The "for an MMO" thing reads more like an excuse than anything else.. especially for a game like this. Global Agenda and APB look terrific compared to this and between them split up a lot of the same concepts that SOE is using..There are UE3 MMO's that look a good deal better than this.

I disagree.. I think it looks pretty awful regardless of the genre. If we're using World of Warcraft as the benchmark, I guess that's a fair statement (despite the horrid art direction), but there are quite a few of these "MMO" games that look a great, great deal better than this.

Age of Conan "looks" good for an MMORPG.. this.. not so much. And I'm not even considering the fact that it's probably segmented into many smaller areas, and driven by much lower area caps than most other MMORPG's. This game isn't making full use of the genres previous constraints.. but then again, everyone is throwing around the MMO name these days.

Gameplay looks pretty poor too, tbh. Global Agenda looks way more fun.

Compared to the images above I'm pretty sure it does *look* better too..

Yea.. I wasn't terribly impressed with MAG either. But I'll just have to agree to disagree here. There's nothing about this game that looks impressive, even "for an MMO." It looks horrible from a technology viewpoint (yes, "for an MMO") and the art is even worse. You might think that gameplay could save it, but that doesn't look terribly impressive either. And yea.. even that relatively poor GA screen shot still looks a lot better than the mess above us. Low resolution textures everywhere, devoid of filtering or anti-aliasing, and excessively low polygon assets all around. I'm not even sure how anyone could want to defend it.

Now look at Conan (or even Aion at its best), and try telling me that this is anywhere near those levels of detail.. and I can almost guarantee you that their size and scope is far greater than what SOE will deliver. The "for an MMO" argument falls flat on its face when you compare stuff like this to more modern games than World of Warcraft.

Plus you're also assuming that this is a traditional persistent world and I bet you it aint. These areas are probably nearly all instanced, with much smaller player caps than you would see in something like Warhammer Online or World of Warcraft..

Hell.. Huxley looks better.SOE has a track record alright.. another reason to have low expectations for The Agency.

Hey I'm all for putting size and scope in perspective.. I just think it loses ground when you can clearly see that there are plenty of things pushing those boundaries much further, that are much more appealing to look at. When you compound that with SOE's terrible track record, and the gameplay footage that we have seen.. I just can't see how anyone could be building hype for this thing. If there's more to The Agency that will make the masses flock to it, they certainly have not shown as much.. and they have not shown a single thing that even indicates that the game will have some sort of massive scope.Because it doesn't look good.. even for an MMORPG. Does it look better than the low end of that genre? Not even. This is especially true when you consider the source and the potential budget. At least some of those games can say that their lack of funding held them back. This doesn't even *look* much better than EQ2.

It offends the senses with its art direction, which aint helping any. So we have horribly low details surrounding us on all sides, and that's not even the worse part. The fact that the games assets contain so little detail isn't even the main offense.

A game like Warhammer Online is even more appealing than this visually.. because it's saved by its art direction. It also doesn't hurt that it uses textures where I can't physically make out each individual pixel ;)

Fair enough.. I won't pre-judge it anymore than I already have. I was just trying to back up that position. It's better than just saying "OMFG IT'S UGLY!" without any qualifying statements at least...