Well as allot of you know I have been trying to work on my own MMO on and off for a few years (Navisaer) which really has some unique ideas and what not but havent been able to take the time I need to write my own engine and RC doesnt yet have the requirements, come to think of it no engine does at the moment. Anyway I am part of pretty much every dev group out there and when it comes to MMO's us MMO developers get allot of criticism for wanting to make an MMO or anything remotely close. The reason I write this post is because I see allot of talent in this community and I see allot of people really wanting to get into the industry and when you think about it what we do now will impact the game development industry for years. Not one point in time has there ever been the ability to develop an MMO with almost no knowledge of game development so I think we will see many mmo's popping up, some new ideas, some not so new but when your making your next big hit ask yourself do we need to mimic real life with our graphics, physics and events? The idea of a game is to entertain. To allow your players to escape reality into a true fantasy world so I thought long and hard about this and what I could do in order to make a mmo that would represent my idea of fantasy and to be honest Im dry on anything that isn't realistic, has our world turned reality into fantasy? I think so
Now this brings me to what I started this whole post about. If you intend for your mmo to be anything but ordinary then go 100% on your design dont just have a fantasy story with a "fantasy" world make your graphics appear less realistic and game play imaginative. So tell your modelers to stop modeling so realistic and start modeling something super crazy and leave the realistic graphics to those crappy FPS games.