joy of playing an MMORPG centers around its immersive qualities (and I suppose this is an arguable stance), then the richer and more involved it is, the better. Of course, having paid (thus quality-controlled, and accountable) players is surely expensive, and I take it SOE has dumbed down the number of live events etc somewhat now.

The game also seems to suffer from strange combat controls (and indeed, imagining just how multi-player bullet time might work made this a concern from minute one) and lackluster PvE (ie the missions are repetitive). I also assume that it's hard to compete for players in the WoW eat dog world of MMORPGS.