Don’t get me wrong, I like this game’s concept. I like World of Tanks as well, but I wouldn’t classify either as an “MMO”. When I see that acronym attached to a game’s description, I immediately think of an open environment where you take on missions, visit different locations with shops, NPC’s and the like. I don’t relate a match-based with 24-32 players in an instance as an MMO. Guild Wars had it right when they admitted up front that GW was not an MMO. If you define an MMO as simply a lot of players on a server playing a game, then pretty much every Internet game would be an MMO: Call of Duty, Battlefield, Online Poker, etc.
I’d like to see a more specific classification for games. I’d call Star Conflict and World of Tanks perhaps “PMBO” (Persistent Match-Based Online) or something of this nature. These games are different enough from WoW and the like to deserve their own genre.
A massively multiplayer online game (also called MMO) is a multiplayer video game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously. By necessity, they are played on the Internet, and feature at least one persistent world. They are, however, not necessarily games played on personal computers. Most of the newer game consoles, including the PSP, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DSi and Wii can access the Internet and may therefore run MMO games. Additionally, mobile devices and smartphones based on such operating systems as Windows Mobile, Google’s Android, and Apple iPhone are seeing an increase in the number of MMO games available.
MMOGs can enable players to cooperate and compete with each other on a large scale, and sometimes to interact meaningfully with people around the world. They include a variety of gameplay types, representing many video game genres.
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what you are thinking is “MMORPG” the “MMO” tag can be applied to any game that has servers capable of hosting a massive amount of people.
GW is not really an mmo because the host of the server is the leader of the instance the only place where a player is not a host is inside the towns.
This is wrong, i almost didn’t install this game because it was tagged as an mmo. It is multiplayer, but it has nothing to do with regular MMOs. Maps are tiny, scope is tiny, grouping is tiny, not even a friend list or community tools, no PvE, no grinding, etc.
I think the closest way to describe this game is “dota in space”. Dota’s servers handle millions of players, and you see nobody calling it an MMO. There is a reason for that, and i’ll let you think about the why.
As for classification there is nothing that fits like a glove really. A better term would be “space shooter” or simply “action”, that’s how its target audience will most easily find it. When this game will hit Steam (really hoping it does so i can play with my steam friends and nag them to install it) it will be put under the free to play category.
