[QUOTE="AdrianWerner"]The same reason why WoW camed out in 2004 looking like 2001 game? And that era was the height of pc graphical progress and yet it still looked outdated.dc337
Are you kidding me? You're saying The Old Republic looks that way because of technology lag? That doesn't make sense when Force Unleashed came out in 2008 and looks much better.
The Old Republic has toned down graphics so it can play on DX9 igpus. If every laptop had at least an 8800 it would look far better.Regarding The Old Republic.
You're talking about an MMO here. It's the last type of game where you'd want to try to push the technological boundaries for a number of reasons:
- MMO's tend to be very open-ended. In crysis, the designers can control how many moving objects you'll ever see onscreen at once. In an MMO players can (and will) gather by the hundreds in limited areas. If you have anything near 'high end graphics' for average game play, adding hundreds of other players, each with customizable gear (more graphical and CPU load), customizable race, hair color, height, weapons, gender and it will in many cause the game to become unplayable. In an MMO you have to design the game for the worst case situations, you cannot assume that you'll never have more than 5 / 10 / 20 creatures or players on screen at once.
- MMO's tend to have a strong focus on continues updates. One of the huge advantages of the WoW approach to MMO graphics is that it reduces the file sizes that have to be downloaded by the end users. If you have more than a million people all trying to download a patch, the difference between 50 mb and 500mb becomes very very important.
- Better graphics also makes it a lot harder to make new armor / clothes / weapons / whatever going forward. It takes more work and effort to keep a running series of updates. If you're going to keep a constant stream up updates going you'll want to make it relatively simple to add new items to your game. High end graphics run counter to that goal.
Your general augment
I think you're seeing a 'problem' that has always existed. Chasing after the 'best graphics ever' game has always been a hobby for the minority of gamers. It's also not something that ever happened all the time. Sure a new 'pushing the boundaries title would come out every couple of years or so but it wasn't a constant progression.
Many of the best / most popular games didn't look very good for their time: Civilization or Masters of Orion 2, Warcraft / StarCraft / Diablo, Kotor1 and 2, Deus Ex was already using an old engine when released.
It's true that there have always been one or two companies pushing the boundaries (ID and Epic for example). And yes those companies are all now forced to work on multiple platforms. The problem is not that PC gamers have stopped upgrading their machines; it's that it now costs far more to utilize top end graphics than it did 5-10 years ago. The cost of making a game that look really good on the Quake 2 Engine or the Unreal engine was peanuts compared to what it costs to make a game look good on the Crytech engine. It's not that the new engines are worse. However each of the new fancy graphics improvements and effects requires an artist to make the actual art asset that will be used by those effects. The smoke clouds, shaders for lighting, shaders for friggen everything, it takes longer and thus more money to make higher res textures. In short it takes a lot more money to make one level or one monster with really good graphics compared to making a monster with average graphics.
It's not that they don't want to support top end machines, it's that that the better graphics you're trying to produce, the more your game will cost. So you end up sending far more for the minority of your costumers.
There are still companies pushing the boundaries of gaming graphics. Crytech is the obvious example but also creative Assembly with the Total War series. Arma II and STALKER both use advanced graphics options.
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