MMO's and dynamic story-telling probably won't happen anytime soon.
You can take the first incarnation of Ultima Online, during the beta and the VERY early starting period as an example. The economy and ecology were designed to react dynamically to outside influences. If you killed, skinned, and butchered deer, the price of leather and venison would drop the more you sold. Items in high demand like tools and weapons would get priced higher. More vendors of the same type meant competitive pricing schemes. Etc. etc.
What happened? Well, the game's resources ran out in no time flat. During beta, it was a race to buy tools (sewing kit, scissors, smithing hammer) then a race to find as many cows/deers/etc as possible to get skins. After about 30 minutes there were no living animals over the whole continent, all the shops were sold out of all tools and items, and players were murdering each other for sewing kits. Seriously, this really happened. It wasn't long afterward that the UO design team chucked the economy into the bin as a "nice idea on paper but unimplementable at this time".
Also, as a software tester, the idea of TESTING a dynamic story-telling crafting engine is scary. Testing software is all about identifying your inputs and your potential outcomes from those inputs. Trees and linear rails may be dull, but at least you know what you're going to get. In a dynamic system, things are so open-ended that you can end up with code and data objects interacting with each other in completely unpredictable ways that could cause the whole system to fail. Without a SOLID design framework that is very robust, it would never work right, and you'd likely end up with combination of events/objects that would be a total surprise.
MMO's and dynamic story-telling probably won't happen anytime soon.
You can take the first incarnation of Ultima Online, during the beta and the VERY early starting period as an example. The economy and ecology were designed to react dynamically to outside influences. If you killed, skinned, and butchered deer, the price of leather and venison would drop the more you sold. Items in high demand like tools and weapons would get priced higher. More vendors of the same type meant competitive pricing schemes. Etc. etc.
What happened? Well, the game's resources ran out in no time flat. During beta, it was a race to buy tools (sewing kit, scissors, smithing hammer) then a race to find as many cows/deers/etc as possible to get skins. After about 30 minutes there were no living animals over the whole continent, all the shops were sold out of all tools and items, and players were murdering each other for sewing kits. Seriously, this really happened. It wasn't long afterward that the UO design team chucked the economy into the bin as a "nice idea on paper but unimplementable at this time".
Also, as a software tester, the idea of TESTING a dynamic story-telling crafting engine is scary. Testing software is all about identifying your inputs and your potential outcomes from those inputs. Trees and linear rails may be dull, but at least you know what you're going to get. In a dynamic system, things are so open-ended that you can end up with code and data objects interacting with each other in completely unpredictable ways that could cause the whole system to fail. Without a SOLID design framework that is very robust, it would never work right, and you'd likely end up with combination of events/objects that would be a total surprise.