Framerate Cityscape

There's an inherent technical problem in a noir mmo.
WoW runs ok on my laptop, but not in the main cities - Undercity and Orgimmar (that's right I play Horde...wanna fight about it?). My framerate can sometimes drop as low as 8 fps. That's unplayable unless you're crafting, chatting, or on the auction house.

Almost all quests in WoW are outside the cities, so rendering is greatly reduced. But in a noir game nearly everything would happen in-city. And people should be able to play and have fun on a computer system a few years old. So the game would have to be massively instanced. (For those of you who don't know what "instances" are, basically it's a specified area that loads especially for you or your group. Other players/groups that come into that area get their own "instance" independent from yours. This means that your computer only renders the NPCs and players in your group, not the 10 million other players in the area).

Apparently other games like EverQuest didn't do instances, and so your group might run into another group in a dungeon and so you would have to fight/figure out which group got to continue and kill the main baddie.

You don't want your game to be playable to only those with the fastest/best/most expensive computers...you want people to play who use their computer for other things beside avoiding real life.

But at the same time, if you make everywhere instanced, what's the point of it being an mmo? You can't really interact with anyone. You might as well make a single player game with a mutiplayer component like GTA IV.

Sony Online Entertainment has a game coming (actually by some of the guys who made EverQuest) called The Agency, which I'm looking forward to that may deal with these very issues. We'll have to see...