It's nice looking, but not genre redefining. What needs to happen is way more complex than just multi-toon control.
Lets consider a couple things which are default in all MMOs.
1) A character. Characters don't change, it's your persona it's who you are in the game, but they still never really change. They don't age, they don't get scars, they don't get really different from success or failure. Failure in most MMOs mean you start again from where you left off, but it's not so shaking to a player. Annoying, but not shaking. This is not a plead to perma-death, but I would like to see warriors that get into mean fights at least look like they've been battered up, if not have some one war scars, just as an example.
2) A world. The world, like the character, never changes. Seasons don't really matter, story-lines never change the layout or introduction of a game, and so forth. People argue that having such changes alienates new players to the game, but I would like to see the empirical proof for this, because I played AC1, and in AC1 one town was wiped out and never restored, I came into AC1 just after it occurred one month prior. It didn't hurt my experience to know something big happened and I didn't experiece it. It actually envigorated me to want to play the game to see what happens next (What did happen next was the end of the Aegis, they were wiped out according to story-line.). Until game worlds are actually living, breathing things, what a player does in them will never matter to the player.
3) Equipment. Bob has sword of X, I have staff of Y, and so on. That's great if they're limited or exclusive to your player, where they can be won off you in PVP combat or lost forever if you should fail to protect yourself, but they're not. There's a thousand other toons with the same gear as you. There's nothing to make you stand out either due to rarity or visual diversity of your equipment. Also, the fact you depend more on equipment than your skills (as a player and those earned for your toon) proves that you're just a walking annequin which anyone can just pin whatever equipment to change your abilities rather than you simply having good equipment that compliment your abilities and skills. Either, devs make all equipment the same no matter who's playing, and that they don't magically buff a player's skills or abilities, or make such powerful equipment rare and prestigeous, if you want to make a big change in MMOs, that requires little to no recoding of any loot table procedures.
Just those three points there if changed or improved, then you might consider your game genre 'shifting' or altering if it's significant in that it expands the core features already known in MMOs with new features not known in MMOs (mutable environments, unique character evolution/progression, and etc). The problem is, no developer wants to and no capital investor is willing to fund such a project, which is a shame, because we already have the storage capacities and processors to execute some detailed environments. All that's missing is the will, not the knowledge.
Comments
It's nice looking, but not genre redefining. What needs to happen is way more complex than just multi-toon control.
Lets consider a couple things which are default in all MMOs.
1) A character. Characters don't change, it's your persona it's who you are in the game, but they still never really change. They don't age, they don't get scars, they don't get really different from success or failure. Failure in most MMOs mean you start again from where you left off, but it's not so shaking to a player. Annoying, but not shaking. This is not a plead to perma-death, but I would like to see warriors that get into mean fights at least look like they've been battered up, if not have some one war scars, just as an example.
2) A world. The world, like the character, never changes. Seasons don't really matter, story-lines never change the layout or introduction of a game, and so forth. People argue that having such changes alienates new players to the game, but I would like to see the empirical proof for this, because I played AC1, and in AC1 one town was wiped out and never restored, I came into AC1 just after it occurred one month prior. It didn't hurt my experience to know something big happened and I didn't experiece it. It actually envigorated me to want to play the game to see what happens next (What did happen next was the end of the Aegis, they were wiped out according to story-line.). Until game worlds are actually living, breathing things, what a player does in them will never matter to the player.
3) Equipment. Bob has sword of X, I have staff of Y, and so on. That's great if they're limited or exclusive to your player, where they can be won off you in PVP combat or lost forever if you should fail to protect yourself, but they're not. There's a thousand other toons with the same gear as you. There's nothing to make you stand out either due to rarity or visual diversity of your equipment. Also, the fact you depend more on equipment than your skills (as a player and those earned for your toon) proves that you're just a walking annequin which anyone can just pin whatever equipment to change your abilities rather than you simply having good equipment that compliment your abilities and skills. Either, devs make all equipment the same no matter who's playing, and that they don't magically buff a player's skills or abilities, or make such powerful equipment rare and prestigeous, if you want to make a big change in MMOs, that requires little to no recoding of any loot table procedures.
Just those three points there if changed or improved, then you might consider your game genre 'shifting' or altering if it's significant in that it expands the core features already known in MMOs with new features not known in MMOs (mutable environments, unique character evolution/progression, and etc). The problem is, no developer wants to and no capital investor is willing to fund such a project, which is a shame, because we already have the storage capacities and processors to execute some detailed environments. All that's missing is the will, not the knowledge.
-- Brede