Speaking of World of Warcraft and Everquest 2, it's also interesting to note that WoW has much better gameplay than EQ2 does (this is from personal experience of playing both). Some people of course won't agree, but I think the numbers are indicative of this as well. So we have a similarity between two big MMO releases and the current console generation. On the one hand, we have an MMO that sacrificed visual realism to promote artistic style and gameplay, on the other an MMO that was considered to have had some of the best graphics of that time, which incidently made the game almost unplayable if you tried to run it with all the settings enabled (on a brand new high end computer at the time).
In the end, gameplay won out and the direction the EQ2 developers were headed alienated a lot of people (including me). Graphics are nice as long as the gameplay backs them up, instead of being sacrificed in the process.
