GeekyCoder reviews Novoking
(Visited 4655 times) Game talk
Oct 182007
Novoking, the China Second Life ? is a decent overview of yet another Chinese entrant into the “metaverse” scene. Visually, it looks good, but there’s a price — an over 300MB download to get in, and high system requirements.
I am not sure the “metaverse” market has learned the lesson that WoW taught about accessible hardware requirements. For that matter, the huge lesson taught by the casual games industry about maximum download sizes before you start losing trials.
7 Responses to “GeekyCoder reviews Novoking”
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They want the big expansive worlds, plus they want the amazing 3D graphics, plus they need a large enough cast to populate the worlds, etc.
If you can envision your game as a simpler 2D environment or somehow figure out how to cut corners, do it. Systems are only getting faster, but that means that a simple 2D environment will only get faster too.
Maybe these companies should be pre-loading the big installation with the OS so that when people buy pre-built systems, at least, or maybe make a deal with MS so that updates (which can be staggering anyway) are the only download barrier.
Maybe these companies should be trying to pre-load systems with their big installation so that when people buy pre-built systems, at least, the updates (which can be staggering anyway) are the only download barrier.
The flip side of this is that the US is so primitive in its “broadband” with many “Third World” countries serving up 100 Mbps which makes large downloads very, very tolerable from a time-to-download perspective (we had an intern from Mongolia that could get 100 Mbps at home! ARGH!).
Conservative requirements != 2D only, as Raph points out about WoW.
Not having looked at Novoking, I also hope they learned from Second LIfe’s mistake, which at one time was to chase 3D features at the expense of compatibility. I haven’t looked at SL for a while, but for some time it was *horrible* about requiring a very specific set of Gfx HW & drivers, and doing anything but degrading gracefully if you fell outside that feature set. Tres ‘late 90s’ of them!
The virtual world today seem to focus to much on high quality graphics to attract user rather than practiicality. Unfortunately, that is not sustainable because it is the substance that retain the user not image ulimately.
Even in Novoking, SecondLife etc, I doesn’t use them often because there is little value preposition. I yet to figure out how I’m going to use them given it is high investment cost in term of time and resource in building my own environment.
What IS the current common wisdom on the maximum download size before you lose a bunch of people? I think I’m still under it, but it never hurts to double-check!