What is your concern with the graphics? I don't know that I caught it in your sentence.
No monthly fee for this game. Oh, your third paragraph is the concern in your second? It seems he's doing a couple of things here.
First, he's appealing to a market by treating them as special[0]. This is a good idea as PC gamers tend to invest pretty heavily in their kit and are likely to support games that show off the capabilities of said kit. The games can be both good and pretty, but sometimes even just pretty will be enough.
Second, concentrating on PC allows him to not worry about being burdened by supporting consoles, which means he can push the tech even further. Which goes back to servicing the gamers mentioned in point 1.
[0] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jnwqezP86Ww/Td_WTq9dxoI/AAAAAAAAAi...
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.
I got the distinct impression from hearing him speak that this isn't so much of an MMO as it's a multiplayer game in a massive universe. He said that one of the reasons they're able to put such high fidelity models into the game is that you won't typically see many of them at once. He likened it to Battlefield 3 battles vs everyone in a galaxy converging on one spot.
This also ties into your analog to an MMO. It isn't, I gather.
All that said, I'm not him and I haven't had a hand in making it. I wouldn't mind a hand in making it...
All of the twitch-reaction type MMOs I have tried have tended to be fraught with lag problems, the scaling issues if you have to run a single game world where sub 100ms response times are required and you have 10K+ people connected at any given time must be quite something.
> We also plan to provide a version that allows private servers similar to Freelancer to be maintained and run by the pilot communities. These would support single and multiplayer space combat battles where teams could hone their skills without having to use the public servers.
The main thing that concerns me is the graphics, popular MMOs seem to have always had pretty low system requirements.
Keeping an MMO running and compelling must have some pretty high costs so you either need a lot of players (which high reqs might exclude) or a high monthly fee.