Gosh, City of Heroes is still a wonderful game… but boy, it really does show its age when I look at it now. The downside of polygon graphics is that they tend to age a fair bit worse than good pixel art, which is why it’s currently a bit hard to look at the mitten hands and flat faces of CoH without being reminded that this is basically a PlayStation game in terms of visual presentation. And darn it, if we could have this game but with the graphical engine of even just Champions Online, no other changes…
It’s really hard to justify building a totally new graphics engine for the same game; I don’t know how much effort it would take to, say, build a version of Guild Wars using the graphical engine of Guild Wars 2, but I’m going to go ahead and say that it’s not worth the effort. And yet for some titles it barely even matters; the graphics are older, but Final Fantasy XI still looks gorgeous and I’ve never found myself thinking that it really needs a whole new graphical engine. So let’s take this into the realm of the hypothetical and ask if you would play a completely older MMO with completely new graphics. Nothing about the actual game will change in the slightest, the systems and balance issues and all remain identical, but the graphics are all new. Would you play one, and which game?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
