Ability to modify world>>>large number of players

Rungar

Valheim is an excellent example that the mmo aspect is pretty much dead in the water compared to the ability to change the world. The world of Valheim is a more compelling world than any mmo could provide even with 10 players or just yourself. 

I always thought procedurally generated material was terrible but obviously it all depends on the implementation. The areas in Valheim feel more like a world than what you might  find in your typical mmo.

I can see this kind of tech settling in somewhere around 50-100 player servers leaving the mmo aspect buried in the dust in favor of a more personal experience. I think this is what EQnext was trying to do before it got scuttled, which is a shame because it would of been great.   

cheyane

I also feel so involved in the world that even just wandering about collecting resources and thinking up ways to fortify my home I just don't realise hours have ticked by. The time passes so quickly in this game because I am so involved in the game. It has completely bewitched me.

I have always had an affinity for building and creating things in games. I owned several homes in Everquest 2 and I simply adored that aspect of the game. I have given up probably years of my life to just crafting between EQ2, Vanguard and other games and only gave up when my carpel tunnel decided to rear its ugly head. It was especially bad in Vanguard the pain so I just stopped playing even though I was far from actually wanting to stop playing the game but I wanted to craft and just playing without crafting was too hollow an experience for me.

I am sure many cannot understand that sentiment but to some players crafting, decorating, farming can be very complete experiences in gaming that include combat and character building. For me it is a big part of roleplaying.

I think Valheim has surprised me a great deal in how immersive the world is. The world in spite of its one gig occupation in my hard drive has taken far more space in my gaming mind and play time. Truly a remarkable game.

Wizardry

I don't think EQNext was trying to do much of anything,perhaps seeing if any interest in the idea and he did not receive that interest in form of money from Landmark.Just imagine if he could fast foward a year or two seeing how much money is being thrown at crap,maybe it could have been a real thing.

As to Valheim,it looks borderline ugly to me,i rather have Atlas graphics anyday all day but of course Atlas is not doing any terraforming.However Atlas allows  much more freeform building,more things to do deeper game.

I would never sacrifice game for terraforming and even though it is not as bad as say Minecraft the resulting blocks are not great looking either,often the result looks like a mat of 128x128 texture sheets.
YES i do want to see the MMO genres move in the direction of Valheim/Atlas/Ark and YES i do want the Minecraft/Valheim terraforming but i need to see the whole package done right.

I also want to see us be able to hire NPC's like in Atlas.I laughed at what BDO was doing,icall that lazy,cheap half assed crap.Npc's that can harvest,fight,protect yoru base,sail your ship the whole nine yards,it is all doable.We just need a decent sized developer willing to do it.Maybe this valheim selling so many copies will actually do some good for the genre in that devs see that kind of money ,we might get the bigger players moving in with better games.

Mendel

cheyane said:

<snip>

...when my carpel tunnel decided to rear its ugly head.

I really prefer to think of carpel tunnel as having a spastic colon rather than an ugly head.  We've got to get someone started on improving that metaphor!

Rungar

I have the feeling that elder scrolls 6 has been delayed to such a degree all due to voxel technology. Valheim has shown that the game can be great without high res textures, but i have a feeling that elder scrolls 6 will be voxel based and have better textures than what's possible or reasonable now.  

TwistedSister77

remsleep said:

Valheim or any voxel base game that allows players to freely build and destroy world blocks will have a much lower number of players allowed simultaneously per map/zone/area than a non-voxel based game

This has to do with voxel-stream overhead that "static world" traditional games don't have to deal with at all - because the players cannot change the terrain at all.

The issue is one of exponential nature:

With one player connected to the server - things are dead simple - the client sends players actions such as movement, combat actions, item/inventory usage etc... to the server - the server validates those and responds back to the client. The communication in 1 client to 1 server is very symmetric in nature - 1 client generates 1 response from server for each action.

So now lets say 5 more players log in and are on the same screen with the 1st player - so there are now 6 clients communicating to the server - lets assume these 6 players are on a PvP map and are fighting eachother:

Player 1 - casts a fireball spell at player 2 - player 1's client sends the "cast fireball action" to the game server - the game server then responds back to not just Plauyer1's client - but has to inform all 6 player clients that there's a fireball being cast so that all the players were aware of player1's action.

So a single action from the client - will generate a response from the server to all 6 clients - because everyone involved in this PvP fight is the same area and the server needs to notify all clients about this action.

6 players involved in PvP all doing actions at the same time will generate 36 updates to each client from the server in real time.

Now imagine having 500 players in a battle all one area - for each client action - movement, combat action sent to the server - the server has to respond and inform all 500 clients - and this happens from all 500 players.

So 500 players battle - generates 250,000 responses from the server to each client if all 500 players are doing actions at the same time (which in mass PvP - they are all moving, casting etc...) and every client has to be aware of the actions from all 500 players - this is why massive scale PvP breaks down as the server gets overwhelmed so much - and the clients can't deal with a massive number of updates either. 

There are a bunch of "tricks" that network code server engineer will use to help here - but I am not going to go into that in this post.

So you see the exponential nature of how the server load and bandwidth OUT to clients can get out of hand pretty fast as you add more players to one small area.


And now in voxel based game - add the fact that world geometry can be changed by each client on top of all their actions - so that is what is meant by the "voxel stream" - as the server has to constantly send back to each client all terrain changes in real time - on top of all the other normal player actions (combat, movement, inventory/item use etc..)

So one player puts down a single block - if there are 50 other players nearby - the server has to send an update for that 1 block to all 50 players so that they can see that the world has changed.

Imagine 50 players all building at the same time - yep - the server will be sending 2500 updates to each client.


This is why voxel games tap out to much lower numbers of "concurrent players per map/area/zone/world" than traditional games.

I hope I made sense.

Yes, isn't this why Camelot Unchained creators are pimping making buildings that are fully destructible with over 1000 players pvp'ng in a siege?

Rungar

well it might not be technically voxel but it somewhat behaves like one i.e you can change the terrain and destroy objects. With the exception of making caves it seems far superior to voxels.