I was talking to my friend last week about the new generation of consoles, he told me there was an MMO anounced for PS4. At first I thought "how weird, consoles mostly don't handle MMOs very well." He told me it would be have totally epic battle, up to 40 vs 40.

My reaction was: "40 vs 40 is epic? Are you $*%# kiding me?"

The fact is that it is rare for any game nowadays to be a huge experience, even an old game like WoW fries your video board when there are a hundred players at screen. I do remember the golden days of Ragnarok Online War of Emperium (a guild vs guild war for castles), those were massive events that literally hundreds of people would participate at the same time, here is a video of a particularly massive fight:

Ragnarok graphics were a mix of 3D scenarios and sprite characters that actually looked pretty cool. It also makes the game scale incredibly well, even by the hardware of the time. The network consuption was a bit problematic (people would lag badly sometimes), but I do believe nowadays this can be handled (Heck, I played at a 128kbps connection those times and lag wasn't common).

Which brings me to my point, do you think that people would still be willing to play an sprite based game or just 3D games have any chances to be popular?

The speed of the internet connection doesn't have much to do with whether 2D or 3D graphics will be performant -- you might have to send a bit more data to describe what's a player's doing, but I can't imagine its much more. Likewise, I don't think 2D vs. 3D drawing is a huge factor either, I would suspect that adjusting the LOD of large groups of players (that is, rendering simpler models with smaller textures and simpler effects when a lot of people are onscreen) would scale nicely.

But sure, there's nothing wrong with 2D games, or mixing sprites with 3D environments, as long as the artwork reaches a high and consistent quality where the 2D elements don't look completely out of place with the 3D elements. You might even render the environment with an orthographic projection that's slightly out-of-skew (you could still let the player switch perspective among the four cardinal directions).

There probably are a few people who dismiss games with 2D elements, but there's at least as many that actually appreciate it, and you'll win over any fence-sitters with the quality of the art and gameplay, not whether its rendered in 2D or 3D.

The speed of the internet connection doesn't have much to do with whether 2D or 3D graphics will be performant -- you might have to send a bit more data to describe what's a player's doing, but I can't imagine its much more. Likewise, I don't think 2D vs. 3D drawing is a huge factor either, I would suspect that adjusting the LOD of large groups of players (that is, rendering simpler models with smaller textures and simpler effects when a lot of people are onscreen) would scale nicely.

But sure, there's nothing wrong with 2D games, or mixing sprites with 3D environments, as long as the artwork reaches a high and consistent quality where the 2D elements don't look completely out of place with the 3D elements. You might even render the environment with an orthographic projection that's slightly out-of-skew (you could still let the player switch perspective among the four cardinal directions).

There probably are a few people who dismiss games with 2D elements, but there's at least as many that actually appreciate it, and you'll win over any fence-sitters with the quality of the art and gameplay, not whether its rendered in 2D or 3D.

Reducing LoD is a nice strategy to reduce the problem a little, haven't considered it.

What I meant by the network problems was due to the massive amount of players on the screen (keeping clients syncronized is a problem that grows in a square order).

Each packet of info has to have:

* All the customization each player avatar has

* Everything the players have on and equipped

* The direction the players are facing

* All the players' critical stats

* The direction the players are moving

* The speed the players are moving at

* All lighting and particle effects for each player

* All the "extras" each players has, such as pets

* Everything else that's rendered as a result of each player

I remember on Secondlife, in some areas, I was downloading "game state" updates at 50Mb a minute

do you think that people would still be willing to play an sprite based game

Realm of The Mad God is a 2d, sprite-based cooperative bullet-hell MMO featuring perma-death, and it's very popular. You can read a bit about the design philosophy on Lost Garden. RoTMG is an excellent example of the fact that a well-made game -- 2d or 3d -- can succeed even if it features things that many consider unpopular or unworkable.