The meta for any video game is always determined by the people who are willing to grind out the math. It doesn't matter what style of gameplay is involved. The fact that they're all fundamentally just formulas in a calculator makes them broadly comparable. The same rules apply for MMOs, MOBAs, action games, side scrollers, fighting games (frame data, anyone?), and every other kind of video game more complicated than Frogger. Optimization differs only in the number of variables.
It's not the fault of the public for the misinterpretation when the game is being hyped on MMORPG.com and on the front page of the main site for EC it states the game is "the 1st MMORPG set in the 41st century". It's being advertised all over the place as an MMORPG FPS game.
Probably because that's what it is. The issue is people don't understanding what the different genres mean and/or the genre definition isn't clear to begin with.
It is a misnomer though and does confuse people, even if you swap the traditional vertical progression for the horizontal progression in this game there is free class swapping and no one really "playing a character" so I don't really see it as an RPG in any form, it's more of an MMO FPS with an RPG skin. No one is going to be playing "Brother Leviathan the Chaos Marine Raptor", they will be "Bob the Choas faction player" so it's not an RPG to my mind. But then I'm old school and view games like WoW as having deviated from MMORPG years ago into the genre of MMO metagaming.
The definition is RPG in and of itself is fairly ambiguous. One can switch characters in almost any another other RPG, that does not negate their status as an RPG.
Oh I agree, the main issue though is that the XP/progression sticks with the character, so if you switch you start that character from the state that you left him in (or from scratch if he's new). In this it's an XP pool for the faction, or so I understand it, that will allow you to class switch, spawn elites and heroes (using requisition etc). The only way I see it as a true RPG is the fact that the game allows you specialize to a high amount in a single class at the cost of the other 2 classes and the ability to switch. Which is how I intend to play it. To be fair, and this is my own opinion, when games started using the MMO tag and abandoned the MMORPG tag, start using ports to get into arena queues and turning everything into instances they ceased being RPGs. This game goes a long way to reinstating the older style of persistent open world play, if it ever goes the route of enroling in a queue to play PvP and then getting teleported into an instance I'll drop it like a hot potato.
Most RPGs allow you to gain back spent attribute and/or skill points, some don't even truly use a class system to begin with. Allowing on to switch character doesn't mean it ceases to be an RPG. Those aspects had little to nothing to do with what makes an RPG in the first place. RPG never meant you had to walk everywhere. Most of the older RPGs didn't need a porting system because they were small and generally very linear. If anything such queuing and what not hurt the social side of things, which is far more the MMO half of MMORPG. Instances serve their own purpose too and, whilst I always far preferred open world play, I understand the idea behind them. Using them, however, doesn't diminish the game's RPG elements.
I think this game will fit as a mmorpg, we will just be playing it as a third person shooter. Its really just a different way to think about it. We are getting the coolest voice comms in any game Ive ever heard of. I dont think the stats are going to vary widely amongst comparable cross faction classes. But there should be a ton of high end rare items that should be very hard to get. if you see an ork with a giant convoluted steam powered shoota then you should know this guy has fought like hell to get that weapon and is probably going to kick your ass just because of skill.
MMO is such a loaded acronym. Imvho bE could buck the word altogether if they wanted and get out from under the shadow of both MMO and RPG because both were subverted a decade ago and we can't change that now. It is painting EC with the same shitty hotbar/autoaim brush as WoW/EQ if you look at external forums. Dark Millennium prejudice isn't helping their either. Best definition I've heard lately was from mmorpg.com when they called it a 41st Millennium Battle Simulator. Massively multiplayer online action battle simulator, MMOABS. Anyway, on topic I am interested to how much of a difference 'crafted' and earned gear mods make to a player's superiority. More options is just strategically better if it lets you play in an optimum configuration for your own skill set, whether the loadout is horizontally balanced for the average player or not. So a player with the skills and commitment to gather MOAR lewts is superior in that way, if some people like that sort of theorycrafting. Unless it's to mess with someone else's PvE Hive experience muhahaha.
Like I said it's all down to opinion, for me once the step have been taken that take you away from playing a character and into metagaming then it ceases to be an RPG, there are plenty of games on the market billed as MMORPG and when I look at them I see just MMOs with a slight nod towards RPG but no real in depth syste,s in place. Baiscally put those aspects of queues and ports into instances destroyed (for me) the whole concept of RPG, it turned city hubs into waiting rooms and the game into a collection of arenas, if that's the way PvP goes then it's not an RPG but a collection of old school death matches and capture the flag matches, may as well go back to Quake rocket arena (which is a good game) instead of being in an MMORPG. In fact limiting the game to a capped number of people in an arena instance with queue systems (in my opinion) reduces the games to multiplayer instead of "Massive Multiplayer" as the "Massive" part was never supposed to be the number of people in a queue but the number of people playing at the same time. [shrug] I play SWTOR for a while, enjoyed the game, completed the story, got to cap, ended running the same instances over and over, queuing for instances and running repetitive dailies. For me that was the whole game literally destroyed. I left shortly afterwards. If anything such queuing and what not hurt the social side of things, which is far more the MMO half of MMORPG. Instances serve their own purpose too and, whilst I always far preferred open world play, I understand the idea behind them. Using them, however, doesn't diminish the game's RPG elements.
