Wing Commander's Chris Roberts returns to gaming with ambitious MMO

I wondered about Linux because it seems to be a common thing with crowdfunded games as it seems to be a fairly popular OS with people who like kickstarter and the like. He also mentioned that he liked the PC as an "open platform" which made me hopeful (can't get much more open than Linux), the last Chris Roberts game I remember playing ran under DOS so it's not like he has a legacy of Windows development.

I didn't realise it was no monthly fee, not sure how the economics of that would work. Running servers to host real-time fast paced space battles is going to require some significant umphf and a very good network.

While you are right that there's a demographic of PC gamers who enjoy building high end systems in my experience a lot of people who play MMOs like WoW tend to run them on low end laptops as well as old desktops. Part of the appeal is that you can get your less gaming inclined friend to start playing with you on whatever POS they have lying around. I'm pretty sure blizzard keeps WoWs graphics basic on purpose.

Perhaps this is a more targeted product for hard core PC gaming fans, however if they want to make the graphics a big selling point they will have to keep updating these as time goes on and video cards become more powerful.

That means they will have to either have very scalable graphical settings, or will rely on their fans upgrading their PCs to keep up with the game. I can imagine it would be pretty annoying to get into playing an MMO and then one day have a patch come out that doubles the triangle count and means you now get 5 fps.

Disclaimer: I haven't seen either of these guys for 15 years. However, I was at Origin in the early 90s, followed by Digital Anvil. Not everything we did turned to gold, to put it mildly, but Chris and Erin didn't rig demos.

If they're doing that now, I'll be astonished. It wasn't in our DNA as a company -- either company -- and that ethic came from the top.

We were well accustomed to competing with the latest rigged demo from any of several companies that are either entirely forgotten now, or remembered with a snarky chuckle. Our business was basically to ship what other people were promising... eventually, anyway. :)

Nope. But he did demo some combat and completely failed to shoot down any enemies, crashed into his own carrier twice, and then got outrun by the enemies. I think a rigged demo would probably have gone a bit differently. :)

The thing is, you would either need to make those high-tier rewards accessible to everyone in which case they lose a lot of their shine. Or you need to design it so that only a very small % of players will be able to achieve them.

There are those who are willing to play an MMO for 16 hours a day, so if you make them rare enough these are the only people who will be able to achieve them.

I remember Star wars galaxies, I didn't play it much myself but I remember "play as a Jedi" being a big selling point and apparently this was in reality only possible if you were literally willing to devote your life to the game.

They changed it some years later so just about everyone could become a Jedi and there was much uproar from what I remember.

The problem that the "Titans in Eve" comment is playing at is a situation in which a few extraordinarily invested players are ruining the game for everybody else, by making use of player options that were basically not balanced against the rest of the game because the devs figured that they would never be attained in non-trivial numbers.

If a game ends up incentivizing a style of play that the vast majority of players find unfun to the detriment of a style of play favoured by the vast majority of players, that's a problem.