Yep, it's an MMORPG alright.

So, almost three years later, here is the game that promised to turn the troped-out MMORPG genre on its head. But that isn't really what I'm seeing, here.

I have to admit to being highly intrigued from the character-select screen. The factions hint at a strong premise; the class descriptions are highly differentiated and flavorful; and the paths, which seem to largely revolve around investigative gameplay, are right up my alley. The sci-fi universe, as introduced in this text and in cinematics, feels richly imaginative and engrossing.

But then the game started, and my level of caring about that world just melted away. WildStar's offerings may sound radically different than the traditional, bland MMO experience, but the gameplay is just too samey and familiar. Hints and tooltips pop up all over the screen; combat abilities are accessed with an icon bar and number keys; a minimap displays markers guiding you through available quests. NPCs offer brief flavor text that only thinly veils basic quest objectives: walk to a target location, use a target item, kill some number of insipid enemies. Combat has some interesting quirks - like a dodge move, and directional aiming for ranged attacks - but still boils down to using abilities and waiting for them to cool-down before using them again.

All of the mystery and excitement of the game's plot is completely absent in the actual moment-to-moment gameplay, which feels specifically streamlined in the same way that every other modern MMORPG is -- on the basis that players don't actually care about the story anyway. The gameplay feels similarly oversimplified and vapid, with only the most nominal attempts to hide the fact that you're just moving to targets and clicking on them. And the UI is way too busy, again seeming to assume that the function of an on-screen widget is familiar to the player ... because it does the same thing in every other MMORPG.

Maybe I'm wrong; I did only play the game very briefly (less than an hour). But past the character creation screen, nothing I saw in WildStar supports the idea that it's a fundamentally new take on the MMORPG. Iteratively better than its peers? Maybe. But different? Not as far as I can tell.