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Limitations of a MMO: Content vs Size
phersso
Member Posts: 12
a) Many people like highly interactive games, that include a lot of content and features.
b) A MMOs fun and popularity esculate when you increase world size & maximum server population. (A bigger world and more players in-turn attract more players)
Where can you drawn the line between the two? For sake of the arguement, I'll give a quick setting:
Graphics: Decent new-age style, similar to Age of Conan, but a slight step back.
Content: Many objects are interactive. Chairs can be moved, picked up and sat on. Same with many other objects: trash, furniture, barrels, etc etc. Most things that could be found in a standard room, can be moved/picked up.
World Size: Something larger than WoW at launch. Lets say: 100km2 + (is that right?)
Server Max: Similar to many other MMOs (5000? 10000?)
Its a hard question to answer, because there are many variables other than the game (players PC, Internet speeds, etc).
Could anyone give an approximation, assuming that the Graphics and World Size are set-in-stone, and the other 3 variables can be changed, where do current game limitations lay?
Comments
One thing you have to remember with interactible objects in a non-instanced space is that several thousand people can and will be interacting with it. In addition so will NPCs.
On the content, I really don't see why a company cannot have alot of content and size. Content really isn't as expending as other features like graphics because it is simply a small text file less then 1MB in size and is handled on the processor that in most mmos is rarely overworking.
Most of the actual limitations of player count on mmos are based on the graphics and not really the gameplay mechanics.
The bottleneck is the networking.
Graphical details is no problem, as that is Client based, but the server part, being objects and everything is where it gets tricky.
Another variable is where you place the servers. If they are placed in Europe, then you won't attract many US players, as they often would have high latency, and the other way around.
How the world is programmed. In WoW the world areas are seemingless, except for Azeroth/Kalimdor/Outland, where you have loading zones.
Where as in other games you often have small areas with many loading zones.
I'm sure you could make a huge huge game, with many loading zones, without this hurting the client. But problem with this is that the world won't seem seemingless(Like in DDO).
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This is what I was thinking about. I am really curious if anyknow knows a ballpark estimate on how much object interactivity there can really be, before you start needing instancing and start getting glitches/jumpiness.
I mean, if you have many duplicate models of say, a wooden chair (lets say 1000). Each chair can be moved/pickedup/sat on. All of these chairs are in one zone. Now imagine adding in a variety of other objects, such as torches, knifes, bats, etc. Is there any way you can know where to draw the line, without testing it in a alpha release of a game?
Its very possible to do this with thousands of items. For an example just look at Second Life. A very old game that all objects are manipulatable by players and updated in real-time. However, like I said the problem is still very much graphics. With a game like EQ2 the character data per character is very large. All those little sliders you adjust have to be added to the character package. The larger it is the bigger the problem because you could be sending this package thousands of times a second. When you look at an object, the data to tell the client its position and rendering data is much smaller.
However, if you add physics to an mmo, then yea you are looking at instancing it due to the amount of processing the server will have to do.
Gameworld size and population are systemic dependencies. They need to remain in proportion to each other, at some ratio that is affected heavily by many variables. Let's consider some oversimplified generalities:
Huge Gameworld - Small Population
The gameworld will feel empty, and if the game requires cooperation or competition between players it will suffer greatly.
Small Gameworld - Huge Population
Everyone packed in tight, with little room to breathe. Leads to rampant player-killing and/or kill-stealing.
Both of these scenarios are a serious problem, but an overpopulated world is a problem that is harder to mitigate. Large worlds with small populations can use events or hubs to pull players together...but a small world with too many players has no room for anyone or anything.
A large world has the basic problem of giving enough content to explorer playertypes to make the world feel large, while creating systems that allow social, achiever, and killer playertypes feel like they've got content available at a reasonable distance from wherever they are.
It's a balancing act. Not an easy problem. And the systems a game uses for quests, PVP content, and so on heavily impact these systems.