Not sure there's much there that makes it any different from any other MMO, they still hint at large time commitments being needed which seems counter-productive to me, the biggest complaint I hear from people leaving/not wanting to play MMOs is the time commitment, why not break the mold and make the game accessible to those people also rather than create MMO clone #4363337 and try and compete with it head to head?
The comments about making PvP more accessible sound promising, I have to agree with what they say regarding it being something that's often an afterthought but again I think WoW's attraction to it's playerbase was that PvP is entirely optional, DAoC was great for those of us that loved PvP but the real numbers are in the PvE world and the sheer thought of PvP scares these people to death - it'll be a very tough task for Mythic to convince these people otherwise, the comments in the article do nothing to convince me they've really thought about this properly. Still DAoC's PvP was second to none and the seige Mythic provided in NF, whilst not to everyone's taste was a technological acheivement for sure - there's a lot of technical barriers in implementing a proper seige system and Mythic has a track record of overcoming them. Quite why they can't overcome technical barriers such as bards having emp as a rising stat as well tho I'll never know.
One thing made me chuckle though:
Plans for a functional user interface? I'd bloody hope soSlashdot wrote:Currently we do have plans for a fully functional and modifiable User Interface
No Mac/Linux support planned, so they're certainly cutting of thousands of players there who are pretty much stuck with WoW as their only MMO choice. It's a shame the realisation that maintaining a cross platform port nowadays with intel Macs and mature cross platform APIs is an extremely simple and far from time consuming task if it's something that's taken into account from day 1, and with Vista being unwanted by many, Mac sales growing and Linux desktop popularity ever increasing it's questionable whether a game like an MMO with a 5yr+ lifetime should really ignore these OS'.
To me it sounds a lot like another DAoC in the Warhammer universe, which is no bad thing seeing as DAoC held my attention for a good 4 - 5 years, but although I think it'll be fun for us DAoC fans I think it may struggle to compete with WoW and pull in a wider audience. It's still too early to put money on it though of course, things still have time to change.
