Loading... Graphics Matter Most in MMOs

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The Pulse

You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the result is the Ten Ton Pulse (What is Pulse?).

Here's today's top 5 Pulse results:

Biggest Movers in the Top 20 this week :

Darkfall (UP 19 to #16)
Star Wars: The Old Republic (UP 13 to #11)
Jumpgate Evolution (UP 10 to #17)

Loading... Daily

Loading... viscerally next-gen high-poly eye-popping newsletter graphics are just the start.

Thanks to all that participated in the dev chat with Star Trek Online's Craig Zinkievich last night. It was a good time, and Craig fielded over a dozen questions from the audience with aplomb. We'll have a transcript and audio up early next week/

With my eight cores entirely consumed with Compressor-ing the NY Comic-Con '09 footage into premium member-downloadable video podcasts for the past 36 odd hours and counting, I took a trip down memory lane to get my daily gaming fix. Back to the days when 320x240 was standard and 640x480 was mindblowing, when a 3.6 meg install took a hefty chunk out of your 50 meg hard drive, DRM meant finding word 6 in paragraph 5 of page 32 in the manual, credits took up barely half a screen, and a command-driven shell felt way more comfortable than a GUI.

Thanks to the folks at abandonia.com and DOSbox, I found plenty of old favorites: Battle Chess, TIM, Scorched Earth, the original Civ, Red Baron, Panzer General, Silent Service, Sensible Soccer, and Lost Vikings (Blizzard's first ever). And before I get a letter from our lawyer saying that abandonware is a sketchy concept at best, I have the original disks for all these games in storage (just really no way to crunch into a 3.5" or 5.25" floppy to save my life). If you're equally scrupulous but don't have the original proof of purchase, you can get yesterday's PC games on the cheap at goodoldgames.com .

And no, we don't get a cut from mentioning these sites, I just think it's awesome that folks are working to preserve a big part of my largely misspent youth. The graphics are atrocious, the sound and music equally laughable by today's standards, but the gameplay was in many cases more solid than anything we have today. With storage media and specs at a minimum, art, framerate, graphics, and animation were secondary to creating an solid, internally consistent gaming experience.

Ironically, with miniscule 2D sprites far less artistically and graphically demanding than today's huge 3D models, games like Civ, Panzer General, Jagged Alliance, and maybe even Pirates! offered more visual variety than their modern day counterparts. It was more like reading a book than watching a movie - you took it comparatively slow and let your imagination fill in the details. In my opinion, the only platform still clinging to this worthy notion is the DS - no wonder it's popular.

I've written before about the experience of sitting down on a mountain top and watching the sunrise in my early days of EverQuest. I also have written about my trouble playing EQ today due to the UI and - I admit it - the pixel-tastic graphics. Thankfully Station Pass allows me to pick it up and put it down without the drain of subscribing and unsubscribing.

Why can I pick up old TBS / RTS strategy games with ease, not mind an elderly FPS like Wolf3D or Unreal, yet be so bothered by graphically-aging MMOs? There's at least three reasons why:

1) MMOs are social experiences, and we often want to tell people about the game we're enjoying and maybe have them come join us. If an MMO looks like crap or is just plain unpopular and we continue to play, it tends to become a closet habit. Lord of the Rings Online didn't quite live up to my art direction expectations and I think this is the fundamental reason why I stopped playing, though to this day I still believe it's a quality MMO that I want to play more.

2) We have this funny notion that MMOs that we continue to subscribe to over long periods of time will not only look good for years from launch but grow with us as gamers. Kudos to Mythic Entertainment with Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn and NetDevil with Jumpgate Evolution for going to such great lengths to update their aging properties.

3) We spend a ton of time playing MMOs and talking about the MMOs we're playing, and not only poor graphics but poor art direction grates on us. Familiarity breeds contempt much faster when we don't like what we see even on a semi-conscious level. My problem with horror and gore MMOs (Requiem: Bloodymare, Age of Conan), even if the graphics are fine (AoC, not RB) is that I don't enjoy being pelted with ridiculous amounts of spurty blood and guts for hours on end. A little of it from time to time is fine for the cause of realism, but a constant barrage just pisses me off - there's no buildup or shock value, just a desensitizing stream of violence like brainwashing scene in A Clockwork Orange (but with the opposite effect).

Is the quality of MMO graphics more important to you than in other gaming genres? Why do you think that is? Talk it over in the Loading... forum or, as always, feel free to email me. Have a great weekend!

Shayalyn's Epic Thread of
the Day

From our Ten Ton Torched Forum

All Things Bacon Go Here!

Some
men will own up to the old cliche that claims men are pigs.
But the guys on our forum will readily declare that not only are they pigs, but they love
pigs...pigs in the form of that tasty fried (or nuked) treat called
bacon. And so, for your Friday moment of WTF, I give you an epic bacon thread.
It offers everything from bacon tattoos to bacon martinis. And, because
of that cliche thing I just mentioned, it also has bacon boobs and
booty.

You're welcome, guys.

=================================

Awesome Quotes from the
Epic Thread:

"Nom nom nom nom nom nom..."

- Metal

=================================

Do you have a favorite Epic Thread? Let
us know!

4 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 92 in February! 228 in 2009!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today [Thanks Phil Comeau for links and Real World News]

Op/Eds

Community

Goob & Begud: "The Ultimatum"

Guides

World of Warcraft: Warlock Spells, Lvl 1-80

Hot Content - Or, what I took a fancy to:

Real World News

Crayola lays off 30 workers

Rumour has it that the laid-off staffers were chronic queue-jumpers, refused to stay inside the lines.
Goat rampages through Wisconsin home

The animal is definitely not kidding around, is now ruminating his next move.
Zoo shut down briefly by loose monkey

Why they would listen to a monkey and close down the zoo is beyond me, let alone what his sexual morals have to do with anything.

Thanks for visiting the Ten Ton Hammer network!

-Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer team

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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