Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Caliane said:

"realistic" graphics for an mmo is a terrible idea honestly.

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For models I agree, but for the world I think it can work just fine. I think Lotro did a great job on their world design and for that matter their weather despite using a more realistic style.

I definitely agree that I"d like to see an MMO try a more realistic weather system, followed the change of seasons, and had dynamic weather like cold fronts & storms that actually traversed the game world. If the changing weather had an impact on how NPCs acted that be even better

But I won"t be holding my breath for that happening any time soon, hehe

That sounds like a whole lot of server processing//design work for something that half the audience would toggle to "Render 3D Complex Sky--False" in order to not cripple their FPS.

Simple works fine, and I trust graphics designers about as far as I can throw them when it comes to making graphically intense things without ruining playability while they are active.

I always find it incredibly amusing when games go to great lengths to make "oo shiny" things... that will be instantly turned off by players since they"re horrible when you"re in an area with more than 5 people (Oh EQ2 and your magical computer-devouring, seizure-inducing lightshow you call combat).

Death Knight Desecration Aura is why I hate Unholy DKs. Neon flickering graphics-lag vortex of suck.

I do love weather effects.

Weather in wow is probably my second favorite addition they made, after pvp battlegrounds.

I think that in general it is nice to have realistically styled graphics for scenery, weather, plants, water and so on. The "nature" stuff in areas where there tend not to be hundreds of people that is. Obviously you need sliders for combat applications but you can make some stunning vistas and locations that people really will remember, with the obvious perk of getting great marketing screen-shots and video potential. Besides, the art guys get bitchy if they don"t get to at least play with their latest toys and better that they blow their wads here rather than ending up with translucent yet mirror-surfaced mobs with pulsing irregular solids stuck all over them later.

Now, at the other end you need to dramatically go in the other direction. No one notices the difference much between "decent" and "exceptional" graphics during raid level combat or pvp but they sure as hell will notice frame-rate stuttering and even those with great systems tend to err on the side of caution. You can try to address it with sliders of course but then you had best be happy with how it looks on minimum, because that"s where most of those sliders will go.

I may not run Alienware level crazy machines, but due to always loving newish shooters, my machine stays decently upgraded.

I"ve almost never turned effects off for lag reasons. To help distinguish person A from person B under all the crazy glows, sure; and other tactical reasons.

I pity those folks who are still running older comps and would rather degrade their play experience than to take a night off from the bars and use the cash to upgrade their vid card/cpu/whatever.

You can go look at the steam hardware polls to get a good idea of hardware trends. Just weight it a little heavier towards the bottom end because MMO"s tend to attract a lot of people who aren"t really gamers. What we"d consider an "average" gaming rig is a supercomputer of the future to 90% of households.

I posted it in the FFxi thread but I used to work for a company doing IT work for a stupidly large company. We replaced old PC"s every 5 years or so. Out of the 150ish computers we"d get rid of every month, we"d usually get 10~15 requests from people to buy the old PC off our hands. The vast majority wanted them for something for the kids to play games on.

I always imagined the look on a kids face when his mom talks about how she"s going to bring him a new computer to play games on and the next day she brings home a P4 2ghz, 512 mb RAM and onboard video/sound card. We considered making the startup sound for windows on the machines we sold to users the "you lose" sound from Wheel of Fortune. Ba bump ba booowwwww.

What"s a real shame is that developers can"t stop time so that they can add a slider to the graphics options that go from "original EQ -> WoW -> FFxi -> Aion" instead of the EQ2 "Ugly melting plastic Nazi guy from Indiana Jones -> Shiny melting plastic Nazi guy from Indiana Jones" effect.

It"s such a shame that these recent pretty games have been so devoid of content. Even if I don"t play it fulltime it would be nice to have something other then Team Fortress to fill my time inbetween WoW raids. I suppose I could take up another hobby. Maybe I"ll bust out my Lego"s and rebuild all my castle sets. That should chew up a month while I try to find all the pieces I"ll inevitably drop on the floor.

Edit:

Oh, and I wouldn"t worry about your graphics eventually feeling dated. By that point you either have hit critical mass and it doesn"t matter how dated your graphics look (WoW) or you"re in a happy medium and dated graphics aren"t what"s going to kill your game anyways. People who are still playing your game 10 years from now could give a shit about the dated feel (Starcraft, Counterstrike, Baldur"s Gate, etc...).

Zehn - Vhex said:

You can go look at the steam hardware polls to get a good idea of hardware trends. Just weight it a little heavier towards the bottom end because MMO"s tend to attract a lot of people who aren"t really gamers. What we"d consider an "average" gaming rig is a supercomputer of the future to 90% of households.

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Well it is nice to see the "average" pc has dropped down in price quite a bit as well.
Back in the day, 3 grand was required to play games. 2 grand was business.
then, around the time of pentium 2 grand became the all around average pc for gaming and everything else.
Nowadays, a 1 grand system will play everything just fine. (Not including monitor.) And be much stronger then a ps3.

I"d also suggest keeping your art style consistent throughout the life of the game, with enhancements being very subtle.

WoW for example, you can look at any zone and recognize it as WoW, even though some of the models have improved or textures have become more complex. It has a solid, consistent sense of artistic style that it sticks to.

Then look at EQ1, which just went all over the place. You"ve got the original trilogy which stays together for the most part, then Luclin and PoP have a different style, then GoD and beyond change completely yet again. It just doesn"t feel right. This is bad art direction imo, as even if you want to improve the look of expansion zones you need to take into account the style of your game and be consistent, even if that means you"re behind the curve graphically.

Kuro said:

That sounds like a whole lot of server processing//design work for something that half the audience would toggle to "Render 3D Complex Sky--False" in order to not cripple their FPS.

Simple works fine, and I trust graphics designers about as far as I can throw them when it comes to making graphically intense things without ruining playability while they are active.

I always find it incredibly amusing when games go to great lengths to make "oo shiny" things... that will be instantly turned off by players since they"re horrible when you"re in an area with more than 5 people (Oh EQ2 and your magical computer-devouring, seizure-inducing lightshow you call combat).

Death Knight Desecration Aura is why I hate Unholy DKs. Neon flickering graphics-lag vortex of suck.

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Well there are 2 parts of it.

1) is the server side for controlling / monitoring the weather system and maybe we still aren"t to the point where the server side power is available to make it a reality (though if the UO2 guys were dreaming about a true solar system being controlled server side 10 years ago seems like weather should be possible by now ). But assuming it could be done without a huge overhead on the server, as long as the system is run server side the game world could be impacted by weather and every player could feel it regardless of the level of detail the display of the weather is set to in their UI which I think would be an improvement over what we currently have.

2) the UI side and you"re right that is still unfortunately a major concern. I truly wonder if it were financially viable how advance a game could be today if someone took advantage of the absolute latest of cutting edge technology and while still actually making a really good game behind it.

I"m definitely a big fan of developers giving people with better computers the option to improve the graphics or turn on things that help make the world more immersive. Here again I have to credit Lotro for their approach, and even Blizzard to a lesser extent. But I think both should be capable of going further in the number of options they make available.

Would it really be that hard to have an option for "dark nights" in WoW where I need an external light source to see?

Grave said:

Then look at EQ1, which just went all over the place.

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EQ1 also existed during a huge transition in tech switch. I think it"s the only game ever to require a hardware upgrade to play expansions. Each of the expansions was internally consistent at least even if the entire game wasn"t.

They tried at least, even if they fell flat on their face. If they had managed to pull it off it would have been interesting to say the least. EQ had a habit of not understanding just how massive an undertaking everything they did was hence the half-complete state of most of the expansions.

Grave said:

I"d also suggest keeping your art style consistent throughout the life of the game, with enhancements being very subtle.

WoW for example, you can look at any zone and recognize it as WoW, even though some of the models have improved or textures have become more complex. It has a solid, consistent sense of artistic style that it sticks to.

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I wholeheartedly approve of this message...
It"s one of the reasons our "style" took so long to find, and our style is not now, nor ever will be reliant on technology to look good or play great.

Style is one thing, but how can you still make it look good 5 years after release? Sure wow looks cool but the models etc are starting to look "dated".

If you only release one expansion every 2-3 years then you should be ok, but if you plan on doing it once a year after the 4th or so expansion you need to do something with the "look"

In many ways the natural progression of say kiddie looking low-level wolves to the more menacing NR worgs is fine. I DO think all player races need to be bumped up to the TBC race quality, but I don"t think that"s something Blizzardcan"tdo, just something they haven"t yet (or ever will).

Still the look is obviously fine, there are plenty of breathtaking zones and amazing models and animations in Wrath without all the graphics being overhauled.

One thing that cannot be understated, and that so few companies seem to understand, is that animations can really make or break a game, graphically. It could look like a fucking photograph still, but if every movement is halting and awkward and slow, then it doesn"t mean shit. Just compare the animations in WoW to games like WAR or EQ2. It really is night and day, and so many companies fuck it up.

Azrayne said:

One thing that cannot be understated, and that so few companies seem to understand, is that animations can really make or break a game, graphically. It could look like a fucking photograph still, but if every movement is halting and awkward and slow, then it doesn"t mean shit. Just compare the animations in WoW to games like WAR or EQ2. It really is night and day, and so many companies fuck it up.

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This is very true.

Its one of the things Wow did very right. The animations are quite fluid.


Also, in regards to making a game look good for a long time. Again, said many times, using strong illustrative methods in favor of pushing polygons and tech, will make your game look good indefinately. (And will also very likely mean it runs at lower settings better.)
Team fortress 2 will look just as good 20 years from now, as it does now.
Super metroid looks just as good now as it did when it came out.
Super mario3, world also, look just as good now as they did when they came out. Only resolution as really changed.

Things I notice the first time in any MMOG in this order:

1. UI
2. Animations
3. Graphics

Thats all in the first 10 seconds and will make or break a first impression. Then comes combat.

Just curious curt if SLI is going to be properly implemented in your game? I can"t think of one MMO i"ve played that actually saw noticeable performance increase when I turned on SLI.

Um, ya, sure....
*Looks for some tech dude to answer that*

Ngruk said:

Um, ya, sure....
*Looks for some tech dude to answer that*

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Curt this is probably not something you want to admit to not knowing

Citten said:

Curt this is probably not something you want to admit to not knowing

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It"s not that I don"t know what it is, it"s just I"ve never reaped the "serious benefits" games have claimed you could get from it, or manufacturers for that matter.

I have no clue about the tech behind it, none what so ever. I just know it"s another acronym way smarter people throw around like I say "Crap" in meetings....