Can a GTA MMO Work?

The Grand Theft Auto series has been one of the most successful game series of the last decade, but attempts to turn the premise into a MMO game have not yet reached that same level of success.  While the first two GTA games had a cult following, it wasn’t until GTA3 came out and turned the game into a full blown 3D city that the series exploded amongst gamers.

The beauty of the GTA series is that the city is an open world allowing the player to go where ever and do whatever they wanted.  While of course there are some limitation, the transition from a single player game to a MMO was quite obvious and over the last few years we’ve had some attempts at it.  The two biggest being CrimeCraft and All Points Bulletin (APB).

CrimeCraft was the first out of the gates in Sept 2009 and launched with a subscription fee.  Within a few months it was announced the CrimeCraft was moving to the free 2 play model.  Since then CrimeCraft has released its first major expansion, Bleedout, and seems to be doing pretty pretty well, although no where near in terms of success when compared to the GTA series.

Next up was All Points Bulletin which has some major hype behind it, but was quickly lost after the launch.  It only took 3 months for APB to shut down.  Since them it has moved to GamersFirst and is currently in closed beta with a relaunch expected sometime in 2012.

Is it that no one has gotten the formula down yet or that what made GTA so much fun was that it was a single player game?  Having played APB during it’s very short life span, my major issue with the game was that the missions were very repetitive.  While GTA missions was only slightly better, they were heavily scripted with cut scenes and drew you into the story line.  While a stronger story line might have helped APB, I don’t think that it would have magically made it a success.

What do you guys think? Can a GTA MMORPG work?