First-person only is a terrible decision and doesn't make any sense in a game like this. Oh well. Another failed "hardcore" MMO is on the horizon.
This game will fail, but not because of first person. I believe that is a great idea. I can't tell you how many times I've peeked around corners, or "orbitted" around in 3rd person to get a good view of the battlefield in other games.
This game will fail because:
Mainly, the Unreal Engine. MMORPG in a 1st person shooter engine is never smart, look at Vanguard and all the technical problems they had, and this company is making the same mistakes?
1) Because of Unreal Engine, it doesn't support 5.1 or 7.1 audio. You have to turn your sound to stereo in the contorl panel to even get any sound at all. So those with USB headsets that have 7.1 (Logitech G35) won't get any sound at all, because they don't support anything other than 7.1. Who uses stereo these days?
2) UI is hideous, again, they are using Unreal Engine which I'm not sure what support they have for making MMORPG type interfaces. I'm guessing not much.
3) Server performance is not suited to handle all the players and moving object. There is a 30 second lag time in towns for actions you do, and I only see maybe 50 players at most in the area. Unreal Engine showing its limitations, or programming bugs? Who will know.
I've been trying to play the last 2 days and maybe have about 5 hours into the game. I actually sort of liked it, however, the 3 issues above make it unplayable for me.
4) Unrelated to Unreal, it just isn't ready, they need another year in development before release. This is close to an early beta or late alpha build. Releasing anytime soon would be a disaster.
The things I liked about the game:
1) First person view. You have to see someone in order to know they are coming, or hear their footsteps (provided I can get my sound to work)
2) No compass, no radar, no map, no arrows to tell you where to go... no hand holding.
3) No quest grinding/journal. I guess some MMORPG creator decided not to make every towns person inept in finding 10 bunnies to make rabbit soup. Thank god...
4) Death system I like, only because I had brainstormed the same idea I had for an MMORPG in the past. When you die, you go into the ghost mode, with no release to bring you to a bind spot. In fact, there are no binds at all. Priests can see ghosts and revive. Which means if you don't have a priest around you, you have to float your way back to a priest in a temple somewhere to get a rez, or stumble across one on the field that is willing to rez. (Not that they have rez implemented, but I believe that is the idea)
5) Sandbox gameplay. You create your character how you like, do what you want. No quest hubs, no certain zones to go into when you are this lvl or that lvl.
6) No lvls, entirely skill based. So no "grinding" to get to lvl 50. And in this game you don't have to grind to get skills, you can buy books and read them, it just makes the skills go up slowly when you are reading or offline.
7) Monster AI. When I wasn't lagging, it was sort of interesting how monsters worked. If they were in a group, one might charge you hit you, run back to their friends, while the others just sat there looking at you waiting for you to come. While they were on their own and you raised your weapon, they would instantly flee... It seemed monster AI worked differently depending on if they were in a pack or had friends around. Also they reacted differently when you snuck up on them from the rear, they'd not see you and not flee as quickily, etc. It's not the typical aggro range, chain aggro type situation you've seen since EQ1 that every other game has. But the servers were lagging very bad so it's hard to tell what was really going on.
Anyways. I'd like a professional company make a "hardcore" MMORPG, it's what appeals to me and alot of others. The game sort of reminded me of a cross between EQ1 and Asheron's Call 1, which in my opinion is a good thing and would be an awesome game. But this game is not up to their quality in any regard, be it server performance, interface, or execution, so it almost seems like a game that should have been released 8 years ago. It seems we may have to take 2 steps back to make 1 step forward.