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sanadawarrior on 17 December 2008
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HappySqurriel said:
sanadawarrior said:
Wiintendo said:

article:

Two companies with a shrewd approach to minimum system requirements are Blizzard and Valve. Now, I don't want to overload you with a flurry of numbers. But if you compare the minimum specs for Blizzard and Valve titles like World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, Half-Life 2: The Orange Box, and Left 4 Dead with games like Crysis: Warhead, Call of Duty: World at War, and Fallout 3, you'll see that the former have designed their games to run on older, less-powerful machines. By doing so, they've made their games accessible to a wider audience.

 

Indeed lets compare the specs for World of Warcraft a 4 year old game, Half Life 2 Orange box a 4 year old game resold with its various expansions and add ons, and Left 4 Dead a new game built on the engine of a 4 year old game vs. games with current tech.

Fact is WoW and Half Life 2 made people replace hardware, wether it was a graphics card, more ram, or the whole computer when they came out. I know I replaced my laptop for WoW, despite my laptop running FFXI, which was my MMO at the time, pretty darn well. That does not sound like designed to run on older less powerful machines to me. WoW is not successful because of minimum system requirements, despite what many people would want you to think. If that where the case, wouldn't City of Heroes, Lineage II, RF Online, and a dozen other MMO's that share WoW's minimum specs be just as popular or heck, somewhat in the ballpark of WoW's numbers?

Lastly, Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2, both from Bliz, look like they are going to be breaking banks for system upgrades/new pcs when they come out.

*edit*Also, arent Fallout 3 & COD WaW currently outselling L4D?

 

Well, not really ...

World of Warcraft was far from being graphically impressive when it was first released, and would run quite well on a 3 year old PC in "unpopulated" areas. It was the popularity of World of Warcraft, and having 100+ people in a Zone, that caused people to upgrade their systems.

At the same time, even though Half Life 2 was released in 2004 it ran perfectly well on my system from 2002 which had a Geforce 4 in it. People did upgrade to play Half Life 2 because (unlike games like Crysis) scaled really well and the game was playable on modest hardware and took advantage of more powerful hardware.

Thats silly, of coarse an empty MMO runs great, it's supposed to have 100+ people in zones and such, thats the point. If you can't run that then you need to upgrade. As for graphicaly impressive, it looked better then most of its contemporaries such as FFXI, and SWG, so I'm not sure what you are talking about. As for Half Life 2, most people I knew had to upgrade old computers to play, so if your old rig got you running perfectly then thats great, but not what I saw.