What is the most realistically scaled mmo?

Cpt_Picard

The continents of most mmorpgs often only take an hour max to cross, the entirety of wow's landmass being about the size of manhattan. Excluding games that have a Final Fantasyesque map (Potbs, STO) which game has the most realistic scale?Let's split this into Sci Fi and Fantasy/ground based games because I believe that open space is probably much easier to generate.

Balkon

Originally posted by Cpt_Picard

The continents of most mmorpgs often only take an hour max to cross, the entirety of wow's landmass being about the size of manhattan. Excluding games that have a Final Fantasyesque map (Potbs, STO) which game has the most realistic scale?Let's split this into Sci Fi and Fantasy/ground based games because I believe that open space is probably much easier to generate.

EVE...

 

Other than that... None that I can think of.. The only other realistically sized game was Daggerfall, not an MMO but it's world was literally the size of countries.

BeansnBread

I remember the planets in SWG used to be crazy big. But they were more like small moons than the planets they were supposed to represent.

Cpt_Picard

How big is eve actually? I don't play myself but I wouldn't surprised that if the distance between planets was measured physics would dictate that they should crush together.

BeansnBread

Originally posted by Cpt_Picard

How big is eve actually? I don't play myself but I wouldn't surprised that if the distance between planets was measured physics would dictate that they should crush together.

They use real distances between the planets. They use AUs (Astronomical Units) to measure distance between the stars and planets and things.

 

It pretty realistic in terms of the measurements. I think they even have a Sol system which includes earth and it's 8 other planets. The speed at which you travel, however is purely science fiction. :P

EricDanie

Originally posted by Cpt_Picard

How big is eve actually? I don't play myself but I wouldn't surprised that if the distance between planets was measured physics would dictate that they should crush together.

Realistically big. You aren't really able to travel all over the universe (over thousands of systems), or at least it would take you insanely long to do so, even considering there are jump gates from systems to systems every system in itself is also huge, providing a variety of activities.

People mostly settle and live on a few systems, or if they're haulers or something (thanks to local markets/banking this is a very possible to be a way of playing) they travel across a few systems from a trade hub to where they're going to sell/buy stuff.

I don't understand why games don't procedurally generate enormous worlds, players should improve the terrain over time/populate cities instead of tailoring small worlds. They can focus on the few cities/places that have special representations, but not everywhere is some special place that has to be hand tailored... 

Dredphyre

Since someone has arleady broken your stipulation of the MMO being ground based (by offering EVE), I'll shall hedge on your Fantasy/Sci Fi stipulation and suggest World War II Online. Its landmass is 1/2 scale Europe, or that portion of Europe it models anyway.

thecrap

Regarding maps UWO I think has the most realistic maps accurate to every city the entire world is available to explore its kinda spooky since its very detailed esp the monuments and landmarks of every city are noticeable but regarding traveling the game is like eve on sea with a lot more extra traveling may take a few hours to days depending on your ship

Adamantine

Originally posted by EricDanie

I don't understand why games don't procedurally generate enormous worlds, players should improve the terrain over time/populate cities instead of tailoring small worlds. They can focus on the few cities/places that have special representations, but not everywhere is some special place that has to be hand tailored... 

Thats trivial to explain.

The player doesnt want to run for hours just to hand in a quest.

So what do you do ? You pack a lot of content in minimal space.

Now if you still want realistic sizes, you would either have to

(a) generate quest content by some randomization algorithm (that one failed in Daggerfall).

(b) have an extreme amount of space without any purpose (which also has to be generated through randomization).

(c) employ like 10,000 to 100,000 to even more of artists and level designers to handdesign content for all this extreme amount of space. That means even if you assume a 10 Mio playerbase like for WoW, you would have 1 artist per 100 players, which in turn only pay like 15 dollar each, which compiles to just 1,500 dollars, from which you have to pay a lot more than just that artist.

HYPERI0N

Have to say for a land based one Vanguard saga of heroes.

 

But overall EvE heh probably take thousands of years just to travel from one star to another and thats with Micro warping all the time.

Novusod

Light and Dark (shut down) was the largest scaled MMO ever made. Land mass was 35,000 square miles or about the size of state of South Carolina.

Typhado

Originally posted by Adamantine

Originally posted by EricDanie

I don't understand why games don't procedurally generate enormous worlds, players should improve the terrain over time/populate cities instead of tailoring small worlds. They can focus on the few cities/places that have special representations, but not everywhere is some special place that has to be hand tailored... 

Thats trivial to explain.

The player doesnt want to run for hours just to hand in a quest.

So what do you do ? You pack a lot of content in minimal space.

Now if you still want realistic sizes, you would either have to

(a) generate quest content by some randomization algorithm (that one failed in Daggerfall).

(b) have an extreme amount of space without any purpose (which also has to be generated through randomization).

(c) employ like 10,000 to 100,000 to even more of artists and level designers to handdesign content for all this extreme amount of space. That means even if you assume a 10 Mio playerbase like for WoW, you would have 1 artist per 100 players, which in turn only pay like 15 dollar each, which compiles to just 1,500 dollars, from which you have to pay a lot more than just that artist.

 

I think we need to be looking more into this sort of stuff. While the content in daggerfall wasn't great that game is 14 years old.

Plenty of games use procedurely generated content now that is touched up by people afterwards. I think MMO's are where this sort of thing could best come through.

Visc

 The problem claimong EvE is huge is itnot difficult for it to "seem" huge. You have a stoic backdrop that no matter how long you fly it never changes dimension (kinda like a browser game) the only thing that you actually move between is a few items in the system. Sure the numbers change to give you the feeling of a vast system but it's always had a sense of staleness of movement for me. The systems, as they like to call them are nothing more than zones. When you gate jump your just zoning into another lifeless backdrop of a map. I played the game for over 5 yrs and it never felt right.

 Darkfall (open map except for dungeon zones), LOTRO (few zones) and FFXI  (zoned) seem like large map areas to me.

Excession

posted this info in another thread, but it fits here too.

Linkage:

http://www.actionradius.com/jdl/default.asp?id=1801&qty=1

and

http://static02.mediaite.com/geekosystem/uploads/2010/05/Large-Video-Game-Worlds.jpg

HYPERI0N

Originally posted by Visc

 The problem claimong EvE is huge is itnot difficult for it to "seem" huge. You have a stoic backdrop that no matter how long you fly it never changes dimension (kinda like a browser game) the only thing that you actually move between is a few items in the system. Sure the numbers change to give you the feeling of a vast system but it's always had a sense of staleness of movement for me. The systems, as they like to call them are nothing more than zones. When you gate jump your just zoning into another lifeless backdrop of a map. I played the game for over 5 yrs and it never felt right.

 Darkfall (open map except for dungeon zones), LOTRO (few zones) and FFXI  (zoned) seem like large map areas to me.

There is no Zoning in eve

JaggaSpikes

Originally posted by HYPERI0N

Originally posted by Visc

 The problem claimong EvE is huge is itnot difficult for it to "seem" huge. You have a stoic backdrop that no matter how long you fly it never changes dimension (kinda like a browser game) the only thing that you actually move between is a few items in the system. Sure the numbers change to give you the feeling of a vast system but it's always had a sense of staleness of movement for me. The systems, as they like to call them are nothing more than zones. When you gate jump your just zoning into another lifeless backdrop of a map. I played the game for over 5 yrs and it never felt right.

 Darkfall (open map except for dungeon zones), LOTRO (few zones) and FFXI  (zoned) seem like large map areas to me.

There is no Zoning in eve

star systems are zones in EVE

cosy

Originally posted by spinner_vis


Originally posted by HYPERI0N


Originally posted by Visc


 The problem claimong EvE is huge is itnot difficult for it to "seem" huge. You have a stoic backdrop that no matter how long you fly it never changes dimension (kinda like a browser game) the only thing that you actually move between is a few items in the system. Sure the numbers change to give you the feeling of a vast system but it's always had a sense of staleness of movement for me. The systems, as they like to call them are nothing more than zones. When you gate jump your just zoning into another lifeless backdrop of a map. I played the game for over 5 yrs and it never felt right.
 Darkfall (open map except for dungeon zones), LOTRO (few zones) and FFXI  (zoned) seem like large map areas to me.

There is no Zoning in eve

star systems are zones in EVE

 

yes and no, for example when you jump in to a system if you type something in the chat the text is send to other player even if you have the "loading bar"

Sovrath

Originally posted by HYPERI0N

Have to say for a land based one Vanguard saga of heroes.

 

But overall EvE heh probably take thousands of years just to travel from one star to another and thats with Micro warping all the time.

I would also agree on Vanguard. I't pretty much the only game I've played where I have to think "do I have enough time to get there", explore and come back?"

Gilgameesh

The most realistic scaled world that I know is actually Fallen Earth, with 0 loading screens (Vanguard have chunks).

cheyane

I think it is Vanguard too as the world was not cut and paste or wide expanse of space. The world had nooks and crannies that you could explore and find amazing things like a waterfall or stream or a strange tree. Then it was far like the above poster said you would actually wonder if you could get back in time or how long it would take to go and come back form a place. That seemed very realistic.

bdew

Every system in eve is a separate instance, no ammount of years traveling would let you get to another system without using a gate / jump drive.

More interesting there are "grids", fully closed areas that you can interact inside, normally being a few hundereds of kilometers in every direction but that changes at runtime. Nothing occuring outside the grid you are in can affect you or even be seen by you, there can be a massive fleet battle with thousands of battleships going 10 km from you but you will never see [except "crap lag!111" in local chat] or hear anything untill you cross that grid border.

So basicaly while the world in eve is technicaly well scaled in the numbers they show you, it's not actually supported by the gameplay.

AlysenMinase

Most likely Vanguard for fantasy, and Eve for Sci Fi.

If we're saying any game, not just MMO's, definetly Minecraft. It can be 8 times the size of Earth, and the land layout it generates can be nice to look at sometimes.

Czzarre

Im going to say either Darkfall or EvE

TheHatter

EVE isn't realistically scaled, at all. Space is very very big. LIke, unconceivably big. 

100AU at the speed of light would take 14hrs. (yeah, I just did the math) You do it in EVE in about 2min. I think Warp drive in EVE is under the speed of light, but don't quote me I can't remember. Yes, I understand that ratings are in AU/s, but yeah.... that's just.... well nvm. 

So......... that would make it the most UN-Realistically scaled MMO of them all. 

 

The most Realistically scaled MMO I think is WWII Online. I believe it's a 1:1 model of Europe. I think Fallen Earth is also a 1:1 model of the Grand Canyon, or just slightly less. So, it's probably a tie between those 2. 

laokoko

I have no idea. But I would say Eve have it so much easy to make a giagantic world.

I dont' think in an artistic stand of point, it take much work at all to creat an area.

I mean the environment of Eve looks like the sky of other mmorpg.

Windssoul

Originally posted by TheHatter

EVE isn't realistically scaled, at all. Space is very very big. LIke, unconceivably big. 

100AU at the speed of light would take 14hrs. (yeah, I just did the math) You do it in EVE in about 2min. I think Warp drive in EVE is under the speed of light, but don't quote me I can't remember. Yes, I understand that ratings are in AU/s, but yeah.... that's just.... well nvm. 

So......... that would make it the most UN-Realistically scaled MMO of them all. 

 

The most Realistically scaled MMO I think is WWII Online. I believe it's a 1:1 model of Europe. I think Fallen Earth is also a 1:1 model of the Grand Canyon, or just slightly less. So, it's probably a tie between those 2. 

Shame you forgot the math of the warp drive.

And the Warp drive is signifigantly faster then C.