The Daily Grind: Web or Client based?
When many of us started online gaming, there was no such thing as a web-based MMO client. By gosh, you either telnetted into your MUD, or got your CD and took a couple of hours to install your game, and you liked it! Now with the advent of faster connections, some companies have wandered onto the web for their gaming. Flash-driven MMOs are attempting to change how you look at web-based gaming. Of course, advancing along with both forms of MMO are the ISPs worldwide who limit downloads, and either cap you or charge you obscene amounts of money for going over your allotment in terms of traffic - an issue that affects all MMO gamers, web and client alike.
Today, with the looming advance of download restrictions in mind, we wanted to ask... Do you prefer your MMOs to run as a separate application, which includes higher-resolution graphics, full-quality music, and other larger file-sized assets because you'd gotten it on CD/DVD/downloaded the mother of all files - but which generally require enormous patches? Or do you like the idea of a web side client such as Gaia Online's zOMG! where if you're on limited bandwidth, you don't have to deal with enormous patches to download every time there's new content - it all streams to you. Does it make no difference to you as long as the game is good?
