Here’s something I wanted to get into my talk, which fell out for reasons of flow: the expectations that other genres bring to the table.

One reason why it’s easier to make fantasy MMORPGs is that fantasy players really don’t care about teh sh1n3y. We want something that looks pretty, but we don’t obsess over it. Given that MMOs have an enormous number of technical problems to deal with beyond graphics, and given that our graphics have to be dumbed down to deal with — well, let’s just call it the “Ironforge problem” – well, that’s not something that can be ignored.

Motor City Online had it’s problems, but one of the ones that no one talks about is the expectations that the genre brings to the table. Fans of racing games, especially ‘realistic’ ones like the Need for Speed series, are total hardware whores. They expect and demand the shiny in each new game that comes out. FPS fans are much the same way.

MMORPGs have long lives, though. UO is approaching it’s 10th anniversary. It’s had a graphics overhaul – once. It’s looking to do another one. At great expense. Meanwhile, UO looks old. For all the problems UO fans might have, it survived looking aged fairly well. Can racing fans have that kind of tolerance?

This tangent was brought to mind when I was thinking about one of the things that Rob Pardo of Blizzard said in his speech: namely that it is a real challenge to convince any game team to make ’substandard graphics’. Rob Pardo, via Raph’s Liveblogging his words verbatim:

An example of Tradeoffs: system requirements of Wow versus Crysis, for example. Crysis looks awesome. But we would rather have the broader market. So that forced us to the stylized art style that is resistant to looking dated. It did generate lots of negative press, and our graphics programmers always wanted to push farther too. You just have to be prepared. But every game we’ve released, we have gotten the comment that our screenshots were not up to par.

Trust me, he’s not kidding. It’s actually really difficult to convince graphics programmers and artists, who not only want to push the envelope because it’s cool, but who are legitimately concerned their resume and portfolios might fall out of date.

Still, compare that mentality to this quote (found via Kotaku) about the upcoming Crysis game:

Diemer, senior game designer of Crytek, explained that next-generation consoles don’t offer enough computational power to run Crysis, German publication Heise reported… Diemer explained that “next generation consoles like the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 do not offer the sufficient power” to assure the quality of gameplay Crytek demand for Crysis.

That’s right – Crysis (release date: 1/1/07) has too many CPU cycles for a game-specific machine that’s NOT EVEN OUT YET. So… what are the odds your PC will run it?

Original comments thread is here.