In UO you can log in and just be your character, living out his or her daily live in a fantasy milieu. Your character can have a revenue stream, overhead, regular customers, a physical store to keep track of. Your character can be the equivalent of a sustenance farmer except it'd be reagents and Imbuing ingredients and gold that he or she farmed instead of crops; just using what you make and making what you use. You see people going to one bank consistently just because they like that town and are attached to it. They get Loyalty points for that city for the same reason. One can play UO for a couple of hours a week and your character can live a semi-complete fantasy life inside this vaguely medieval/renaissance environment and deliberately never touch the broader story around you.
Or you can become deeply involved and have as much of an impact on the story as (or at least the appearance of such an impact) one of the Epic Heroes you occasionally run into.
If any other game captures that, that unique mix of the mundane and the fantastical both existing within a fantastical environment, they keep it well-hidden. It's not my impression that other games have that, and that impression is based largely on what players say and what other games' manufacturers tell me through advertisement and press releases. In other words if other games have that mix they don't like to talk about it.
Assuming EA doesn't just go nuts one day? (Always a possibility....) Then, as long as UO keeps what I described, UO quite likely has a future.
-Galen's player
