If you look at MMOG Chart you’ll see this little game called Runescape. It’s a web-based MMOG. The graphics are terrible and the gameplay simplistic, yet they are raking in the money and have more subscribers than Everquest. Why? Lets look at what is different between Runescape and the other MMOGs.
1. The graphics suck.
2. The gameplay is simplistic.
3. It’s cheap.
4. It runs in a webbrowser.
Since the first two are negative points, the conclusion must be that it’s the last two points that are selling the game. More than this though – if your graphics suck you don’t have to spend as much time or money on graphics, which is a big plus to me in my situation.
So I’m going to avoid the work of migrating the Reality Engine (although it is a great engine) and continue with my original plan of using Irrlicht in a web browser. Irrlicht just released version 1.0 too so I’m going to take a look at that soon.