Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 11:08 am
Nope, just has to be better enough than the competition. It's hard to quantify how good a game is, again it's subjective, but game ratings are the closest quantification I can think of offhand and good enough to explain this concept with. So, say game A is rated 95% and game B is rated 90%, if you have a pool of 10 million players, it doesn't mean game A will have a 5% higher playerbase because it's 5% better, it means each individual in the pool will likely think "Which game shall I spend money on", the answer is going to be the better game - obviously it's a little more complex than that due to the subjectiveness of how good a game is but in general you get the idea.OohhoO wrote:Still, by your logic WoW must be 10 times better than DAoC was at it's peak...
To simplify it into an analogy, you have two loafs of bread that taste largely the same, are identical otherwise except one of the loaves has 2 extra slices in it, people would rather get more for their money in general and go for the one with the extra slices, but the odd few might go for the shorter one because their personal feel is that the shorter loaf tastes better even if the others don't think it tastes any different.
That isn't entirely true, in DAoC's first few years there was a major MMO peak with Everquest, Lineage and so forth still having millions of players (not as much as WoW individually, but almost as many, if not more than combined), you're right in that there was a difference however - it was largely Asian players that built up the bulk of players then. This peak died away during DAoC's lifetime and WoW brought the MMO playerbase flying back up.Ovi wrote:You also can't compare different periods in time. There is a much larger audience for MMORPGs now than during DAoCs peak.
I certainly understand the argument for supporting people with lower spec machines but it's perfectly feasible to produce a scalable graphics engine and that's the real problem. You can have graphics AND playability, this is hard for some companies with low budgets nowadays because of the amount of time that goes into building a game, but Blizzard simply didn't and now, most certainly doesn't have that excuse - they had the resources, funds and experience built up from earlier successes (Warcraft 1 - 3, Starcraft etc.) to achieve this but didn't.Ovi wrote:Going back to the point about WoW's engine looking dated, that was not just because of the development time, but also partly by design. Blizzard purposely aimed it at a lower spec machine, in order to allow as many as possible to play it. The figures would suggest that it was probably a good decision.