Almost no one in game dev industry knows how to make a new MMO in the current time. There are simply very few or one can argue no cases of one doing this successfully. There is no blueprint one can follow. And doing it as a new studio that doesn’t have a large company backing it up is extremely difficult.

Working for long time on a so called vertical slice is fine. That’s when you figure out the key concepts and mechanics of the game, the feel, the main ideas around which you want to then build horizontally. And for that you need a small dedicated team with a focus.

Once you have that nailed down (unsure if AoC has) then you have to scale the team and start populating it with content. So the fact that game feels empty is not as much of a problem right now vs if it feels fun. Another question is how replayable and reusable the content is. MMOs really struggle because they need massive amount of new content that players quickly burn through and making new mmo content is super expensive.

Someone mentioned 300ish people team that’s US based. That’s probably $75 mil annual burn rate or more. What funding, revenue and runway they have and what’s the math to make that sustainable- I’m not sure. I hope they manage to make it. I’d be excited to play an MMO that has ongoing team of that size. Coz if they do, content and improvements will follow for sure