Yes, my experience compels me to agree. The best compromise I've found are Diablo-style co-operative stories, where multiple people can go through a very engrossing story as a group of adventurers, and progress to the game's final end. I argued that the great failure of SW: The Old Republic was that it removed the one element that made Knights of the Old Republic such a success: the engrossing single player story.
Massive online environments, by definition, prohibit a single character from being important. The natural solution is the instanced single player game, allowing large party sizes which scale difficulty based on the encounter. A corollary of this is that any true, persistent MMO must be sandbox type, allowing individual players extreme freedom to write the stories. The best example of this is EVE, and a lesser known korean RPG Lineage: The Blood Pledge, which allowed players to control castles of each kingdom, creating incredible game histories due to player competition alone.
It is clear that the single player co-op and the MMO are now distinct genres, catering to different play styles. Attempts to bridge this gap have generally failed from a storytelling perspective, even in great games such as Guild Wars 2 and The Old Republic.
Massive online environments, by definition, prohibit a single character from being important. The natural solution is the instanced single player game, allowing large party sizes which scale difficulty based on the encounter. A corollary of this is that any true, persistent MMO must be sandbox type, allowing individual players extreme freedom to write the stories. The best example of this is EVE, and a lesser known korean RPG Lineage: The Blood Pledge, which allowed players to control castles of each kingdom, creating incredible game histories due to player competition alone.
It is clear that the single player co-op and the MMO are now distinct genres, catering to different play styles. Attempts to bridge this gap have generally failed from a storytelling perspective, even in great games such as Guild Wars 2 and The Old Republic.