Hate to be the one to say it, but restaurants only go to three star. Hotels go up to five, but restaurants go up to three. And earning even one is a prestigious award.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelin_Guide#Stars

There are several MMOs on consoles, and there have been since a console generation back. Everquest OA, FF XI, Phantasy Star Online, and FF XIV (to ps3 I think?) at some point. Those are the ones I can think of anyhow.


MMO?

Dust isn't much of an MMO or an RPG though. That's not meant to be an insult necessarily, I'm just thinking that outside of the chat and corp system - it's basically a game with randomized team deathmatch and poor matchmaking. There's a gear/class element, but the classes/gear remain very simple:

Race/class?

e.g. : There are four races, and 4 "classes", but only 11 of those possible combos are available right now - and only 4 of them have much definition role-wise.

Gear?

e.g. : Compared to what one might consider other MMOs (or even regular console RPGs) the weapon choice tends to be very restricted within type. Most weapons inside a given type have basically three weapons (std gun, adv gun, pro gun). Sometimes there's a variant, in which case you might add "different adv gun and different pro gun" to the mix... anything else is probably an Aurum variant of one of those.

Try to imagine if you played an RPG as a sword expert, and by game's end your choices were: Broadsword (you could use this as the start), Broadsword +1, and Broadsword +2. This is pretty accurate to Dust for specializing in a given weapon, most don't have "lots" of types like ARs do. The weapons themselves look mostly identical to prior weapons and act identically in every way but slight damage increases.

Story?

What can be called a story isn't accessible in Dust... at all. Aside from the intro movie, in what way, shape, or form does any player have any involvement in the universe (personally)? Some MMOs aren't great at this either mind you, but the extent of player engagement in the world is instant battles. The instant battles have no apparent attachment to anything. It's like if WoW or Everquest had launched only with a PvP arena, which you can level at.

The names of corporations, the roles of governments, the way players might interact or influence any of it is.... completely missing. A player has no stake in anything, and the impetus to get stronger for a new player has to come from wanting higher skills for more team deathmatches. Team deathmatches where the matchmaking is sketchy, and you can't necessarily choose your team.

So, the game is completely blank here. Any story would have to be gleaned from reading websites. The universe doesn't exist outside some art design for Dust players. There are no "quests", there are no "stories", there is no "content" - there are only random team PvP matches, and starting tomorrow - what are basically arranged pvp matches between player "clans/guilds". All of it exist outside the universe - especially for a random ps3 user.

Controls?

This is a very legitimate gripe. Just about ALL of even the crappiest games ever made on PC still come with a menu where you can customize the key layout, and it's really common in console games that have competitive elements as well. They recently added "alternate" layouts for controllers, but they still aren't willing to just hand the player a list of functions and let them attach the button/key they want.

This is dead stupid. It's not a complicated feature. It's not something that requires balance. It's something managed in just about every game ever released. Dust is released. Controls you don't like shouldn't be something you just cope with. How you interface with the game itself is about as basic and fundamental to the game as things get. It's easily the first shooter I've seen with keyboard support that said basically, "use our mappings or gtfo". I still hate the controller options too, and it seems stupid that a list of functions we could assign buttons to wasn't part of the initial release.

So, yeah. If I reviewed MMOs, I'd say this game sucks too. It's like being an RPG player handed a shooter with only a head to head player mode, no single-player, etc. What else would you make of it?

One can't force people to see a (realistic) vision of what a continuously developed game will be like to someone who is used to release->next game kind of game development.