First, let me direct your orbs to the following: http://www.riftgame.com/en/
So, being as I'm a huge fan of MMOs from both the player and developer angles, I tend to throw my hat into the ring for any MMO beta that comes along if only to see what they're up to. Well, along comes "Rift - Planes of Telara" which I diligently check out at E3 a couple years back and write off as "good concept art, no gameplay".
So here it is in beta, scheduled to be released 'soon', and I have another look - and am shocked at how similar its main mechanics are to the old Horizons designs.
First off, Rift centers around, well, rifts. Rifts are extra-planar (death, fire, water, air, etc) doohickies that appear and let bad stuff into the game world. They randomly show up in the game world and begin to corrupt the area around them and spawn lower-level critters that defend them. Over time if left alone they spawn more difficult critters and some of those wander off to open more rifts. Eventually the rifts create a 'foothold' which is a very difficult higher-level fortified area.
If you're feeling a sense of dejavu, this is pretty much the anchor and blight mechanics from Horizons which culminate in something akin to the deadlands areas.
But wait, there's more!
Rift has what they call a 'souls' system wherein a player can choose to level a class to a certain point in order to access traits of that class in another class - so you can have things like plate wearing mages, druids specialized in death magic, and rogues using bows imbued with the powers of the elements.
Dejavu again... We call this 'multi-classing', but I guess that doesn't sound fantasy enough.
The basic premise of the character is that you are 'Ascended'; some great hero slain during the last war (where the Dragons were either banished or imprisoned - it's unclear) and brought back mysteriously to fight in the current war and given great powers over death itself. And last but not least, Rift is what they call a dynamic world - they can change things on the fly without needing the typical patch process.
Oh, and the crafting system is much like our beloved Istaria with gathered and processed base materials used in recipes, but not quite as deep as there is no alteration of the recipes.
The things Rift really missed is a decent selection of races - they have the typical six flavors of human (bleh) - and there is no player housing.
I don't consider this a contender for anyone happy with Istaria as it's still missing many of the things that Istaria offers a player, but I do find it interesting how often they use the word 'innovative' when discussing their core functionality, and we've been playing with it for years.
So, yeah, it's definitely not a WoW clone... But I'll pass.