Originally posted by srsnoob I wondering if anyone has a technical answer for why graphics in MMOs need to be toned down (not as detailed) compared to single player games. I thought that only information about player location, action, NPCs etc. is sent between the server and the player's PC so internet connection is not really a factor. That only the player needs a PC capable of rendering the graphic's files already installed on their hard drive, which many do evidently by highly successful and graphically intensive single player games released on PC. So why aren't MMOs produced with the same level of graphical detail? Are the limitations technical or is it more of a development time/cost issue?
If you have to ask........
With all the crap devs have to go through as far as graphics, animations and detail, do you really think the devs are being lazy about this or trying to hold back? Just think about it for a little bit.
Uh why would I think they are being lazy? I'm just curious for an advanced/technical answer. Like is having player characters on screen is more resource intensive graphics wise than having non player characters and why? What's the structure of the programming like?
Let me try.
There are 375 players in a courtyard, in sight of one another.
If this was a singleplayer game, and everyone was a NPC, there would be 375 real-time 'objects' being calculated.
if this is a multiplayer game and those are actual players, there are 140625 'objects being calculated.
Now add spell visuals, and the server calculating their effects, both visual and numerical, in the right sequence.
Eve's answer was Time dilation. straight forward, time slows down to give the server time to compute. other MMOs chose simply to drop down the number of components in graphics of all kinds to reduce computation.
simply put, it's like this: what can you calculate faster? 25.1+71.5 or 5774.6733 + 22049.2345 ?
That's pretty much the most accurate reason & reasoning, why graphics are as they are in MMO's
I don't know where you got that EVE comment out of.... EVE does not have "real" 3-D enviroments, it has a backdrop of starts and a few planets it needs to render / calculate ontop of players and thus is far less resource heavy in terms of non-player related visuals.
You mean their MMOs look like their SP games? Cause yeah....they both look dated. They have no tech that would make them ahead of the game. Trust me. Try looking at the difference of models before you speak.
I'm not talking about the animation. Even if I were to talk about it, Eastern developers do better on it. Let's compare this 2 games which have similar gameplay/combat elements, which are soft-targeting, action combat, blocks, etc.
ESO :
Blade & Soul :
You can clearly see which one has the better animation.
You think B&S can handle as ginormous PVP battles as ESO can? i VERY much doubt it. They're pretty and resource heavy, they'll never reach the same amount simultaneous characters fluidly on the screen as ESO does.
You win some, you lose some, i rather have great fluidity with hundreds of players on the screen rather than 10 sparkly characters that starts chopping the game already.
Originally posted by srsnoob I wondering if anyone has a technical answer for why graphics in MMOs need to be toned down (not as detailed) compared to single player games.
Rendering bottlenecks.
Offline it's just 1 player with a much smaller land area to render. So objects can have more polys and textures can be 4096x4096 in size without much of an issue on a decent computer.
Online with more characters, and the need to have the vast space filled with life-like objects, requires keeping the polys to the level of offline games. So each character now has many less polys and texture sizes reduced, to make up for the missing poly used in the environment and moving objects.
The other factor is particle effects are really nice in offline games as it's but a few NPCs that you will encounter. Online, put 25 players in a small area with even WoW styled graphics, and it'll lag out a computer...that's almost 3x as many effects as a SP game (one of biggest improvements in computer performance is to turn down the particle effects).
This is about as good of an answer as you'll get on this. It is much easier to optimize a single player game, with a few exceptions. When a PC lacks a good CPU you are much more likely to get the rendering lag in MMOs, where you get past the loading screen but the players and NPCs are still not loaded and FPS drops significantly. It is also why other genres of online games are still behind PCs in the amount of players they can have, even with the new gen. What I would like to know is why there are still MMOs being released that look like 90s Disney reject cartoons (Hello EQN and Wildstar).
You mean their MMOs look like their SP games? Cause yeah....they both look dated. They have no tech that would make them ahead of the game. Trust me. Try looking at the difference of models before you speak.
I'm not talking about the animation. Even if I were to talk about it, Eastern developers do better on it. Let's compare this 2 games which have similar gameplay/combat elements, which are soft-targeting, action combat, blocks, etc.
ESO :
Blade & Soul :
You can clearly see which one has the better animation.
You think B&S can handle as ginormous PVP battles as ESO can? i VERY much doubt it. They're pretty and resource heavy, they'll never reach the same amount simultaneous characters fluidly on the screen as ESO does.
You win some, you lose some, i rather have great fluidity with hundreds of players on the screen rather than 10 sparkly characters that starts chopping the game already.
Indeed, I agree with you. I was just answering the OP's question.
To be fair, Bless & Black Desert will also have siege wars just like in GW2 & ESO. Let's see how will they accomplish that with those cirspy graphics.
As far as the server goes in influencing a game's graphics... that is out of the question. The most a server will need to do is tell a client where mob/object A,B,and C is.
But, as far as why graphics are toned down for MMORPGs, I'd say there are a few reasons:
You can potentially have a lot of people on the screen, and that adds to the rendering cost. Big events with lots of people exhibit this problem. Workarounds for this have been made (for the most part), like priority rendering (mob -> party members -> everyone else. See: FFXI).
Not everyone will have a computer with the power equivalent of Godzilla, so and it would make sense (if you want a lot of people being to play the game with a decent framerate) to have graphics toned down or finding other ways and tricks to reduce rendering costs or ways to optimize the engine (like reduced textures). There are many video cards and hardware configurations to take into account, and the average person is not going to have a 4 GB graphics card or 16 GB of RAM in their system. Having various graphics settings could ease this.
Textures. Using 4096x4096 textures everywhere to convey your world would require some serious hardware. Textures still need to be loaded into memory (and if I am correct entire textures need to be loaded first before they are sampled, thus still needing to have that texture in its entirety in memory somewhere). Combined with the possibility of any number of characters showing up on your screen at any time for any reason, rendering cost is increased or decreased at random. Reduced texture sizes can ease this (provided I'm correct about textures being loaded in their entirety before being sampled down).
Shaders can also increase the load on the CPU and GPU too. Those real time shadows, sub-surface scattering, bump mapping, and volumetric lighting add to the rendering cost.
And that's all just the graphics side of things. Turning the graphics back a bit will allow more people to play your game without spending more cash to invest in beefier hardware, but turning them up will allow only a small portion of people to play your game with other people needing to invest in hardware to even be able to run it.
I can't give you a technical answer but I can just relate my experience having played almost every western MMORPG ever made. The higher the quality of the graphics the cruddier the game plays. It is that plain and simple.
In a single-player game, the developer has far greater control over every scene. Each view you see is designed to fit neatly within comfortable poly, texture, cpu, gpu, etc limits.
Imagine creating the props and hiring the staff for a play you are about to put on. Now imagine offering a stage, staff and props for anyone that wants to put on a play.
This matches my understanding as well. Unpredictable scene complexity, background loading / unloading of assets, as well as system load from the constant near real-time dynamic updates from the server.
Originally posted by Scot What amuses me here is that MMOs have been in a race to keep up graphically with SP games. They have ditched so much in terms of gameplay, roleplaying tools and the rest. Yet they still cannot keep up, was the "streamlining" worth it?
Yes, since graphics of any lesser quality would lead to the MMO being automatically rejected by many NA MMO gamers.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Textures. Using 4096x4096 textures everywhere to convey your world would require some serious hardware. Textures still need to be loaded into memory (and if I am correct entire textures need to be loaded first before they are sampled, thus still needing to have that texture in its entirety in memory somewhere).
It's even more complex with offloading between CPU and GPU (sectoring). In games like EQII they banked on the wrong tech (CPU) which means most calculations are done via it, but it's slower than a GPU (what a GPU can render @ 30fps, a CPU can only process it @12fps...it's dog slow). So the best games balance computations between BOTH the CPU and GPU to reduce the I/O bottleneck that can develop. A building, for example, to optimize the processing will be cut up into sectors per level, and depending on the complexity of the scene (e.g., a lot of particle effects and/or a lot of polys) it's sectored according to which can handle the data chunks the best.
There's a lot of background processes going on for every object within a players FOV (and some out of view), and too many people think the GPU handles all the graphics, it doesn't and it can't. I/O bandwidth is the limiter.
Originally posted by Loktofeit Originally posted by ScotWhat amuses me here is that MMOs have been in a race to keep up graphically with SP games. They have ditched so much in terms of gameplay, roleplaying tools and the rest. Yet they still cannot keep up, was the "streamlining" worth it?
Yes, since graphics of any lesser quality would lead to the MMO being automatically rejected by many NA MMO gamers.
Not nearly as many as they lost because of their cruddy gameplay. It is painfully obvious that the market cares more about gameplay than graphics, just look at the most popular games on the market, they are all graphics lite, gameplay heavy.
In a single-player game, the developer has far greater control over every scene. Each view you see is designed to fit neatly within comfortable poly, texture, cpu, gpu, etc limits.
Imagine creating the props and hiring the staff for a play you are about to put on. Now imagine offering a stage, staff and props for anyone that wants to put on a play.
This matches my understanding as well. Unpredictable scene complexity, background loading / unloading of assets, as well as system load from the constant near real-time dynamic updates from the server.
That is not true in an instance though, and much of MMO gameplay are in instances.
On iOS mobile development, each animated character on the screen consumes at least 1 draw call, and draw call count has a major impact on most apple devices.
So, in a single player game, the dev can limit the number of animated thingies to keep it 30+ fps on most devices.
In a multi-player game, the dev's have to plan for 30 or more players in the same area, which might drop fps to 5 fps like in the original raids of Everquest.
For EVE, I suspect they have to plan for 1000s of ships in the same area.
Uhhhh when I replied that, I didn't say the answers I was given weren't technical. I was responding to that one guy that was suggesting I had an ulterior motive for posting this question you dumbo. FUNNY MATE.
Technical Answer:
Single player games do not require server-client communication. Every action performed by a client spells/gear/location/physics needs to be reported back to the server where then additional math is done and then reported back to hundreds of other clients who will then send back information to the to other clients.
Your logic with a server telling clients what type of shoulder pads client x is using is flawed and incomplete. Yes it is the server giving clients that information but only after the client puts the shouder pads on. Now apply that to things that get change much more frequently like location / spells / los / targeting / and the physics math needed to calculate said things.
Originally posted by Stuka1000 Simple answer is that single player games do not have to render dozens if not hundreds of players on screen at the same time in real time.
Originally posted by srsnoob I wondering if anyone has a technical answer for why graphics in MMOs need to be toned down (not as detailed) compared to single player games. I thought that only information about player location, action, NPCs etc. is sent between the server and the player's PC so internet connection is not really a factor. That only the player needs a PC capable of rendering the graphic's files already installed on their hard drive, which many do evidently by highly successful and graphically intensive single player games released on PC. So why aren't MMOs produced with the same level of graphical detail? Are the limitations technical or is it more of a development time/cost issue?
If you have to ask........
With all the crap devs have to go through as far as graphics, animations and detail, do you really think the devs are being lazy about this or trying to hold back? Just think about it for a little bit.
Uh why would I think they are being lazy? I'm just curious for an advanced/technical answer. Like is having player characters on screen is more resource intensive graphics wise than having non player characters and why? What's the structure of the programming like?
Ok.. i give it a try.
First of all, as a lot of other already said, you do have more characters(and with that more polygons, more textures) within line of sight, or more technical radius of view, and with that what need to be rendered.
But that alone is not the only problem.. the more significant problem going hands in hand with the above problem is unpredictablility. In a single player game you can predict exactly at any given moment how many polygons you have to draw how many memory for textures you do need, and can go up to the limit of the actual hardware and show the best possible, best detailed, best animated, best textures, whatever possible.
In a MMO, especially with open world design and limitless zones(AoC set a limit to 100 players to each zone for that very reason) you can never predict how many characters will be at a single place. It can be 1 or hundreds, and now you have to add the scenery, possbile projectils and other stuff and add to that, that you usually demand a high distance of view in a mmo, whereas you can use some tricks in single player games or at least predict exactly how it may look and use simple background texture for it as replacement.
That alone is just the extented requirements for graphic cards and cpu, but also network traffic force some limitation, because the very same reasons upon you.. and therefore you don't have usually a lot of different hitboxes per character and mostly just one, and or not so much of a direct fps control compared to battlefield, war of the roses or other games.
And what solutions do you have for that?
Either you tune down your characters(a lot), minimize hitboxes and precision of fps combat(hitbox, hitdetection and all that stuff), or you limit the zone size and maximum numbers of characters in every zone heavily, like AoC did it.. and therefore it is not odd that AoC is one of the best looking MMOs, even nowadays, but with a very heavy price tag on it. Instancing, Phasing, restricted zones, small zones, less characters in one zone and so on.
If you would restrict it further, and would accept longer loading time with every zone shift you could do very well a MMO with graphics, fluidity, and multiply hitboxes like the current battlefield. But on the other hand, is it worth it? Or is a huge, seamless world with hundreds(instead of a few dozen) players around it worth to scale down the graphics and other stuff?
It is as always from a programming/technical standpoint a trade off every developer have to face and decide what is more important for the current game.
Edit/PS: Now that i have read the complete thread more or less everything i said was already said before. But that OP is your answer, take a few others, which gave you more details about some more specific aspects,
Sidenote: Asian/Western. They don't look all better than western MMOs. Play Age of Conan with Top notch Hardware and everything up, and don't forget it is a few years old, and play a comparable Eastern MMO. The Eastern one will not look any better, and especially not more detailed. The have the same limitations, and they have to choose a side of the fence as everyone else, too. (And don't mix up artistic value vs. graphical detail)
And.. no MMO looks like the best single player games.. Blade&Souls is miles away from the top single player games graphically, as any other MMO, too.
In a multi-player game, the dev's have to plan for 30 or more players in the same area, which might drop fps to 5 fps like in the original raids of Everquest.
Not in 5 man instances. And 30 is not that big a number .. there are more than 30 NPCs (which all have to be rendered) in scenes in SP games such as Hitman Absolution.
Probably because your average MMO will have 10 times more content than your average single player game.
Even a huge single player game like Skyrim is tiny compared to the average MMO.
So, when you have to render 200km squared rather than 20km squared you dial back the graphics a bit because they are EXPENSIVE and very time consuming.
In a multi-player game, the dev's have to plan for 30 or more players in the same area, which might drop fps to 5 fps like in the original raids of Everquest.
Not in 5 man instances. And 30 is not that big a number .. there are more than 30 NPCs (which all have to be rendered) in scenes in SP games such as Hitman Absolution.
Again, it isn't the sheer number and type of objects, rather control over the number and type of objects that is the issue. In MMOs, there is less control over what is present in any given scene, which means other aspects have to have a lower limit somewhere to compensate for it.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Uhhhh when I replied that, I didn't say the answers I was given weren't technical. I was responding to that one guy that was suggesting I had an ulterior motive for posting this question you dumbo. FUNNY MATE.
Technical Answer:
Single player games do not require server-client communication. Every action performed by a client spells/gear/location/physics needs to be reported back to the server where then additional math is done and then reported back to hundreds of other clients who will then send back information to the to other clients.
Your logic with a server telling clients what type of shoulder pads client x is using is flawed and incomplete. Yes it is the server giving clients that information but only after the client puts the shouder pads on. Now apply that to things that get change much more frequently like location / spells / los / targeting / and the physics math needed to calculate said things.
Server/client data is an example of CPU crunched data, not GPU, and always going on in the background. But it doesn't directly explain why MMOs use lesser graphics online itself. Location/inventory/spell usage data can cause traffic bottlenecks and queries have to be limited due to it, but graphics processing is local.
I would like the OP to give us an example of where the graphics in a single player game exceed the graphics in an MMORPG meant to run on the same hardware.
Rendering a single player character model is no different to rendering a single NPC model. Similarly, rendering 30 NPCs is just as taxing as 30 PCs. However, if I'm writing a single player game I can control the maximum number of models that will ever be displayed on screen at once. If I don't include any crowd scenes or mass battles there will never be a need to render more than 10, 20 whatever models at once.
In an MMO I cannot control or predict how many models will on screen at once. I cannot limit it to a nice low number that would enable me to use super high def models. Just look at places like Orgrimmar in WoW. Now imagine the computing power each player would need if Orgrimmar was rendered with Crysis3 or GTA V quality graphics.
The suits that control the development of my MMO want it to be playable on as many systems as possible. Including machines that were low end 5 years ago! So, I need to make sure the models can render in large quantities on really bad hardware. So, I need to drop the overall model quality.
Rendering a single player character model is no different to rendering a single NPC model. Similarly, rendering 30 NPCs is just as taxing as 30 PCs. However, if I'm writing a single player game I can control the maximum number of models that will ever be displayed on screen at once. If I don't include any crowd scenes or mass battles there will never be a need to render more than 10, 20 whatever models at once.
In an MMO I cannot control or predict how many models will on screen at once. I cannot limit it to a nice low number that would enable me to use super high def models. Just look at places like Orgrimmar in WoW. Now imagine the computing power each player would need if Orgrimmar was rendered with Crysis3 or GTA V quality graphics.
The suits that control the development of my MMO want it to be playable on as many systems as possible. Including machines that were low end 5 years ago! So, I need to make sure the models can render in large quantities on really bad hardware. So, I need to drop the overall model quality.
Comments
That's pretty much the most accurate reason & reasoning, why graphics are as they are in MMO's
I don't know where you got that EVE comment out of.... EVE does not have "real" 3-D enviroments, it has a backdrop of starts and a few planets it needs to render / calculate ontop of players and thus is far less resource heavy in terms of non-player related visuals.
You think B&S can handle as ginormous PVP battles as ESO can? i VERY much doubt it. They're pretty and resource heavy, they'll never reach the same amount simultaneous characters fluidly on the screen as ESO does.
You win some, you lose some, i rather have great fluidity with hundreds of players on the screen rather than 10 sparkly characters that starts chopping the game already.
This is about as good of an answer as you'll get on this. It is much easier to optimize a single player game, with a few exceptions. When a PC lacks a good CPU you are much more likely to get the rendering lag in MMOs, where you get past the loading screen but the players and NPCs are still not loaded and FPS drops significantly. It is also why other genres of online games are still behind PCs in the amount of players they can have, even with the new gen. What I would like to know is why there are still MMOs being released that look like 90s Disney reject cartoons (Hello EQN and Wildstar).
Indeed, I agree with you. I was just answering the OP's question.
To be fair, Bless & Black Desert will also have siege wars just like in GW2 & ESO. Let's see how will they accomplish that with those cirspy graphics.
As far as the server goes in influencing a game's graphics... that is out of the question. The most a server will need to do is tell a client where mob/object A,B,and C is.
But, as far as why graphics are toned down for MMORPGs, I'd say there are a few reasons:
You can potentially have a lot of people on the screen, and that adds to the rendering cost. Big events with lots of people exhibit this problem. Workarounds for this have been made (for the most part), like priority rendering (mob -> party members -> everyone else. See: FFXI).
Not everyone will have a computer with the power equivalent of Godzilla, so and it would make sense (if you want a lot of people being to play the game with a decent framerate) to have graphics toned down or finding other ways and tricks to reduce rendering costs or ways to optimize the engine (like reduced textures). There are many video cards and hardware configurations to take into account, and the average person is not going to have a 4 GB graphics card or 16 GB of RAM in their system. Having various graphics settings could ease this.
Textures. Using 4096x4096 textures everywhere to convey your world would require some serious hardware. Textures still need to be loaded into memory (and if I am correct entire textures need to be loaded first before they are sampled, thus still needing to have that texture in its entirety in memory somewhere). Combined with the possibility of any number of characters showing up on your screen at any time for any reason, rendering cost is increased or decreased at random. Reduced texture sizes can ease this (provided I'm correct about textures being loaded in their entirety before being sampled down).
Shaders can also increase the load on the CPU and GPU too. Those real time shadows, sub-surface scattering, bump mapping, and volumetric lighting add to the rendering cost.
And that's all just the graphics side of things. Turning the graphics back a bit will allow more people to play your game without spending more cash to invest in beefier hardware, but turning them up will allow only a small portion of people to play your game with other people needing to invest in hardware to even be able to run it.
I can't give you a technical answer but I can just relate my experience having played almost every western MMORPG ever made. The higher the quality of the graphics the cruddier the game plays. It is that plain and simple.
This matches my understanding as well. Unpredictable scene complexity, background loading / unloading of assets, as well as system load from the constant near real-time dynamic updates from the server.
Yes, since graphics of any lesser quality would lead to the MMO being automatically rejected by many NA MMO gamers.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
It's even more complex with offloading between CPU and GPU (sectoring). In games like EQII they banked on the wrong tech (CPU) which means most calculations are done via it, but it's slower than a GPU (what a GPU can render @ 30fps, a CPU can only process it @12fps...it's dog slow). So the best games balance computations between BOTH the CPU and GPU to reduce the I/O bottleneck that can develop. A building, for example, to optimize the processing will be cut up into sectors per level, and depending on the complexity of the scene (e.g., a lot of particle effects and/or a lot of polys) it's sectored according to which can handle the data chunks the best.
There's a lot of background processes going on for every object within a players FOV (and some out of view), and too many people think the GPU handles all the graphics, it doesn't and it can't. I/O bandwidth is the limiter.
.:| Kevyne@Shandris - Armory |:. - When WoW was #1 - .:| I AM A HOLY PALADIN - Guild Theme |:.
Not nearly as many as they lost because of their cruddy gameplay. It is painfully obvious that the market cares more about gameplay than graphics, just look at the most popular games on the market, they are all graphics lite, gameplay heavy.
That is not true in an instance though, and much of MMO gameplay are in instances.
Lesser graphics=more people can play and faster development
MMOs have serious problems getting out big updates and expansions these days.
On iOS mobile development, each animated character on the screen consumes at least 1 draw call, and draw call count has a major impact on most apple devices.
So, in a single player game, the dev can limit the number of animated thingies to keep it 30+ fps on most devices.
In a multi-player game, the dev's have to plan for 30 or more players in the same area, which might drop fps to 5 fps like in the original raids of Everquest.
For EVE, I suspect they have to plan for 1000s of ships in the same area.
-WL
Werewolf Online(R) - Lead Developer
Technical Answer:
Single player games do not require server-client communication. Every action performed by a client spells/gear/location/physics needs to be reported back to the server where then additional math is done and then reported back to hundreds of other clients who will then send back information to the to other clients.
Your logic with a server telling clients what type of shoulder pads client x is using is flawed and incomplete. Yes it is the server giving clients that information but only after the client puts the shouder pads on. Now apply that to things that get change much more frequently like location / spells / los / targeting / and the physics math needed to calculate said things.
This.
OP, there is LOTS of misinformation on this thread. I saw I think three posts on the first page that were incorrect.
I'd share my thoughts as to why, but A) you'd be silly to trust me, and
I don't know the whole answer.
Might want to do some of your own research.
Ok.. i give it a try.
First of all, as a lot of other already said, you do have more characters(and with that more polygons, more textures) within line of sight, or more technical radius of view, and with that what need to be rendered.
But that alone is not the only problem.. the more significant problem going hands in hand with the above problem is unpredictablility. In a single player game you can predict exactly at any given moment how many polygons you have to draw how many memory for textures you do need, and can go up to the limit of the actual hardware and show the best possible, best detailed, best animated, best textures, whatever possible.
In a MMO, especially with open world design and limitless zones(AoC set a limit to 100 players to each zone for that very reason) you can never predict how many characters will be at a single place. It can be 1 or hundreds, and now you have to add the scenery, possbile projectils and other stuff and add to that, that you usually demand a high distance of view in a mmo, whereas you can use some tricks in single player games or at least predict exactly how it may look and use simple background texture for it as replacement.
That alone is just the extented requirements for graphic cards and cpu, but also network traffic force some limitation, because the very same reasons upon you.. and therefore you don't have usually a lot of different hitboxes per character and mostly just one, and or not so much of a direct fps control compared to battlefield, war of the roses or other games.
And what solutions do you have for that?
Either you tune down your characters(a lot), minimize hitboxes and precision of fps combat(hitbox, hitdetection and all that stuff), or you limit the zone size and maximum numbers of characters in every zone heavily, like AoC did it.. and therefore it is not odd that AoC is one of the best looking MMOs, even nowadays, but with a very heavy price tag on it. Instancing, Phasing, restricted zones, small zones, less characters in one zone and so on.
If you would restrict it further, and would accept longer loading time with every zone shift you could do very well a MMO with graphics, fluidity, and multiply hitboxes like the current battlefield. But on the other hand, is it worth it? Or is a huge, seamless world with hundreds(instead of a few dozen) players around it worth to scale down the graphics and other stuff?
It is as always from a programming/technical standpoint a trade off every developer have to face and decide what is more important for the current game.
Edit/PS: Now that i have read the complete thread more or less everything i said was already said before. But that OP is your answer, take a few others, which gave you more details about some more specific aspects,
Sidenote: Asian/Western. They don't look all better than western MMOs. Play Age of Conan with Top notch Hardware and everything up, and don't forget it is a few years old, and play a comparable Eastern MMO. The Eastern one will not look any better, and especially not more detailed. The have the same limitations, and they have to choose a side of the fence as everyone else, too. (And don't mix up artistic value vs. graphical detail)
And.. no MMO looks like the best single player games.. Blade&Souls is miles away from the top single player games graphically, as any other MMO, too.
Not in 5 man instances. And 30 is not that big a number .. there are more than 30 NPCs (which all have to be rendered) in scenes in SP games such as Hitman Absolution.
Probably because your average MMO will have 10 times more content than your average single player game.
Even a huge single player game like Skyrim is tiny compared to the average MMO.
So, when you have to render 200km squared rather than 20km squared you dial back the graphics a bit because they are EXPENSIVE and very time consuming.
Again, it isn't the sheer number and type of objects, rather control over the number and type of objects that is the issue. In MMOs, there is less control over what is present in any given scene, which means other aspects have to have a lower limit somewhere to compensate for it.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Server/client data is an example of CPU crunched data, not GPU, and always going on in the background. But it doesn't directly explain why MMOs use lesser graphics online itself. Location/inventory/spell usage data can cause traffic bottlenecks and queries have to be limited due to it, but graphics processing is local.
.:| Kevyne@Shandris - Armory |:. - When WoW was #1 - .:| I AM A HOLY PALADIN - Guild Theme |:.
Am I too late to get in?
I would like the OP to give us an example of where the graphics in a single player game exceed the graphics in an MMORPG meant to run on the same hardware.
I find the question to be leading and false.
Dear OP,
Rendering a single player character model is no different to rendering a single NPC model. Similarly, rendering 30 NPCs is just as taxing as 30 PCs. However, if I'm writing a single player game I can control the maximum number of models that will ever be displayed on screen at once. If I don't include any crowd scenes or mass battles there will never be a need to render more than 10, 20 whatever models at once.
In an MMO I cannot control or predict how many models will on screen at once. I cannot limit it to a nice low number that would enable me to use super high def models. Just look at places like Orgrimmar in WoW. Now imagine the computing power each player would need if Orgrimmar was rendered with Crysis3 or GTA V quality graphics.
The suits that control the development of my MMO want it to be playable on as many systems as possible. Including machines that were low end 5 years ago! So, I need to make sure the models can render in large quantities on really bad hardware. So, I need to drop the overall model quality.
Does that help answer your question?
Go Hard Nibs!!!