The old consoles are basically 10 year old pc's. Sure other mmo's can run more, but they sacrifice graphics, particularly 3rd person mmo's which are stylized in a cartoon type style to protect the players from extremely long load times or crashes. Not to mention the fact that when thinking of an mmo to compare to the bold consoles, you need to be thinking of an mmo that was released in the 2004-2005 range and the graphics of those times. Things you must keep in mind are the following: Processing power and RAM: How much data can the hardware handle at one time? The finer and better graphics require more data to be stored and readily accessible, which on pc's is most often referred to as ram, which is short for readily accessible memory, or something like that. This is where your go to data is stored, which can be drawn up and processed extremely fast, and where consoles and computers store data for what it's processing or going to process right then and there, such as the map, texture details, enemies and enemy AI, physics, character data, etc. Your processing power feeds that data through the graphics card in the console or pc, so that you may see on screen the 30 or 60 frames a second that produces the on screen video game you are playing. Graphics card: This goes hand in hand with the other two as well, however is also of its own class. The graphics card is responsible for turning those bits of code into that you see on screen, and the more modern graphics cards do so more efficiently. They can handle more data at a time, and produce a better image faster from the code it receives. If you are lacking in any one of these departments, your game will either crash/not run, or run slowly, and both of these results create an unplayable game and angry customers. If you know anything about pc's and their innards you know how fast technology for them is advancing (its crazy).