jon

Look at that, they made earmuffs with speakers.

This is a different story than what most people understood including me. Back then it was Green Monster Games was formed to make an MMORPG because Curt loved Everquest and wanted to make one. They did lots of MMO vet hiring in the early days. Then they changed their name and bought BigHugeGames and then years of silence until the marketing campaign for Reckoning.

Now it appears that they bought BigHuge and their engine, and kept it going in Baltimore to release their in development game, but with an Amalur skin. So with this news, they apparently kept another studio (in Boston?) going using the BigHuge engine to make Copernicus from the beginning? That is awesome.

5 years ago it appeared Copernicus was going to be competing with Vanguard and an aging EQ 2 today for the traditional MMORPG fans. You can see a lot of that old-school gameplay in Reckoning where positioning matters a lot, and all the content isn't designed for specific progression reasons. If Copernicus fails though, I bet the EQ Next team gets real nervous.

After Vanguard's death, any semblance of MMO generations went out the window as everyone threw out WoW clones. With Copernicus back in the mix, is 2012 the real start of the 3rd generation of MMO's?

The US servers are deserted too, but it's not because the game isn't successful. It's because it's such a casual friendly game, that casuals being casual don't log in for hours and hours at a time. And when they do, other than rift grinding, all of the end-game content is instanced and everyone gets teleported to the instance from the cities. Since the game gets you to max level so fast, you will almost never see people in the mid-level zones.

Click to move is much much easier to implement, and makes it easier for the servers to handle poor connections since the client and server know where you are going ahead of time. I think the difficulty implementing a WASD control system where the client and server are constantly predicting the future, correcting the past, and then finally drawing everyone screen multiple times a second (oh wait...you want to go backwards now? throw all that work out!) is why click to move is anything but a niche.

Very nice UI. Wont work on a console though.

Since apparently the goal is to allow crafters to craft useable adventuring gear while leveling, will the system break when ArenaNet decides the game is too hard to progress through for former Farmville players and raises XP rewards? This is what happened to Rift.

This is a very old game mechanic. It could be argued that it is an original MMO game mechanic. The very first MUD's (talking 80's here) would reset the entire world after someone got to a certain score.

Here is the standard game rules for the very first MUD's (AberMUD):

http://elven.madarch.org/infotohtml.php?info=game

Haven't WoW and Rift made entire games out of "Banksitting" while you wait for some instance queue to pop up?

@motorsep

Sure, am a former programmer myself. Just let me download a binary. I don't care about patching, bandwidth is cheap. I'll just download the entire thing.
The game looks fantastic. $5 is nothing. The crap I'd have to go through to get it is not worth it to me.

Requires Steam or something called Desura to play. No thanks. You guys pay me, and then I'll think about installing that crap.

One of the problems underlying the raid to progress issue is that people will naturally in any social setting start to try and gain status and fight over who gets to be alpha. Even if a game removes gear, levels, and every button except one that when clicked shoots fireworks, and proclaims you the one true god-king, people will invent ways to differentiate themselves and raise their status among their peers. This behavior is hard-wired into our brains.
Combine this behavior with people whose sense of self worth is tied to how their peers view them, and people begin to question why they are paying a monthly fee to be told they aren't really the one true god-king like their mother told them.

One solution really is to stop designing mmorpgs for playstyles. As long as the game world i diverse enough, with enough reward paths anybody should be able to discover a niche where they can excel.

The issue isn't raiding vs soloing. It's developers aren't thinking big enough.