A technical question regarding MMORPGs and RPGs.

yogi

Greetings,

Why MMORPGs have lesser graphics compared to RPGs?

The question arose for me specifically because in one forum, The Elder Scrolls Online forum specifically, a person (one of the staff) told me that the graphical performance of TESO is not as good as the graphical performance of TES:Skyrim because TESO is an online RPG which requires more resources.

Now, what I don't understand is how being an online game makes a difference to the graphical aspect to the game?

Skyrim looks nice on my machine, but I had to tune TESO down making it look quite sh!tty in order to have stable fps.

P.S. I am not a tech-savvy and not that smart of a person too so please bear with me. And I am sorry if this is the wrong place in the forum to post this or if the content itself is not fit for polycount, please guide me if so or have the post removed.

Thank You very much.

throttlekitty

Most MMO's are geared to provide gameplay for a wide variety of hardware, including gaming cafe machines. So they don't tend to push as hard. The more customers playing, the better.

Cibo

throttlekitty wrote: »

Most MMO's are geared to provide gameplay for a wide variety of hardware, including gaming cafe machines. So they don't tend to push as hard. The more customers playing, the better.

He said that he must play in lower settings than in Skyrim which has better Quality. Your appraoch is the target audience and general Spec.

In my opinion:
Its a matter of possibilities. In a single player game you are the centre of everything. When a monster is behind a wall in Skyrim you can say " It cant go in my way so the computer doesnt bother with it". In Teso it can be like *someone is chased by a monster and pass you* the pc must have textures, animation, etc. ... all things must be ready. A single player game with only one player is much more better to handle when it comes to optimize.

yogi

Cibo wrote: »

He said that he must play in lower settings than in Skyrim which has better Quality. Your appraoch is the target audience and general Spec.

In my opinion:
Its a matter of possibilities. In a single player game you are the centre of everything. When a monster is behind a wall in Skyrim you can say " It cant go in my way so the computer doesnt bother with it". In Teso it can be like *someone is chased by a monster and pass you* the pc must have textures, animation, etc. ... all things must be ready. A single player game with only one player is much more better to handle when it comes to optimize.

Yeah, this makes sense to me. Thank You.

Meloncov

Number of characters and particles on screen is a big factor too. An mmo needs to be able to handle dozens of people in the same place, all spawning particle effects.

.nL

MMOs also tend to be more CPU bound, as a part of their drive to support a wider variety of hardware. Which is why games like Guild Wars 2 can run rather sluggishly on PCs with beastly GPUs, and meh-quality CPUs. They're sacrificing high-end performance with the expectation that people will be gaming on their mid-range laptops more than they will be on their super computers (try profiling TESO, if you can, and I'll bet you'll find it's using very little of your GPU's processing power).

Kevin Albers

More simultaneous characters, fx, AI calculation etc. all combine to make an MMO more calculation intensive than a single player game, by far. And since the lowest specs for an MMO need to be fairly humble, you can't get around the CPU bottleneck without giving up on having a big pool of potential players.