Polygon count for a MMORPG game to be released on two years

woliver

Hello people. I'm working with a small team, and we are developing a MMORPG game. We are trying to gather as much technical information as posible, and one of the most important things that we need to solve is the polygon count for the characters (players). What's the budget nowadays?. I know that Blizzard used around 500 polys per character, but that was a long ago. I also found an article that says they are using between "3k-5k" for the NPC's in the new versions.

Please I'd appreciate so much if you guys help me out with this.

Thanks in advance! (:

skankerzero

With MMOs it's all based on how old the pc hardware is you want to support.

WoW's old specs made the game extremely accessible to a large crowd and that was reflected in it's success.

Obscura

Well, that 3-5, even 10k can be totally acceptable, even on older pc's. Polygons are cheap nowadays, however there are still limitations if you want crowd and such. But you can always use lods... The another thing that can determine the speed, is the amount of used bones. 1000 tris won't really give you better performance if you have like 100 bones. Texture resolutions, amount of individual materials, and material effects can also affect performance. Basically these are more expensive than polygons on every platform.

woliver

Thank you for your time guys. It was very helpful:thumbup:

Justin Meisse

Also consider the amount of time per asset multiplied by the number of artists you have. The average MMO has a production schedule around 3-5 years with pretty large teams. So a small team trying to match vanilla WoW might have to put in 20 years of production, cut down the amount of content or do lower spec art that can be produced faster.