AfterWorld Survival Forum

Although younger people play it, Minecraft is a very good example of a extraordinarily successful game that graphics-wise is still living in the 1980s.
 
All evidence suggests that gameplay is generally the most important ingredient in making a successful, long lasting game.
 
Zen
 

Few practical observations:


IF there was a choice either make it run smooth and use crappy graphics OR slow it down, make it unstable and use best graphics, THEN we would have something to discuss.

However, on my PC there's no difference if i run it with Ultimate or Medium settings. I've tested it many times when the game was getting annoyingly jerky and unstable - it either works or it doesn't, graphic settings have no discernible effect. In fact it's more like the opposite, with Lowest settings it seems some functionality is lost (some objects are not displayed at all, etc).




From a purely theoretical standpoint:


I wouldn't dismiss the cold statistics vik referred in his post just so easily. Good looks is one of the most important things to get player's attention, so there's a chance they might stay just a little longer, enough to start realizing that there's much more than just the looks, to get a foggy idea what this world is really all about.



It's no secret most people who left AW Alpha, were complaining it's plain ugly, outdated and ancient. They argued, if it expects them to pay for it, but there's many other games out there that have better looks and are free.
Remember how we tried to explain there's other zones and those look much better than QA1?
Ofc, there was always exceptions, all the old players who're here since the Alpha times are in fact this exception. It's pretty obvious what will be the answer to this question if we ask it in this audience... but i really doubt we could get the realistic answer this way.


I'm a fraid it's all purely academic question now, the transfer to a new engine has already happened and there's no way back. Theoretically it might be possible to use old textures with the new engine but this wouldn't give us any better stability or framerate.

My vote is for the last option, but I think Fifth has a good point about those of us remaining here. I doubt that anyone who cared more about graphics than anything else would still be playing unless they've checked into AWS after first being disappointed with AWA. And if they were disappointed enough with AWA to leave soon after starting they probably weren't happy enough with AWS's graphics over the playbility problems to stay anyway.

There are plenty of people that need to have good graphics in a game in order to start playing it though. So while graphics are less important to us, we've already proven that by still playing AW due to its fun factor. The fact that AWS is so pretty is a great draw and there may be a few more people willing to give it a shot if the player animations were updated, but it's bound to be a much smaller number of people than those that want a smooth, playable MMO and/or RCE.

So again, I think the focus at this time should be exclusively on fixing the major bugs and glitches that puts a damper on playing AWS.

No worries ZAV, newcomers have access to the survey too so if there were many of them they'd be able to vote here as well. ;-)

Allfather: That  is actually a great idea ... what Dedicated Logic needs is to have an idea of why their new players are not returning to the game and poll them to see what options would entice them into coming back and donating money.


Dedicated Logic has access to all the information they need for this - citizenship status, registration date, last log-on date and, importantly, their email address.

Perhaps you could PM Vik with this option (I am sure you could put to much better in Russian than I could ever do)?

I asked/will talk more about the idea. Jarod you just sparked an idea. I can't believe no one has ever suggested it. wow lol. think about it, like 80% of games have daily rewards for logging in. This is to reward those who play. If DL made some kind of pop up welcome screen every time a player logged in (with current events/news) as well as some kind of small reward for playing (or lets say that it hows a bar made of 5 squares. And each day they log in and one more square fills up, at the end of 5 days daily logging in/playing, the player gets a small reward of some type. Then it restarts. And if a player misses a day, then it restarts.

incentive to log in daily. that would be nice

Not even played this game yet.   (waiting for it to download now) But, I do know that graphics arent important really, you get games with great graphics that people will see and go "oh yeah that looks awesome" then a week later, if that sometimes, they quit because the game has little or no substance. Awesome graphics are good for attracting players and advertising the game but playability and general "meat" of a game is what is going to make it succesful in the long run.