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HappySqurriel on 17 December 2008
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sanadawarrior said:
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.

 

So you're comparing its look to 2+ year old games rather than the game that was released in the same month (Everquest 2) which was dramatically more graphically impressive ...

Both games ran very well (including high density zones) on systems that were over 18 months old (and ran to some extent on 3 year old systems) which can hardly be considered to be high system requirements in terms of PC gaming; hell, Half-Life 2 was ported to the XBox which was very similar to a 4 year old gaming PC.

 

To make my point clearer

World of Warcraft

Minimum System Requirements

Windows® System 2000/XP OS:

- Intel Pentium® III 800 MHz or AMD Athlon 800 MHz
- 512 MB or more of RAM
- 32 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting, such as NVIDIA® GeForce™ 2 class card or above
- DirectX® 9.0c (included) and latest video drivers
- 6.0 GB available HD space
- 4x CD-ROM drive
- A 56k or better Internet connection
- For voice chat, an SSE enabled CPU is required.

Recommended Specifications

Windows® System 2000/XP OS:

- Intel Pentium® IV 1.5 GHz or AMD XP 1500+ MHz
- 1024 MB RAM
- 64 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting, such as NVIDIA® GeForce™ FX 5700 class card or above
- Broadband Internet connection
- Two-button scroll-wheel mouse

Half Life 2

Official Half-Life 2 Box minimum specs:

  • Processor: 1.2 GHz Processor
  • OS: Windows, 2000/XP/Me/98
  • Graphic card: DirectX 7 level graphics card
  • Hard Drive: 4.5 GB
  • Memory: 256 MB RAM
  • Other: Internet Connection, DVD-ROM Drive

So ... You had to have bought a system in 2001 or later in order to play these games ...