MMO Envy

So I've been reading Massively, the news blog for all things MMO, and I'm seeing webshots from other MMOs. Am I alone in feeling a bit jealous over the beauty of some? The new LOTR MMO is gorgeous. And I find myself spending less time in SL, and spending that time at home to avoid the ad farms, funky builds, and attachment fiascos.

We're promised Windlight month in and month out, and nothing ever happens. In short, LL, Windlight is becoming the SL equivalent of Windows' Leghorn-Whatever-Vista. Oft rumored, rarely seen. Do something, quick, or SL will be just the place I come to put new products in my Slex boxes to fund my life in another MMO.

One really needs to remember that the reason these other MMOs look so wonderful is because they are more often than not pre-packaged levels created out of files stored in the game's directory. Essentially, they're loaded from the game's dir while you play, or prerendered when you "load" the levels.

As opposed to SL, where everything you see in the direction you look is downloaded on the fly, everything you do and its consequences are uploaded and downloaded on the fly, even if SL had a rendering engine capable of the stuff that modern MMOs were capable of, the amount of sheer bandwidth to transfer the data would be beyond today's capabilities.

Remember that everything in SL is created by its users, even the topography of the land and the foliage....

Remember that everything in LOTR Online is created by its authors, and its authors alone...

That's the big difference.

Yes, some MMO's are more visually appealing than SL. But not a one of them offers the unique community that LL does here in Second Life. In MMO's such as LOTR, WoW, EQ, while they can look better at times, have that same old same old feel, and definately don't offer what SL does in terms of interactivity.

More specifically for LOTR, yes, it looked ok, but played like crap. Not sure what anyone else feels about it, but when I played beta, and into the first couple weeks after launch, total junk. You aren't missing anything there imo.

You should keep in mind that part of why they are so attractive is they have the ultimate control over what goes in where. Part of designing a MMO or any other game is that the artists balance what they're doing with the ability of a client to display it.

For example, one game I know of that is really truly beautiful, keeps a lot of things in canyons because it limits your view, that way they can render what's visible in far more detail than if it was an open plain where you could see further.

The same is true for what people are wearing in the game. There are only so many different possible outfits and they are designed around the client being able to display them.

Also all the graphics in most of these games are downloaded or installed from disk before you ever enter the game. That's not possible in SL.