They might have pushed an internal/alpha patch to beta, happens every now and then.
And the concept is definitely not new. I remember playing Global Agenda a fairly long time ago and it had a ton of similarities. It had progression and items and shit, but it was like out of game stuff, basically loadouts similar to Battlefield/CoD, just you had talent trees and items giving you skills and then cooldowns for your shit in combat, was a pretty fun game really. And yeah I'm sure people made mods back in the days to have this sort of stuff. There is however a large push for it lately. A lot of those games will fail terribly though, some already did(Nosgoth for example is pretty much dead while it still hasn't been officially released I think, it has good stuff but just not enough marketting and content I think). Hell they might all fail, don't know if there's an actual market for this for long term stuff.