So I’m pretty much contrasting Tipa post here.
So I like the idea of having a full fledge MMO that I can log in to and start playing in a few minutes, but I do not believe it is currently practical with the current speed of bandwidth in the US and the current size of MMOs.
The average MMO now is getting close to 8-10GB with some of the high end graphic ones topping 20GB. Breaking a 8-10GB game in to streamable chucks when the average US bandwidth is around 2mbps down is no easy task. On top of that there are still a lot of people in the US who only internet connection is Dial up because they don’t have cable or dsl where they live. You just killed off the entire market of people.
And this is apparent in Free Realms right now. The first time you go to the racing instance you end up having to sit there for 2-3 minutes waiting for the download. Now imagine doing that the first time you enter a zone, instances, city. Sitting their waiting for it to download, that get annoying pretty damn quick.
What happens when your in a group and they want to do an instances that 3 zones away and you’ve never been in any of those zones? Is the group really going to sit there and wait for you to download each of those zones 3 zones and the instances (we are talking 10+ minutes here). I know most MMO players would not be willing to wait.
Sure once you’ve download the zone/instance you don’t have to download it again (unless they make changes to it that require you to download it again, and again, and again).
On top of all that you have Greedy companies like ATT, Comcast, and others who throttle your connection. And I have no doubt they will slow these short download like they do with longer ones, making the time you have to download the zone longer.
So I like the idea, but I don’t think it is practical with today bandwidth speeds. If we lived in Japan where they average 70-80mbps down, this would totally work, but sadly we don’t have those speeds.
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I personally love the streaming download model from Free Realms and Guild Wars. What I would like to see in future games is the option Guild Wars allows. I have a second shortcut for the launcher with a “-image” command line argument. That forces the launcher to patch everything prior to starting the game. If you can’t stand patching in the middle of the game, it’s a great way to avoid that.