Why do MMO games look so good graphically?

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jay_are
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Why do MMO games look so good graphically?

Post by jay_are »

I don't play MMO games and I dont know anyone who does. I've never even heard of anyone online mention MMO games.
Besides of course World of Warcraft, and rarely the online Final Fantasy games, especially XIV which is recent.
Other than that, I don't think many people care about these games. Yet they keep popping up like plague!!
Then I got curious and decided to look up League of Angels cause it was in a random ad.
MAN, why must these games have SUCH WONDERFUL backgrounds and art in general?
The games don't seem that much fun. They don't even look like they have a story i'd like seeing. Or music worth listening.

But just look at THAT screenshot (below). It's like Lunar SSH, but evolved.

Why arent these artists working on real games instead?

If you look at the game in motion, it looks lame, but thats to be expected from an MMO no one cares about. At least I think?
Where are all these gamers hiding?

So my point is, I want more beautiful art like this in the games I play. Especially those remakes from big companies like Square Enix, which get butchered. I would love for example Final Fantasy V or VI looking just a bit more like this. And on a PC or real handheld, not a phone.
This is one reason I am thankful about Lunar SSH.
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Sonic#
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Re: Why do MMO games look so good graphically?

Post by Sonic# »

Why arent these artists working on real games instead?
They are working on real games. MMOG means massively multiplayer online game.

Personally, I don't play them due to lack of time, but I played WoW for over a year and had a lot of fun. I also played a few other games, and have been thinking about getting Final Fantasy XIV. I tended most to enjoy games that had fun character progression and exploration. While story is also a highlight of a few MMO games (Star Wars: The Old Republic), it's not why I go to them.
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jay_are
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Re: Why do MMO games look so good graphically?

Post by jay_are »

Sonic# wrote:They are working on real games
This game is real, but not very. Trust me!

1. I couldn't find it on Wikipedia for info. (it has its own wiki though)
2. I COULD find it on gamefaqs, but there is hardly any info there. And a 0.5/5 rating.
3. Its advertisements depend almost only on voluptous women.
4. It's a web-browser game. (Actually that's quite convenient so you dont spend 10 hours to install like WoW, nevermind!)
4. You won't play this game for its gameplay, music or story. It's free, but i've played much richer free games. (unless you have a love to level up and collect items)

Anyway, by real games I meant games people actually get excited about when they just hear about it. The biggest recent games I can think of that I would rather they had looked a bit more like this League of Angels screenshot are Pokemon X/Y and Zelda: A link Between Worlds.
They look great for the simple graphics they have, but they don't necessarily have to be THAT simple.
Ocarina of Time on 3DS did things more like what I want here. 2D or 3D, the games can have beautiful art. If a simple MMO can have them, why not other games we play more often?
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Leo
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Re: Why do MMO games look so good graphically?

Post by Leo »

MMORPGs will continue to exist because people love repetition.

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Kizyr
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Re: Why do MMO games look so good graphically?

Post by Kizyr »

jay_are wrote:
Sonic# wrote:They are working on real games
This game is real, but not very. Trust me!
1. I couldn't find it on Wikipedia for info. (it has its own wiki though)
2. I COULD find it on gamefaqs, but there is hardly any info there. And a 0.5/5 rating.
3. Its advertisements depend almost only on voluptous women.
4. It's a web-browser game. (Actually that's quite convenient so you dont spend 10 hours to install like WoW, nevermind!)
4. You won't play this game for its gameplay, music or story. It's free, but i've played much richer free games. (unless you have a love to level up and collect items)
Ok, so it's not that the game is real/fake, but more that it's just an ad/browser game? (So, in other words, about as much of a game as like Farmville.) I'm not sure that I'd classify it as an MMO -- it doesn't seem like it's even remotely the same genre as something like League of Legends or Warcraft, say.

Anyway... I don't like getting into the business of defining what a "real" game is (that goes way into elitist territory, which I really hate). Nevertheless, I really do dislike those types of games -- mostly because the gameplay design is centered around being addictive and punishing you for not playing every day, not to provide an actual fun experience. (Games like Evony and, well, Farmville both come to mind.)

In that context, have you actually played the game? I ask because it may be that the pretty graphics are just surface-level -- you mentioned that the movement is really bad. That can happen if the graphics are meant to be purely eyewash (the same way that the cutscenes in FF7 were really well-designed, but the actual gameplay was full of popeye-arms and bad polygons). If it's a matter of asking why the artists working on these games aren't working on more involved ones, it might be as simple as the fact that more involved games require a much greater investment of time and effort (and the artists would also need to be paid much more as a result to make that worthwhile). KF
~Kizyr (they|them)
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Re: Why do MMO games look so good graphically?

Post by Imperial Knight »

I avoid these sorts of browser games like the plague for all the reasons Kiz mentions along with the whole "pay to win" dynamic found in many of them. The marketing effort for a lot of these games seems rather sleazy as well. Remember the person who used to spam this forum with ads for browser games?

League of Angels seems to go with the time tested strategy of attempting to use sex appeal, with the added bonus that the art in their ads (or at least some of them) is apparently stolen from other games. Kiz mentioned Evony, I remember their ads becoming increasingly ludicrous. The early ones just featured art of soldiers or women dressed in medieval/fantasy attire, but over time the ads became increasingly suggestive until it reached the point where they featured photos of lingerie models. Wartune is another one of those games that seems to rely on sex to sell itself, with ads feature scantily clad women and stupid fake content warnings that remind me of those GoDaddy.com commercials that tried to get you to go to their website with the warning that the content on the site is "unrated" (which, of course, literally just means it hasn't been rated). I tend to be of the mindset that if your game is any good you don't need to resort to such cheap stunts.

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