"Rare wants this to be a game, first and foremost, about player skill, particularly skill at working together."
Yeah, not for me. I did end-game raiding in WoW for a long time and it was more like a second job than a game. I'm not interested in crewing someone else's ship. Also, "smaller ships banding together to take down bigger ships" sounds interesting in theory but will probably rarely happen in live play. Someone powerful comes through, the weak will scatter. Death penalties scare people off and doing 'tasks' to return to the land of the living probably isn't much fun after you've died a bunch of times.
If I sound cynical, it's because my friend only played MMOs. He'd jump from one to the next and sometimes he'd get me to join him. When a new MMO was announced, they'd have all these plans and features, most of which ending up being no where near as fun as they sounded--or, rather, people always, always found the min-max and nothing stayed balanced.
More importantly, how are they going to keep this interesting? Procedurally generated quests will eventually turn old, not unless there are an absolute TON of them, to where you aren't going, "oh, not this quest again."
Fighting will only be good if you're powerful, which makes me think that early-starters will have a huge advantage over those who trickle in late.
They've got a lot to prove with this.
