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Open world or instance zones?
BishopTx
Member Posts: 23
having played just about every MMO on the market and have an offbeat opinion that one of the major reasons why many MMO's fail is due to a core design choice in how exploration, grouping etc are handled.
I see two major "types" of MMO's these days --- WoW like, open world, near seamless travel, huge exploration opportunties, limited use of world instances (only for raiding, dungeons etc) and very limited loading time/screens. There is only one Orgrimmar and if you want to meet someone there you don't have to choose between 54 different "zoned" instances of it. WoW is like this, LOTRO, EVE is the extreme being only one server.
Then there are the Guild Wars games - zone based, population capped, completely instanced based, small exploration, lots of loading screens, no seamless transitions from one area to the next etc. All of the City of Hero/Villian games, Age of Conan, Star Trek Online, Champions Onlineare like this. I remember when AOC came out and you'd be in a group and the group would decide to go from one part of the city to another and in doing so it would separate the party into different "zones". Extreme example of not only a bad design choice but a horrible implementation, but it really demonstrated how "MMO" these games really aren't. Having 36 different ALPHA quadrants to choose from in Star Trek Online just doesnt make it feel like the final frontier.
I'm not saying that this is the only reason these games haven't been that successful nor the reason why WoW and the others have been...just that I believe it is one of the most critical elements of a good MMO. Guild Wars is the only zone capped game like it that has a solid following but its not fair to compare because it's free....
Which design Is DCUO?
Hoping it's big, expansive, and open world exploration...nothing would ruin the game faster than being able to have only 28 people in a capital city (AOC's initial limitation).
I'm trying to avoid.... these conversations:
You to your friend: "Hey, where are you?"
Your friend to you: "I'm outside of the dungeon"
You to your friend: "You are? I don't see you."
Your friend to you: "Bah - what instance are you in... I'm in Gotham 23"
You to your friend: "OH - I'm in Gotham 54 - wait a sec, I'll switch"
Cheers.
Comments
no one knows?
Knowing SOE, it will probably be instanced.
I think this has less to do about SOE and more to do about the platform. Most likely it will be more like Champions online and GW2 with a map limit cap such as the OP explained.
Yes, we may see a gotham 23, but its for the sake of performance. Perhaps the cap will be 100 players, maybe it will be 200. The fact of the matter is, many lower end PCs won't be able to handle the severe strain of 200+ players on screen at one time, and its almost certain the PS3 wouldn't be able to.
This could be why more console oriented games are going that route such as CO did.
It would be nice to not instance this type of play, but its doubtful they will have a truly uninstanced open world.
what does it being sony or a console have to do with anything?
The games that made this infamous were all non-sony PC titles lol. coh, guild wars, champions online, sto
As stated it has little to do with it being console specific but hardware specific. They do this for performance, to throttle the amount of players in an area. PSU did it, and that was a console game. CO does it and it was built to release on a console. STO, most likely planned to be console bound until Microsoft cattled them.
The fact of the matter is, scaling players, primarily for performance concerns due to hardware. You have limitations on some PCs and the PS3. You have to scale it somehow. This is the easiest way that I know of.
DCUO is kind of both, Gotham and Metropolis are the main cities and there are a huge amount of areas in these cities, Arkam Asylum for example. Of course places like that are instanced, but there are also carnival areas and an amazing amount of instanced Episodes to do, so its a mix of both, the instanced episodes are like City of Heroes, it doesnt have near as many as CoH but there are also instances and such.
Mystery Bounty
To the original poster, thank you for asking the question that has been floating around in my head, I have come to a similar conclusion about games that are heavily instanced, I tend to not want to play them.
I am hoping DCUO will be an open world but also believe that because of the limitations of consoles it will be instanced very heavily.
Still kind of optomistic though, the storyline trailer makes it look like the creative folks have some pull in making the game so I will be keeping my fingers crossed and hope for the best!
I agree with the original poster that I prefer non-instanced design to instanced design, although I must beg to differ on his statement that "there is only 1 Orgrimar" Yes, per server.... but how many servers are there? And instanced design allows you to swap relatively seamlessly between instances whereas Blizz would like some money off you to allow you to swap servers to play with your mates.
It does come down to performance though, and the more graphically intensive games become, the more developers are having to try and take steps to ensure that the game doesn't grind to a halt. In a game such as DCUO, where they're emphasising "action-based gameplay" I would imagine lag would hurt even more than in a "Wow - type" MMO.
I probably prefer the WOW style of design, but it does offer the developers less flexibility. At launch they need to take a guess on how many servers they will require. Almost without exception, this will be wrong, whether they guess too high or too low. So, shortly after launch you either end up having too few servers or with under-populated servers. The net result of that will be queuing, server moves and/or server closures. Compare that to an instanced model where developers can simply add or remove a couple more servers to increase or decrease capacity and it becomes easy to understand why they probably prefer that model.
What does irritate me though is when bad design means that there are only 20 people in an area (when better design could have had 50 or a 100). My other irritant is when bad design means that it takes a user half an hour to work out how to change instance so you can play with a mate. Teaming should also be easy across instances. If all of these things are coded well, instanced gameplay can be a lot less painful.
I made reference to the multiple server design in the OP. Only Eve offers a true open world and is single server. However, the zone instance based MMO vs Open world but server limited debate is one of the silliest arguments you can make. It's like saying that the only reason a car is faster than a bike is because a car has an engine.
Look, the facts are that all the zone based instance games (AOC, City of Hero/Villian, STO, Champions Online, Everquest 2 (although its not as bad as others) are all server based as well. So the argument is totally mute. Makes no sense, check your bags at the door, thank you have a nice day. Argument over.
Open world designs, like in WOW, allow as many people as the server can hold to be in one general area. And the average server size in WoW is more than 13,000 people. In AOC all you could have in a capital area zone at any one time was 28...and there are often more than 60 zones of the SAME area to choose from....and you are on a specific server.
The reason most of these Non-MMO zone based instance games (MMO Wanna-be) are designed the way they are is their tech really sucks. Its limited, many times, by the allure of allowing the game to be ported to a console, which have very limited memory capacities. Bad desicion and it will never work. You get small spaces, limited by population caps. ICK!
Other reasons are simple poor tech design.
Mark my words, the only MMOs that will garner consistent subscribers (fee based) of more than 500,000 people (the water mark for profitability) are those with open world designs. If DCUO isn't it will fail...people play these games for as many social reasons as they do gameplay reasons. And if the game isnt condusive to Massively multiplayer situations, well its going to fail.
okay confirmed.
Very small, shard based (instance zone pop-capped) locations.
"Where are you Steve?"
"I'm in Gotham Craig."
"Which Gotham"
"Gotham 57, lets meet there to quest"
And then to find Gotham is split up in 20 more instanced based zones, sharded gameplay.
This system doesnt work. It's not really an MMO.
Pre-order cancelled. Collossal Failure predicted.