His Excellency Aethien wrote:
idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
Yeah, I remember just getting it PLAYABLE meant you had a ridiculously solid gaming rig, lol.
And it looks passable now, not particularly realistic or impressive so just imagine what an MMO of the same age that's trying to be realistic would end up looking like.
A lot of Crysis's awesome graphics came not from individual things being beautiful, but how well they made the world look as a whole. A lot of texture effects, a lot of little details on things like trees, etc. It was a lot of rigs to handle at the time (I remember a Game Informer joke about NASA finally approaching max graphics settings on Crysis in 2009). It also wasn't optimized very well, so things ran pretty badly even when an "equal level" game would run much smoother.
someproteinguy wrote:
His Excellency Aethien wrote:
idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
Yeah, I remember just getting it PLAYABLE meant you had a ridiculously solid gaming rig, lol.
And it looks passable now, not particularly realistic or impressive so just imagine what an MMO of the same age that's trying to be realistic would end up looking like.
I think the debate about whether or not graphics will jump to the same degree over the next 6-7 years would be an interesting one.
But totally agree with you. Making a game with a long-term subscription model, and then having its major selling point be good graphics is an incredibly stupid idea.
WoW made a
lot of very good decisions in development, such as a less realistic style that lasted them 10+ years before having to redo the Vanilla models. It still surprises me now and again just how well thought out the game was for the long run, even from the very beginning. It was made to last, which is something I don't see in a lot of the newer MMOs.
You guys are right, though, as graphics become closer and closer to real life, or "perfect," I believe that companies are going to return to more stylized depictions in order to stand out of the crowd. Nintendo has already been doing this for a long time now, choosing to focus on economy and style over system power, and it's worked out well for them mostly.