Depends on what they end up with. If it's a really good game (like Kingdom Come), you can expect to see 80+ USD price tags at release. If Rust really kicks off, you'll be kicking yourself later. I don't see it happening for Rust, though.

There are quite a few problems with a survival based MMO, that I as well think will stop it from ever taking off. First is towns/cities/alliances/whathaveyou, They take an immense amount of coordination, protection, team building, and gathering to sustain. In return they seem like the pinnacle of safety... Until one random drifter gets bored and levels it.

Rust is an impressive game, I will admit that. However, being a survival game means that the active predator is always many times stronger than the guys who try to dig in by virtue. Got a fully built city? Cool, he can deal with it in a number of ways:

Blowing it up.
Infiltrating (shortly followed by blowing it up)
Infiltrating (shortly followed by robbing you blind, and blowing it up)
Infiltrating (shortly followed by opening fire creating confusion and mass death, and blowing it up)
Trolling you from outside the gates with a rifle (then blowing it up)
Camping entrances/exits (then blowing it up)

I have been watching a lot of videos of the gameplay and the trend is basically that the guy who is entrenched will typically get annihilated by the guy who is just looking for people to kill/rob. Any game where the defender is at a disadvantage is not likely to go too far.

Really the only thing that stops someone from absolutely trashing you and your base at all times is the low availability of explosives, which from reading and watching the videos those will become easier to come by.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that taking all of someone's possessions and work away from them is as simple as hitting their bed/sleeping bag with pick axe?

If your house isn't good enough to have a door, something's up

Grenades and explosive charges. Don't get me wrong it's an extremely impressive game and if they ever port it to the consoles, or make it enticing enough on PC I will get it, but as it stands I just don't see a total loss survival game working well as a long term MMO.

Typically how you hook someone on an MMO is progression, even in total loss games like EvE you're really never dealing with total loss except in the most extreme cases. However, RUST literally allows someone to take you back to square one in all of 30 seconds.

Which is not a bad feature by itself, however it really only lends itself to being a casual game used for burning free time. Kind of like a "Well I have 4 hours to spare let's see how far I can get with it" type thing. There is not any real way to cement your progression, and that is why I fear that the game will never achieve anything resembling successful long term MMO. The game by its very own design is simply too easy to walk away from.

Then again though, I suppose you would always build a multi-layered storehouse using all metal. With like 5 layers of metal doors it would be unlikely that anyone would ever dump the necessary resources to breach it.

Now you're learning. Grenades and explosive charges are extremely hard to find on the main servers, they only come from air drops and are very rare ones at that. In order to piss someone off enough that they will devote the time to actually obtain and research explosives, you'd have to do something awful.

It takes a TON of resources to destroy any metal structure. And generally, if you don't have much to lose, you won't be targeted. It's a weird balance. It takes a too much effort to destroy anything that is being defended in any manner, with too much risk of losing all of your gear if you mess up. Raids are fun yea, but rare enough.

Play with a group of friends and it becomes much easier to build and to defend.

What does it have in the way of content? Are they basically sticking to a classic survival design? Or, will they be putting more into it content wise?

Granted being primarily a survival game in it's current form it does not lend itself to content, however basicall all they have to do to leap that hurdle is drop rare spawns in the game that are excessively hard to kill (see: requires a coordinated effort), and drop a ton of useful shizzles.

As is, there is only 1 map. The enemies are extremely limited, normal zombie, fast zombie, black zombie.

AI are boars, wolves, bears, deer, rabbits, chickens.

Air drops usually happen once a day if you're lucky enough to see where they drop and not die en route.

Everything else must be made by hand, through a crafting system.

Reminds me of another game where the Attackers are generally stronger than the Defenders once they hit a certain level.

lel ikr

to craft things you require Blueprints, you learn the bps and you can craft them, dieing does not remove them. so no you dont loose everything.