No. Some of us have been looking at them and laughing since day one. I would say the gimmick has, to some extent, already been exposed to most: after all, you can only keep claiming to have a brilliant new innovative technology that will revolutionize gaming for so many years before people realize you haven't actually made any innovative new games and nothing has been revolutionized. And all the AAA games are still using the "old" technology. And waggling a control may amuse your grandma for a time, but once the shiny factor has worn off, you're back to wanting actual gameplay. And that dodgy, inaccurate controls hinder rather than help gameplay.
Motion sensing is only going to work when there's feedback---not just vibration, but full motion resistance. We're a long way from having that technology. Additionally, it doesn't really make sense either when you're watching TV and you have a tiny FOV, rather than complete immersion.
Developers have had years to show otherwise. Maybe someone will come up with a magically awesome use of motion sensing, but until it stops getting in the way and actually lives up to the claims of "intuitive" and "revolutionary," it's nothing but a gimmick for marketing. Natal adds nothing.
Anyone who responds to a criticism of any country with a rant about how bad the United States is has immediately lost the argument
One sentence later:
The American Empire is broadly speaking evil. Everything thinking person agrees with this.
Assuming you are equating "the United States" with this "American Empire" then you have dismissed your own argument; if not, then you merely have a straw man, which is irrelevant. While the following statement is simply an ad hominem attack on anyone who disagrees with you, I thought I'd include it for the irony. Perhaps you should think this through more.
(And on the original topic, I hardly defend China's position on human rights and freedom and censorship issues. But then I'm an "evil" American of the US variety, and many of us tend to take issue with these sorts of things.)
CO is a console game, it feels shallow, it feels simplistic, roles are extremely poorly designed while seeming flexible and the action never stops.
Eh. The problem with this comparison is that the primary console MMO is FFXI... probably deeper and more complicated in many respects than many (other) PC MMOs I've played, especially the 800lb gorilla, WoW. CO on the other hand feels like WoW lite... like someone played a few level 1 WoW missions, then made their entire game based on that without any real variation.
Now, that may be your thing, but CO was complete and utter crap to me and my friends, because it felt like it was designed for the 8-12 yr old console crowd.
In the (admittedly short.. only got around level 30) time I played CoH, the biggest thing that impressed me was the writing. Not that it was super great literature or anything, but I was coming back each day to do quests not to get experience or items, but to see what happened next. That's a good sign. I never got very much into the AE stuff, but the concept was great. Some people complained about balanced, but really... so what? Personally I play games to have fun, not balance formulas.
I compare this to the newer Champions Online. Great hopes... costume customization was a bit better, more powers, etc. But boy does Champions fail hard on everything else. Lots of flavor text is self-referential tongue-in-cheek commentary felt like the programmers put stuff in as a placeholder and they never bothered to hire writers to fix it. The stories are super generic and feel committee-written, the settings are just about as generic as you can come up with, and... there's just nothing to come back for. WoW has better writing and content. CO just doesn't take itself seriously, and the only real reason to play is to get exp to get to the next level, and as soon as you have the powers you want, suddenly there's no reason to keep playing. Making hero concepts is the only interesting thing.
This brings us back around to CoH's AE. The ability to make your own content plays especially well with super heroes---especially player-made concepts---because you can go beyond just a costume and description, and create and play your own entire story. And that is just awesome.
Because the most exciting thing possible for fans would be Jon's not allowed to talk about it because it was all a big fuck up! Oh, the excitement is pretty much killing me.
I fail to see the word "exciting" in the quote.
How about "don't be disappointed... you never had to play the horrible piece of crap... read between the lines... this thing sucked so much we canned it to save the world from a disaster 1000x worse than daikatana... why am I not allowed to talk about it?... because merely speaking of the horror we produced would probably tear a rift in space and summon cthulhu".
DirectX is made for games. You can use it for other kinds of applications, but if you want to do something that you do in a game, there is likely a function or construct specifically for what you need. It's docs assume you are making a game and when there are multiple ways to do something they often point out the faster way. heck it only works with triangulated mesh data.
Please RTFA. Also, Chris Hecker's article, linked from TFA. Then give us specific, technical reasons that DX/D3D is somehow better for games than OpenGL. Your post is filled with assertions, but with nothing to back them up. It's pretty sad that got moderated "informative".
Open GL is made for EVERYTHING. Sure, you can use it for games. There's nothing wrong with that, but i'm not John Carmack. That shit is hard for me. If i want to make a game, i'll take the platform that holds my hand.
Again, RTFA. Give specific, technical reasons that OpenGL is "harder" than D3D. If you'd bothered to read Carmack's position, his favoring of GL was because GL is easier. Your inability to deal with OpenGL putting your claims in doubt aside, you could at least be specific about the reasons. As per Chris Hecker's article, the only one making these claims are Microsoft evangelists. You wouldn't happen to work for Microsoft would you?
Plus, like others said, direct x is a whole game api. it's not just graphics. it's input, it's networking, it's sound. the whole platform is very cohesive. I'd rather just keep up with one api, one download, etc than have to follow open gl, open al, etc.
This is a bit disingenuous. All of the articles involved are addressing the 3D aspect of DX. The rest of the stuff is either trivial (use SDL or similar which is about the simplest API you could imagine, has a billion support libs, and runs on everything), or you'd be doing it by hand anyway (implement your own networking stack for performance, a la EVE). Your point is therefore irrelevant.
anyway modern game development means licensing an engine. engine developers worry about supporting open gl or direct x.
You seem to be a lazy-enough or low-end-enough developer that this article does not apply to you. However, it does matter to developers who make engines (either primarily or otherwise). Perhaps you should move along; these are not the articles you are looking for.
Being a long-time gamer and programmer, I did still got interested about Wii and Natal. It was great fun to play just moving naturally. But even more so casual people saw it as more fun. Dancing, shaking, moving, whatever they do. It may not seem much, but it is for them. And it's a huge market.
I call BS. First: "just moving naturally". I have yet to see any of these games where movements are anything resembling natural. Or in any way "more fun" because of the aforementioned spastic flailing. (While "fun" is, granted, somewhat subjective, there is still consensus at some point, usually in the form of AAA titles everyone can't stop playing and will be remembered among the classics for decades to come.) This leads us to: "I did still got interested [sic] about Wii and Natal," and "casual people saw it as more fun" (emphasis mine). This is what these things come down to: a marketing tool to make people interested in something. The promise of something new. Unfortunately, that promise has not been delivered.
Natal and the Milo demo especially are complete BS, but that's not really the indicative bit. I mean, you have a camera that is gathering position information, even if you just assume it's capturing what's directly in front of a set that should be enough to go off of for "character on screen looks at player". Natal is giving you information about player position and distance after all, a little calibration isn't much to assume.
No, the real BS is the content. There is absolutely nothing in the demo to indicate that it's not entirely scripted. No suggestions from the audience, random actions, etc. The entire interaction looks staged and carefully played-out. The implication that Natal brings some magical AI to the 360 and lets you interact with it is blatant... but this has nothing to do with what Natal is. And there is no magical AI, or we'd already be using it. Motion sensing doesn't add anything to this. What Natal does is cute, but as Yahtzee points out (skip to 1:33), motion sensing for the most part has sucked and will continue to suck as long as there is no real feedback.
Are you retarded? You really think nothing would be different with non volatile RAM? EVERYTHING would be so much faster.
First off most non-volatile RAM isn't nearly as fast as DRAM. So let's assume you mean "what if everything were in DRAM, and that was non-volatile, it would be so much faster". Well, again not really. Faster, but there are far more bottlenecks than just disk I/O. You can go buy ramdisks now, or you could make them in your current RAM, copy the OS there, and run off that after you boot. Go try it. Firefox isn't going to render quicker, your mail isn't going to load any faster, and youtube isn't going to lag any less. If you work with large photos, most software is already going to exhaust your RAM, so (given you have sufficient quantities) you're already not losing anything.
In short, because of modern hard disk and OS caching, the ridiculous quantities of RAM these days, and a current reliance on the network for most tasks, a pure ramdisk system isn't likely to be that much better for most people. If you put a large database or maybe compile there, you would see improvement. But that's not common for most people.
Why something as deep as the Mediterranean was dry instead of a lake in the first place.
Well, before that, it was a lake. Where do you think the aliens stole all the water from?! It was freshwater then, of course. Sadly the Sahara Forest never recovered.
As far as I know, the major difference with the LHC is scale.
I'm not a physicist or whatever sort of engineer one is to build a giant collider. However, this strikes me the same as saying "company X has 10 servers and they manage to keep them working fine, why does Google have problems? the only major difference is scale!" Well, yes, yes it is.
If you have a glaring vulnerability that lets people defraud your customers out of arbitrary amounts of money, the only sane thing to do is immediately disable the feature. Not wait for a solution. Not cover up the issue. You make coverage of the issue irrelevant. If one person figured it out and wrote about it, 100 other people also figured it out and are using it for personal gain.
...who the hell distributes Linux binaries anyway? On OSX, most software you get is a binary. As you said, 2 platforms (one dying), universal binaries sortof make sense just so vendors can put things in a single box, use a single icon, and not care about writing detection code for something so fundamental.
On Linux the main binaries you get are either from your distribution (which already knows all about your architecture, so why bother), or maybe the occasional third party (nvidia? who already maintains all this separately). Maintaining N binaries is, as you said, difficult if not impossible for Linux. As is distributing binaries anyway.
As a poster above said: solution in search of a problem.
Some people may still have misconceptions about Gentoo. The negative stereotype has long passed, though. Gentoo is, really, a meta-distribution: a dist that lets you make your distribution based on what you want and need.
You could do what some folks have suggested and get a really ancient dist, and that may be fine.. but it will have all the limitations it had back in the day, and nothing new without a lot of manual compilation and work. (No newer shells, html renderers, etc.) Gentoo just automates the process, and since you're building for x86, you could easily build on another box as the parent suggests. (It's actually not trivial to truly cross-compile a dist between architectures last I checked, but I haven't really done a lot of research. However it is trivial to build for a different architecture which the build machine supports.)
This way you get all the stuff you want anyway, and all the work to do so is streamlined. Building a boot disk should be easy (as long as you can find a disk drive for your current box!). Check the wiki for details on how to do a lot of specialized things.
Who are these groups of people that nintendo is still making games for?
Nintendo is still making games? I haven't heard of anything since.. uh, SSBB, which I'm not interested in. The last game I cared to play was Super Mario Galaxy.. and that was out at the end of 2007! It's been nearly two years. I lent my Wii console out to a friend a few months after Mario, and haven't had any reason to get it back since.
They cited "legal and technical issues" for not supporting the transfer of UMD games onto the PSP Go; undoubtedly they couldn't find a way to keep pirated games from being copied.
This makes no sense.Think about it. Seriously, two-second consideration here. First, this is a platform based solely on downloadable games. If they have problems with piracy, especially rampant piracy cutting into game sales, it makes no sense to develop this platform. So either they have means to prevent it, or it doesn't matter because it applies to everything else on the platform. Second, since it either exists or doesn't matter, it can't be that particularly difficult to have someone insert a UMD into their old PSP, verify a signature, then provide a downloadable version with whatever anti-piracy measures are in place.
Really this almost certainly comes down to licensing and legal issues, who's allowed to distribute and how. Tracking down and getting agreements from every single publisher for all titles would definitely be a bit of a legal and technical issue.
Nah it just sounds like the advice of someone who sucks at what they do: and by sucks, I mean not constantly working to improve. I've seen this: people don't realize they suck and don't realize that others don't, and therefore assume the only way to get ahead is by politics and dirty tricks... even when it's not. Of course, I'm sure sometimes it is, but if so, it's time to find someplace else to work. Managers firing their resources (especially valuable ones) is more detrimental to them than to their former employees, so they need to learn how to do their job, too. There was a decent article the other day on managing geeks that may be a close miss in some cases, but ties into all of this and "why we do what we do."
In any case, no, it's not that bad. It may be that bad some places---I haven't seen it---but there are definitely other places. It sounds more like bad stereotyping for a slow weekend story to generate some hits and sound profound. Maybe the author is serious, or maybe he just couldn't come up with better material.
Every other is dying or near death and none of made good on their
promise "We are totally different from WoW, so everyone will love us".
Well, don't forget about EVE, which is perhaps the only other
"truly different" MMO. Not only is it not dying, it's
showing continued growth. But it is different, and by
different that means not the same, so it may not
appeal to everyone. But you can't ask for an MMO that's different
then demand it be like WoW. Personally, I just grew tired of
space.
That said there is also Fallen Earth, which is rather different as well.
While it claims to be a FPS MMORPG, that sortof fades into the
background as a sortof gimmick of the battle system, but it's not a
bad thing---at least in principle. For me what truly sets it apart is
simply the depth and breadth of content with the complete lack of
necessary direction. They have big plans, and if they can work the
bugs out of their client, they might actually pull it off.
As the other reply pointed out, Fallen Earth indeed is different. There is so much content already that you're constantly tripping over new quests... and they're interesting and well-placed in the setting. Objectives are multiple and varied, and how you accomplish them is often open-ended. Tons of missions are tiny story arcs that lead into bigger things later. Crafting is a huge deal and pervasive; pretty much everything but a few base crafting components can be crafted... and you'll need to. The world is truly giant, reportedly taking 12 hours to cross... and there are things you will find across all of it. In CO, it's constantly "am I there yet?" with the next level, just so you can repeat the process. In FE, you can be surprised by a level ding because you were too involved in what you were doing.
The true comparison is that, with CO, it's pretty polished, but everyone is left trying to find some reason to actually play, hoping that they will eventually improve the content. With FE, the client has definite issues: framerate, stability, mob sync, etc, but it everyone just wants to play, because it's a compelling environment with so much content.
CO is only "no different than any other MMO" if that "other MMO" is WoW.
There's not even enough content to cover leveling, as you pointed out earlier in the review. Want to make a new character? Forget a different starting area... you're going to be doing all the exact same quests over again just to make your levels. This is not even mentioning the fact the quests are nothing but "go X kill Y collect Z", where the only variation is whether the "kill" or "collect" steps are included. There is no other gameplay. There's nothing else to do. Even the "large" areas are deceptive... maps appear huge, but you quickly find the screen going black and white long before you reach the edges, leaving only about 2/3 of the actual visible area open. Crafting is a joke, PvP is pointless, and the writing is bland. I don't think I'd qualify this as "reasonable" in the content department.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Some of us have been looking at them and laughing since day one. I would say the gimmick has, to some extent, already been exposed to most: after all, you can only keep claiming to have a brilliant new innovative technology that will revolutionize gaming for so many years before people realize you haven't actually made any innovative new games and nothing has been revolutionized. And all the AAA games are still using the "old" technology. And waggling a control may amuse your grandma for a time, but once the shiny factor has worn off, you're back to wanting actual gameplay. And that dodgy, inaccurate controls hinder rather than help gameplay.
Motion sensing is only going to work when there's feedback---not just vibration, but full motion resistance. We're a long way from having that technology. Additionally, it doesn't really make sense either when you're watching TV and you have a tiny FOV, rather than complete immersion.
Developers have had years to show otherwise. Maybe someone will come up with a magically awesome use of motion sensing, but until it stops getting in the way and actually lives up to the claims of "intuitive" and "revolutionary," it's nothing but a gimmick for marketing. Natal adds nothing.
One sentence later:
Assuming you are equating "the United States" with this "American Empire" then you have dismissed your own argument; if not, then you merely have a straw man, which is irrelevant. While the following statement is simply an ad hominem attack on anyone who disagrees with you, I thought I'd include it for the irony. Perhaps you should think this through more.
(And on the original topic, I hardly defend China's position on human rights and freedom and censorship issues. But then I'm an "evil" American of the US variety, and many of us tend to take issue with these sorts of things.)
Eh. The problem with this comparison is that the primary console MMO is FFXI ... probably deeper and more complicated in many respects than many (other) PC MMOs I've played, especially the 800lb gorilla, WoW. CO on the other hand feels like WoW lite ... like someone played a few level 1 WoW missions, then made their entire game based on that without any real variation.
Pretty much.
In the (admittedly short .. only got around level 30) time I played CoH, the biggest thing that impressed me was the writing. Not that it was super great literature or anything, but I was coming back each day to do quests not to get experience or items, but to see what happened next. That's a good sign. I never got very much into the AE stuff, but the concept was great. Some people complained about balanced, but really... so what? Personally I play games to have fun, not balance formulas.
I compare this to the newer Champions Online. Great hopes ... costume customization was a bit better, more powers, etc. But boy does Champions fail hard on everything else. Lots of flavor text is self-referential tongue-in-cheek commentary felt like the programmers put stuff in as a placeholder and they never bothered to hire writers to fix it. The stories are super generic and feel committee-written, the settings are just about as generic as you can come up with, and ... there's just nothing to come back for. WoW has better writing and content. CO just doesn't take itself seriously, and the only real reason to play is to get exp to get to the next level, and as soon as you have the powers you want, suddenly there's no reason to keep playing. Making hero concepts is the only interesting thing.
This brings us back around to CoH's AE. The ability to make your own content plays especially well with super heroes---especially player-made concepts---because you can go beyond just a costume and description, and create and play your own entire story. And that is just awesome.
I fail to see the word "exciting" in the quote.
How about "don't be disappointed ... you never had to play the horrible piece of crap ... read between the lines ... this thing sucked so much we canned it to save the world from a disaster 1000x worse than daikatana ... why am I not allowed to talk about it? ... because merely speaking of the horror we produced would probably tear a rift in space and summon cthulhu".
Please RTFA. Also, Chris Hecker's article, linked from TFA. Then give us specific, technical reasons that DX/D3D is somehow better for games than OpenGL. Your post is filled with assertions, but with nothing to back them up. It's pretty sad that got moderated "informative".
Again, RTFA. Give specific, technical reasons that OpenGL is "harder" than D3D. If you'd bothered to read Carmack's position, his favoring of GL was because GL is easier. Your inability to deal with OpenGL putting your claims in doubt aside, you could at least be specific about the reasons. As per Chris Hecker's article, the only one making these claims are Microsoft evangelists. You wouldn't happen to work for Microsoft would you?
This is a bit disingenuous. All of the articles involved are addressing the 3D aspect of DX. The rest of the stuff is either trivial (use SDL or similar which is about the simplest API you could imagine, has a billion support libs, and runs on everything), or you'd be doing it by hand anyway (implement your own networking stack for performance, a la EVE). Your point is therefore irrelevant.
You seem to be a lazy-enough or low-end-enough developer that this article does not apply to you. However, it does matter to developers who make engines (either primarily or otherwise). Perhaps you should move along; these are not the articles you are looking for.
I call BS. First: "just moving naturally". I have yet to see any of these games where movements are anything resembling natural. Or in any way "more fun" because of the aforementioned spastic flailing. (While "fun" is, granted, somewhat subjective, there is still consensus at some point, usually in the form of AAA titles everyone can't stop playing and will be remembered among the classics for decades to come.) This leads us to: "I did still got interested [sic] about Wii and Natal," and "casual people saw it as more fun" (emphasis mine). This is what these things come down to: a marketing tool to make people interested in something. The promise of something new. Unfortunately, that promise has not been delivered.
Natal and the Milo demo especially are complete BS, but that's not really the indicative bit. I mean, you have a camera that is gathering position information, even if you just assume it's capturing what's directly in front of a set that should be enough to go off of for "character on screen looks at player". Natal is giving you information about player position and distance after all, a little calibration isn't much to assume.
No, the real BS is the content. There is absolutely nothing in the demo to indicate that it's not entirely scripted. No suggestions from the audience, random actions, etc. The entire interaction looks staged and carefully played-out. The implication that Natal brings some magical AI to the 360 and lets you interact with it is blatant ... but this has nothing to do with what Natal is. And there is no magical AI, or we'd already be using it. Motion sensing doesn't add anything to this. What Natal does is cute, but as Yahtzee points out (skip to 1:33), motion sensing for the most part has sucked and will continue to suck as long as there is no real feedback.
First off most non-volatile RAM isn't nearly as fast as DRAM. So let's assume you mean "what if everything were in DRAM, and that was non-volatile, it would be so much faster". Well, again not really. Faster, but there are far more bottlenecks than just disk I/O. You can go buy ramdisks now, or you could make them in your current RAM, copy the OS there, and run off that after you boot. Go try it. Firefox isn't going to render quicker, your mail isn't going to load any faster, and youtube isn't going to lag any less. If you work with large photos, most software is already going to exhaust your RAM, so (given you have sufficient quantities) you're already not losing anything.
In short, because of modern hard disk and OS caching, the ridiculous quantities of RAM these days, and a current reliance on the network for most tasks, a pure ramdisk system isn't likely to be that much better for most people. If you put a large database or maybe compile there, you would see improvement. But that's not common for most people.
Well, before that, it was a lake. Where do you think the aliens stole all the water from?! It was freshwater then, of course. Sadly the Sahara Forest never recovered.
So you judge information based on who told you rather than what they told you?
I'm not a physicist or whatever sort of engineer one is to build a giant collider. However, this strikes me the same as saying "company X has 10 servers and they manage to keep them working fine, why does Google have problems? the only major difference is scale!" Well, yes, yes it is.
Or everybody's fired!
If you have a glaring vulnerability that lets people defraud your customers out of arbitrary amounts of money, the only sane thing to do is immediately disable the feature. Not wait for a solution. Not cover up the issue. You make coverage of the issue irrelevant. If one person figured it out and wrote about it, 100 other people also figured it out and are using it for personal gain.
I have a rock that keeps tigers away to sell you ...
...who the hell distributes Linux binaries anyway? On OSX, most software you get is a binary. As you said, 2 platforms (one dying), universal binaries sortof make sense just so vendors can put things in a single box, use a single icon, and not care about writing detection code for something so fundamental.
On Linux the main binaries you get are either from your distribution (which already knows all about your architecture, so why bother), or maybe the occasional third party (nvidia? who already maintains all this separately). Maintaining N binaries is, as you said, difficult if not impossible for Linux. As is distributing binaries anyway.
As a poster above said: solution in search of a problem.
Some people may still have misconceptions about Gentoo. The negative stereotype has long passed, though. Gentoo is, really, a meta-distribution: a dist that lets you make your distribution based on what you want and need.
You could do what some folks have suggested and get a really ancient dist, and that may be fine .. but it will have all the limitations it had back in the day, and nothing new without a lot of manual compilation and work. (No newer shells, html renderers, etc.) Gentoo just automates the process, and since you're building for x86, you could easily build on another box as the parent suggests. (It's actually not trivial to truly cross-compile a dist between architectures last I checked, but I haven't really done a lot of research. However it is trivial to build for a different architecture which the build machine supports.)
This way you get all the stuff you want anyway, and all the work to do so is streamlined. Building a boot disk should be easy (as long as you can find a disk drive for your current box!). Check the wiki for details on how to do a lot of specialized things.
Nuff said.
Nintendo is still making games? I haven't heard of anything since .. uh, SSBB, which I'm not interested in. The last game I cared to play was Super Mario Galaxy .. and that was out at the end of 2007! It's been nearly two years . I lent my Wii console out to a friend a few months after Mario, and haven't had any reason to get it back since.
This makes no sense. Think about it. Seriously, two-second consideration here. First, this is a platform based solely on downloadable games. If they have problems with piracy, especially rampant piracy cutting into game sales, it makes no sense to develop this platform. So either they have means to prevent it, or it doesn't matter because it applies to everything else on the platform. Second, since it either exists or doesn't matter, it can't be that particularly difficult to have someone insert a UMD into their old PSP, verify a signature, then provide a downloadable version with whatever anti-piracy measures are in place.
Really this almost certainly comes down to licensing and legal issues, who's allowed to distribute and how. Tracking down and getting agreements from every single publisher for all titles would definitely be a bit of a legal and technical issue.
Are you kidding? The story comes 151 million years after the fact! And that wasn't even the release date!
Nah it just sounds like the advice of someone who sucks at what they do: and by sucks, I mean not constantly working to improve. I've seen this: people don't realize they suck and don't realize that others don't, and therefore assume the only way to get ahead is by politics and dirty tricks... even when it's not. Of course, I'm sure sometimes it is, but if so, it's time to find someplace else to work. Managers firing their resources (especially valuable ones) is more detrimental to them than to their former employees, so they need to learn how to do their job, too. There was a decent article the other day on managing geeks that may be a close miss in some cases, but ties into all of this and "why we do what we do."
In any case, no, it's not that bad. It may be that bad some places---I haven't seen it---but there are definitely other places. It sounds more like bad stereotyping for a slow weekend story to generate some hits and sound profound. Maybe the author is serious, or maybe he just couldn't come up with better material.
Well, don't forget about EVE, which is perhaps the only other "truly different" MMO. Not only is it not dying, it's showing continued growth. But it is different, and by different that means not the same, so it may not appeal to everyone. But you can't ask for an MMO that's different then demand it be like WoW. Personally, I just grew tired of space.
That said there is also Fallen Earth, which is rather different as well. While it claims to be a FPS MMORPG, that sortof fades into the background as a sortof gimmick of the battle system, but it's not a bad thing---at least in principle. For me what truly sets it apart is simply the depth and breadth of content with the complete lack of necessary direction. They have big plans, and if they can work the bugs out of their client, they might actually pull it off.
As the other reply pointed out, Fallen Earth indeed is different. There is so much content already that you're constantly tripping over new quests... and they're interesting and well-placed in the setting. Objectives are multiple and varied, and how you accomplish them is often open-ended. Tons of missions are tiny story arcs that lead into bigger things later. Crafting is a huge deal and pervasive; pretty much everything but a few base crafting components can be crafted... and you'll need to. The world is truly giant, reportedly taking 12 hours to cross... and there are things you will find across all of it. In CO, it's constantly "am I there yet?" with the next level, just so you can repeat the process. In FE, you can be surprised by a level ding because you were too involved in what you were doing.
The true comparison is that, with CO, it's pretty polished, but everyone is left trying to find some reason to actually play, hoping that they will eventually improve the content. With FE, the client has definite issues: framerate, stability, mob sync, etc, but it everyone just wants to play, because it's a compelling environment with so much content.
CO is only "no different than any other MMO" if that "other MMO" is WoW.
There's not even enough content to cover leveling, as you pointed out earlier in the review. Want to make a new character? Forget a different starting area... you're going to be doing all the exact same quests over again just to make your levels. This is not even mentioning the fact the quests are nothing but "go X kill Y collect Z", where the only variation is whether the "kill" or "collect" steps are included. There is no other gameplay. There's nothing else to do. Even the "large" areas are deceptive... maps appear huge, but you quickly find the screen going black and white long before you reach the edges, leaving only about 2/3 of the actual visible area open. Crafting is a joke, PvP is pointless, and the writing is bland. I don't think I'd qualify this as "reasonable" in the content department.