A realistic game world is absolutely foundational for me. Even if I cannot actually visit the mountain range in the distance it needs to be real for me to achieve immersion.
Note however that physical scale is only one way to achieve "realistic scale." EQ achieved it merely with small view distance and decent size zones.
What we are talking about, really, is the emergence of a true "living world" to participate in and adventure in.
There isn't an MMO out there yet that's generated a "living, breathing, world" model that engages a player population the way one would . . . if it truly was a living, breathing, World.
SIZE would have to be large, if not huge. Massive.
The trick however is that simply BIGGER isn't the issue, even if a component. It's what a living, breathing world would present to players, and what the target audience would be for the challenges it would present.
It wouldn't be for everyone. That would be a good thing, not a bad thing.
All the MMO's I've played so far, from AC2, to WoW for a bunch of years, to LOTRO, to Warhammer, to Age of Conan, to Runes of Magic, (I'll exclude EvE in this list because it's a different animal, an apple to the orange), To Vanguard, to Neverwinter, to Archeage, and several others, some of which I liked greatly, all have a same theme generally speaking:
The world is an open parking lot free for lightning fast over-running by the player base. The only token "push back" from the world is levels and mob level, both of which, relatively speaking, are easily overcome by simple farming exercises and reading of spoilers from others.
The worlds don't require UNLOCKING of key, hmmm, "artifacts" I'll call them by the playerbase. They are . . .boop! . . . already provided on the maps: Towns, roadways, open fields ready for planting (archeage) unencumbered by old-growth forests that need to be cleared and prepped first, etc.
Exploration and Discovery are, to huge degree, nullified by this world structure, only present in token amounts . . . then too gone once the waves of ravening players sweep across every square yard of space like a pack of starving fat kids set loose in a Sander's Chocolate factory.
The Unknown, "what's around the corner" gets neutered in the process, quickly.
Godlike powers given to players too quickly, instead of being incorporated into the game as . . . eventual unlocks . . . by players as a result of a signature activity (as a concept example). I mean, players spent MASSIVE amounts of time and effort, sometimes expense for a dang MOUNT. What would it be like to have an unlock in the background, such as Fire, Water, or Elemental magic, not present or available in the game yet, but due to some random exposure of opportunity to a player, who completes some kind of "investigation and research" into something, and does so SUCCESSFULY . . . causes an UNLOCK of a new branch of magic to the entire game world.
And maybe they get the permanent, embodied in the game, recognition for doing so.
Environmental Pushback: Game worlds are too open, too easily traversed level and mob level regardless. A true, huge, "living world" would present significant challenges to players right at the border of the starting areas, even if that was a SMALL zone with a castle and king to start.
Challenges and activities met, and conquered, by players would AFFECT the game world. "Safe", or safer / easier (meaning what our current crop of MMO zones look like, about) would slowly appear as the playerbase expanded their exploration of the huge game world.
The world would be WILD enough, and DANGEROUS enough there wouldn't be waves of spoiler driven, or even beta knowledge driven farmers, sweeping across an entire game world in . . . a day or three. (lmfao . . . and lol some more).
A HUGE game world is a great idea. But what's vastly more profound is HOW that volume is architected against a target audience of customers.
a huge galaxy with thousands of solar system, and planets of a considerable size, small enough for not having to spend much time travelling around, but bigger enough for housing several player driven countries. a galaxy so big that there would never be problem with ocupation. (the community would slowly expand around the inner cluster but could only be one branch in the whole galaxy if you look it that way)
Originally posted by Fdzzaigl I would really like a well done big world.BUT...The "well done" part is the tricky bit. Big worlds carry big issues.How do you manage to get your population in contact with eachother and engaging in group activites? Without letting everyone teleport everywhere and thereby nullifying the effect of your world.How do you manage to fill up the large stretches of space with interesting stuff nonetheless? Just "making it procedural" isn't going to cut it at all. I haven't seen a single procedural world that proved really interesting to explore.How do you prevent people from sticking to a small part of your world or to hubs and ignoring the rest?etc...Yes, my perfect dream game solves all these issues effortlessly as well. But I'm under no delusion that it would be so easy to do in IRL.
this is a good point. How do you keep the world populated across all zones?
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
Personally I wouldn't want something like that, but that would be me.
I'd rather have a smaller hand crafted world with lots of interesting things to discover and find out than a world that much bigger but almost all of it is just composed of "random forest" "random denser forest" "lake" "bigger lake" "smaller lake" and so on.
Same with dungeons, to fill such a big world, dungeons would have to be proceduraly generated... personally I'd much rather do a dungeon hand made than one that's just randomly generated hallways using a specific set of themed objects and textures.
My wife's mother passed away a couple weeks ago... we had to drive 2 days to get there for the funeral, 2 days to get back. I wouldn't want to have to do that in a game to play with a friend just because he happened to have spawned (or be) too far away from where I am.. "hey, want to do dungeon X?" "sure, just give me three days to get there".
In a game I'd want NPCs I can get to know by name, that have personality. In GW2 I always chuckled when I was running by in LA and heard that norn exclaim "by ogden's hammer, what savings"... I felt distressed when I couldn't find him among the survivors when scarlet destroyed the city... happy when I saw him... and then sad when I saw him kneeling in front of what was left of his house mourning the dead of his wife and children... might not be procedural, might be stuck in an eternal loop, and might have a very small population relatively... but at least for me, GW2 right now (to use as an exapmple) feels more like a living breathing world filled with people I remember about after interacting with them than what I can imagine from what you describe.
You have some good points, but consider:
"A smaller hand crafted worlds" will have a small inventory of "interesting things to discover" with a very SHORT life expectancy. Thus, a small, hand crafted world is the antithesis to keeping things interesting and discoverable.
Players flood the small world like jackrabbits, work out the farming dyanmics, and in short order stuff turns into farming-grind-gerbil-wheel.
Travel: it's how you do it that matters. If your design establishes what you've described, then that's what you get. On the other hand . . . . design for success, do it different. It's in how you do it.
I agree with you about connection with the game world story-lining and NPC characters of note. I'm very much like you in that regard. /waves
The crop of MMO's that have been released the past few years don't really do the job. They follow (generally) a same pattern: Make it smaller and FASTER, feed people stuff FAST, grab the money while it's flowing . . .
. . . meaning a deliberate, expected feed off the initial whale-rush that steams through the game world in no time flat, then a fast (or perhaps moderate) crash as actual interest and discovery are bled out and it falls into the SAME OH RUT of repeat farming.
In the end an MMO is nothing more than a blank canvas until artist(s) put paint to brush. Bigger, larger, all by itself is meaningless except for one, very important factor:
It provides for much greater opportunity. There's more to work with.
I agree with the OP; I much prefer large, open worlds. I'm not going to suddenly become bored if there's not a point of interest every 20 feet. This is the one thing that drives me absolutely nutty about FFXIV.
There is one other thing that hasn't been touched on yet, however. Namely, that every single structure in these games seems to have been built with 12' tall titans in mind. Every thing is XXL; can anyone think of an area where you can't have four people walk abreast without touching the sides? Cramped hallways, narrow tunnels, houses that aren't inhabited by giants, these things just seem to not exist in MMORPGs.
Until game design AI can programme this sort of thing of the hoof, its never going to be commercially viable to have a game with the world size of the old School MMO's with top end graphics.
There is one other thing that hasn't been touched on yet, however. Namely, that every single structure in these games seems to have been built with 12' tall titans in mind. Every thing is XXL; can anyone think of an area where you can't have four people walk abreast without touching the sides? Cramped hallways, narrow tunnels, houses that aren't inhabited by giants, these things just seem to not exist in MMORPGs.
There are two reasons for that. One is camera views. If the camera is on the other side of a wall, you can't see what is going on. If the camera is two feet behind your character, you still can't see what is going on. In order to allow a camera to give you a good view of the action, you have to allow more space, and that means more spacious buildings. You can scale everything up to look like it's built for giants, or else you can only make the room bigger and not tables or chairs or such and make it seem out of proportion.
The second reason is animations. When you run, for example, what is maximum forward gap between the furthest forward part of your body (likely a front foot, possibly a hand) and the furthest back part (probably the back foot)? If you turn that sideways, do you think you would fit through a typical real-life doorway? Having characters pull their arms and legs in when near a wall is very, very awkward to do with traditional animation methods. Having characters able to walk right up to a wall without pulling arms and legs in would mean graphically poking through it, which looks terrible. The alternative is to make spaces bigger so that arms and legs and such can go where they need to go without looking all wrong.
Originally posted by Scot Until game design AI can programme this sort of thing of the hoof, its never going to be commercially viable to have a game with the world size of the old School MMO's with top end graphics.
Originally posted by Scot Until game design AI can programme this sort of thing of the hoof, its never going to be commercially viable to have a game with the world size of the old School MMO's with top end graphics.
Be specific. What are you referring to exactly?
Designing and coding takes too much time and money to do this in todays market. Until the tools are so easy to use that you could hugely cut the development time this just is not going to happen. Also if we reached that point a new bar would be set, one all would then have to follow, so the issue may arise again.
Originally posted by Scot Until game design AI can programme this sort of thing of the hoof, its never going to be commercially viable to have a game with the world size of the old School MMO's with top end graphics.
Be specific. What are you referring to exactly?
Designing and coding takes too much time and money to do this in todays market. Until the tools are so easy to use that you could hugely cut the development time this just is not going to happen. Also if we reached that point a new bar would be set, one all would then have to follow, so the issue may arise again.
Not really specific enough. You've made a generalized, sweeping statement, a dictum, that translates to: "We don't have the time to do it right, so doing it any ole way is ok".
The irony here is: It's the sign of the times, the way we've been "programmed", or conditioned, to ACCEPT the mediocre, or even the failure, or we're the people who don't understand. Which isn't a good thing at all.
"Measure twice, cut once." is a saying vastly older than MMO business providers. It's a truism from the time it was first uttered, and a truism today - though one ignored because it's uncomfortable to face.
Our problem today is: We are a bunch of spoiled, pampered, self involved slackers willing to accept mediocrity, or even schlock . . . just because "that's the way it is, it can't be changed, just has to be accepted, that's just the market get a clue".
No.
MMO's rest at one pinnacle, or facet, of creative human effort. The technology capabilities today are astounding. But what's it turned into? A money grab carnival run by sidewalk hawkers who suck in rubes busy with their noses stuck in their butts.
We've seen a bunch of years of MMOs pumped out by dev houses. We've seen bits and pieces of fantastic implementation in each of them. The knowledge is there, the designs, principles, technology, is there.
You want to know what the real problem is, to greater degree than many would like to admit?
Businesses have lost the ability to manage their budgets properly, lured by the same siren call everyone else is afflicted with: Grab the money now and run.
So why bother to measure twice before putting saw to wood?
With the knowledge, technology, and experience out there I'll politely disagree "it's just not possible".
It'll take someone with a remarkably strong will however to rise above the mediocre, or even Fail people hold up today as the Standard.
Originally posted by Scot Until game design AI can programme this sort of thing of the hoof, its never going to be commercially viable to have a game with the world size of the old School MMO's with top end graphics.
Be specific. What are you referring to exactly?
Designing and coding takes too much time and money to do this in todays market. Until the tools are so easy to use that you could hugely cut the development time this just is not going to happen. Also if we reached that point a new bar would be set, one all would then have to follow, so the issue may arise again.
I really don't see your logic here... As a Game Developer my self world Size doesn't really mean more Programming... You program a single Zone Server that can then serve any zone in the world... It's not like you have to program a Zone Server for each Zone in your world... With the right technology going into your game your world can be as large as you want it to be. It comes down to Server hardware to host the zones on which takes money... The more going on in your zones the better hardware is needed... the better the hardware needed the more money it's going to cost.
Personally I have been waiting for a game like the op described. Maybe not as huge as Europe but something quite large, at least something larger than what we've seen in previous MMO's.
I feel like EQ did this well. It may not have been the largest land mass but it certainly gave the feeling of being in a world that was quite large and formidable. I think the weather affects added to this, specifically with the rain and fog, because in both instances it limited your sight distance, making even the most common zones seem large and dangerous.
Personally I think this form of game could work extremely well. Especially with the addition in todays MMO's of more player created or controlled content. Like having player farms, housing, cities and castles. In the terms of a LARGE land mass I think systems like these would help to fill it up, one game that I could use as an example would be Shadowbane.
In Shadowbane, players/guilds were able to create their own cities anywhere on the landmass that they deemed fit. They could setup their cities in anyway they wanted except in one, which was where the city tree was placed. The city tree is basically the item you would plant to stake your claim on land to build your city. The tree was typically in the center of the city but being able to shape the city as you deemed fit, you could end up making it in the back or front or middle depending on how you created the city around your tree. However the tree was in the middle of the "claim" and you would at times be wasting land if you wanted the tree to be anywhere other than the middle.
I think a game with a really LARGE landmass would do great with a system like this. Allow guilds to make cities/castles and players to create farms and homes. In this instance, with the large land mass, you could allow players to literally create plantations that would consist of multiple buildings and many fields. Allowing players to have very large "plots" of land to do with as they like. This would obviously all be tied to crafting and allow the player/guild to create items to help them adventure.
With the addition of this content to any other content that was already in the game (ie NPC dungeons, NPC castles, NPC towns, etc etc) you could fill up the world quite well. There would still be the issue of everyone wanting to be close to the prebuilt towns for quest and AH access but you could put in restrictions on building too close to towns/cities that were pre-built.
There are other systems you could attempt to create to help this as well. For instance maybe throughout creating your home/farm/plantation you could create a NPC that is your servant. Through this NPC you could "send" them to the local city or town to place certain things on the AH for you or to talk to other NPC's looking for quests. Maybe something like having a interface with the NPC where you could say, I want you to take these # of items and put them on the AH for these prices and I want you to look for quests that involve Blacksmithing and Mining. Then have selections in the interface for the different crafts, exploration, kill quests that the NPC would search for. After setting this and telling the NPC to go, he would walk off your property (or just despawn) while he traveled, did the tasks and then comes back (or just respawns) to let you know the items are on the AH and offer the quests that he found. There would be a time frame on this so it wasn't automatic and you would have to wait for them to do everything, so it felt like he actually did the walk and all the talking, to keep immersion.
With the extra landmass you could really turn the game into not just a MMO but a simulator. For instance, with the plantation idea or large farms, maybe after a certain size you can start creating NPC's that live on your farm and do the farm work for you. So you could then setup where you wanted things planted and then send your servants to work on it while you went out adventuring or gathering other materials. You would then have to also make sure they had housing and food and what not but as you can see you could really flesh out this whole farm/home/town/city into a game all itself. Allowing the players that just wanted to have a huge plantation and create food/items and what not and sell them and then others that had a home and filled it with loot they got fighting monsters. Add in PVP and city sieges and BOOM, now you have a whole new system for different types of player content and a HUGE world to put it in so everyone has room.
There is still different issues to overcome, like how does a player go from entering the game to having enough experience to go FAAAAARRRR out into the world and create a place to live and have everything they need to do that. If players have these huge farms and things, how do you make having these large responsibilities worth it in the end? Do players really need 4 carts full of wheat? What would need that quantity that doesn't break immersion, I mean a box of cornflakes doesn't take 3 fields worth of wheat to make. These are all just examples but I think there are things that could be done in a game like this that would fill it up with either dev created content and player created content.
Then you have the issue of hardware and how to support it without going over budget and I have no idea on how to do that but I can dream can't I?
It can be done. In alpha testing of our upcoming mmo we had a world that took almost 2.5 hours to cross at a sprint and non encumbered from one side to the other and zoneless. A cluster of 7 high end hexacores ran this. It is a matter of hardware and server budget.
We also can infinitely expand this world by adding more servers to the cluster.
Originally posted by Scot Until game design AI can programme this sort of thing of the hoof, its never going to be commercially viable to have a game with the world size of the old School MMO's with top end graphics.
Be specific. What are you referring to exactly?
Designing and coding takes too much time and money to do this in todays market. Until the tools are so easy to use that you could hugely cut the development time this just is not going to happen. Also if we reached that point a new bar would be set, one all would then have to follow, so the issue may arise again.
I really don't see your logic here... As a Game Developer my self world Size doesn't really mean more Programming... You program a single Zone Server that can then serve any zone in the world... It's not like you have to program a Zone Server for each Zone in your world... With the right technology going into your game your world can be as large as you want it to be. It comes down to Server hardware to host the zones on which takes money... The more going on in your zones the better hardware is needed... the better the hardware needed the more money it's going to cost.
It is the content that has to fit in the zones I am referring to. A big world means big content. MMO's today tend to be 'rat runs' compared to older MMOs.
There is one other thing that hasn't been touched on yet, however. Namely, that every single structure in these games seems to have been built with 12' tall titans in mind. Every thing is XXL; can anyone think of an area where you can't have four people walk abreast without touching the sides? Cramped hallways, narrow tunnels, houses that aren't inhabited by giants, these things just seem to not exist in MMORPGs.
There are two reasons for that. One is camera views. If the camera is on the other side of a wall, you can't see what is going on. If the camera is two feet behind your character, you still can't see what is going on. In order to allow a camera to give you a good view of the action, you have to allow more space, and that means more spacious buildings. You can scale everything up to look like it's built for giants, or else you can only make the room bigger and not tables or chairs or such and make it seem out of proportion.
The second reason is animations. When you run, for example, what is maximum forward gap between the furthest forward part of your body (likely a front foot, possibly a hand) and the furthest back part (probably the back foot)? If you turn that sideways, do you think you would fit through a typical real-life doorway? Having characters pull their arms and legs in when near a wall is very, very awkward to do with traditional animation methods. Having characters able to walk right up to a wall without pulling arms and legs in would mean graphically poking through it, which looks terrible. The alternative is to make spaces bigger so that arms and legs and such can go where they need to go without looking all wrong.
You don't really have to make the game world insanely large to make it fun. You also don't need everything to be procedurally generated to make it dynamic. Perhaps one server could vary from another when its initially built, but beyond that mob AI and terraforming would do the trick.
To fill the world and keep everything relevant you do what great games of the past did. Scatter rare mobs, quests and other points of interest throughout all zones, including those near cities or "starter zones." Then add stuff like trade routes and you're pretty much good to go. Remove things like the auction house and make localize banks and you will find every city and the surrounding area will naturally become a hub.
There is one other thing that hasn't been touched on yet, however. Namely, that every single structure in these games seems to have been built with 12' tall titans in mind. Every thing is XXL; can anyone think of an area where you can't have four people walk abreast without touching the sides? Cramped hallways, narrow tunnels, houses that aren't inhabited by giants, these things just seem to not exist in MMORPGs.
There are two reasons for that. One is camera views. If the camera is on the other side of a wall, you can't see what is going on. If the camera is two feet behind your character, you still can't see what is going on. In order to allow a camera to give you a good view of the action, you have to allow more space, and that means more spacious buildings. You can scale everything up to look like it's built for giants, or else you can only make the room bigger and not tables or chairs or such and make it seem out of proportion.
The second reason is animations. When you run, for example, what is maximum forward gap between the furthest forward part of your body (likely a front foot, possibly a hand) and the furthest back part (probably the back foot)? If you turn that sideways, do you think you would fit through a typical real-life doorway? Having characters pull their arms and legs in when near a wall is very, very awkward to do with traditional animation methods. Having characters able to walk right up to a wall without pulling arms and legs in would mean graphically poking through it, which looks terrible. The alternative is to make spaces bigger so that arms and legs and such can go where they need to go without looking all wrong.
UE4 can do this, it's part of the standard demo.
Oh, it certainly can be done on just about any game engine. It's just a question of how much work it adds. And the answer is usually going to be, a lot. Is it worth having 20% fewer animated models across an entire game just to have the rest be able to pull their arms and legs in appropriately when walking through small doorways? Making doorways bigger is much, much easier to do.
When I first logged on to a MMORPG, one of the things that astonished me (in a bad way) was the way you just have to wander out of town, and the landscape is simply crawling with monsters. On the left hand side of the road there are wolves evenly spaced one every 20’ and on the right hand side of the road there are goblins evenly spaced one every 20’. The wolves never seem to feel like wandering over and attacking the goblins, and the goblins seem uninterested in hunting the wolves – or going for a chat with the next goblin.
So far, pretty well every MMORPG I have seen follows this trope, I suppose dating back to EQ. It’s the way it’s always been done so that’s the way it has to be.
I have been trying to think of something new for a fantasy MMORPG, and while it might be just a pipe dream, I’d be interested in hearing how others would find it.
There are other common features in MMORPGs that always annoy me.
First, the worlds are always so tiny. WoW is supposed to be set on opposing continents, but each continent is about ten miles long and perhaps four wide, depending on how you measure it. The whole of Azeroth, sea included, could probably fit on the Isle of Wight.
The population is even tinier. If you exclude player characters, any fantasy gaming world seems to have a total population that would fit comfortably in one small village; even then there are not enough farmers to feed them – and who builds and maintains the cities? This is equally a problem in games like Skyrim. None of these fantasy worlds have any credibility, because the geography and demography are all wrong.
Then there are the zones. Desert zone, check. Forest zone, check. Tundra zone, check. Each with its own level range. As a starting character in WoW, I tried to walk from Stormwind to ironforge – was that a mistake!
This is how I would like to see it. Firstly, a game world that is huge. About the size of Europe. Some parts of it would be populated, others would be wilder, and in the civilised parts there would be many villages, towns and cities, all thronging with people. You would never run out of new places to visit.
Could it be done? Obviously not if everything were designed by hand, but procedural world generation is so advanced now that given a basic geographical framework, it should be possible to create everything procedurally. Of course, all the thousands of NPCs would have random names and not much to say, but they would make places look lived in.
In such a world there would be no “zone for level 30-35”. Rather, instead of roaming everywhere, monsters would inhabit lairs and dungeons, which would be fairly common, and again, all procedurally generated.
If this sounds like Daggerfall Online, that’s exactly what it is. Technology and graphics are so much more advanced since Daggerfall came out, that something along the same lines, but much better-looking, should be possible now. What I’m not sure of is whether MMO servers could handle it – I’m sure it is realisable for a single player game.
In Daggerfall, apart from the main story quest, you could go to pretty well any town and find someone who would tell you “ has lost her . It was taken to . Please go and recover it.” And that gave you an excuse to go find the relevant dungeon and hack your way down it until you found the quest item. Such tasks may not be great writing, but they are no worse than the current “kill 15 goblins” you get in any MMORPG.
I think it would be fascinating to explore such a world, where to walk from one part of the map to a distant area could take literally weeks, and you could find places no-one had ever seen before.
If it could be done, how many here would enjoy it, if 95% plus of the content would not be hand-crafted?
Sure, it can be done but there are a few problems.
First of all you need to use the right mechanics for a game where monsters and npcs of all types roam around. The old levelbased D&D mechanics don't work in a MMO like that because in games like Daggerfall and RPG games the mobs you meet are customized for your level. In a MMO you either would have to use mechanics to level down at least most of the opposition to your level (kinda like GW2 but the other way around) or you would have to use mechanics based on "Runequest" instead of "Dungeons and Dragons". The lower powergap and skill based system there would mean that not 90% of everything you run into are impossible when you start a new character.
As for the number of farms is really the reason that most MMOs don't really show the entire world. The problem with a huge gameworld is of course traveltime. There must be a lot for all players to do almost everywhere on the map if you have a huge map without much teleportation, ships or griffons. Then again, Daggerfall did have fast travel betweeen places so maybe it isn't a problem.
I do know for a fact that I loved Daggerfall (still my favorite ES game) and a similar MMO with good mechanics would be fun, as long as you also added some really interesting dungeons. Because only those huge and often illogical random dungeon would not be enough
I like how you think, a themepark similar to Daggerfall is possible but there are plenty of problems to overcome since you really just can't continue building on the basic mechanics M59 started and EQ and Wow continued to improve. Far more of the devs work would have to be put into this then the usual world building here.
There is one other thing that hasn't been touched on yet, however. Namely, that every single structure in these games seems to have been built with 12' tall titans in mind. Every thing is XXL; can anyone think of an area where you can't have four people walk abreast without touching the sides? Cramped hallways, narrow tunnels, houses that aren't inhabited by giants, these things just seem to not exist in MMORPGs.
There are two reasons for that. One is camera views. If the camera is on the other side of a wall, you can't see what is going on. If the camera is two feet behind your character, you still can't see what is going on. In order to allow a camera to give you a good view of the action, you have to allow more space, and that means more spacious buildings. You can scale everything up to look like it's built for giants, or else you can only make the room bigger and not tables or chairs or such and make it seem out of proportion.
The second reason is animations. When you run, for example, what is maximum forward gap between the furthest forward part of your body (likely a front foot, possibly a hand) and the furthest back part (probably the back foot)? If you turn that sideways, do you think you would fit through a typical real-life doorway? Having characters pull their arms and legs in when near a wall is very, very awkward to do with traditional animation methods. Having characters able to walk right up to a wall without pulling arms and legs in would mean graphically poking through it, which looks terrible. The alternative is to make spaces bigger so that arms and legs and such can go where they need to go without looking all wrong.
UE4 can do this, it's part of the standard demo.
Oh, it certainly can be done on just about any game engine. It's just a question of how much work it adds. And the answer is usually going to be, a lot. Is it worth having 20% fewer animated models across an entire game just to have the rest be able to pull their arms and legs in appropriately when walking through small doorways? Making doorways bigger is much, much easier to do.
UE4 looks like a great engine... and the price and the fact that you get the complete Source Code for it makes it even better. However it runs like crap on older hardware. I have a mid-range Gaming PC from 2012. Not the greatest machine but certainly not the worst. UE4 kept crashing my PC every few minutes. Certainly not the greatest working environment for trying to develop a Game! For MMOs to be sustainable you also want to be able to target the largest amount of players possible. The higher your System Requirements the lower that potential Player base becomes.
I can think of two solutions to the problem of suiting monsters to the player's level.
Firstly, given that monsters are not going to be evenly distributed over a field in the manner of many current MMOs, but will occur in lairs and other special locations, it would not be hard to have some symbol indicating the difficulty of that location relative to the player's level - like the red/amber/green name system widely used for monsters. The further you ventured from the civilised lands, the more high-level lairs would predominate.
Secondly, one could revive a trope from original D&D now lost - deep dungeons. In D&D campaigns of the 70s, it was common to have a large dungeon with many levels. As you ventured deeper, you encountered more and more powerful monsters. Low-level and high-level characters could visit the same dungeon, but the former would stick to the upper levels, while the latter would head for the stairs down. This idea was largely ditched from table-top games since these sprawling heterogeneous dungeons were not exactly realistic. On the other hand, they were fun, and they were hardly any less realistic than the way monsters are distributed in current MMOs.
Comments
A realistic game world is absolutely foundational for me. Even if I cannot actually visit the mountain range in the distance it needs to be real for me to achieve immersion.
Note however that physical scale is only one way to achieve "realistic scale." EQ achieved it merely with small view distance and decent size zones.
What we are talking about, really, is the emergence of a true "living world" to participate in and adventure in.
There isn't an MMO out there yet that's generated a "living, breathing, world" model that engages a player population the way one would . . . if it truly was a living, breathing, World.
SIZE would have to be large, if not huge. Massive.
The trick however is that simply BIGGER isn't the issue, even if a component. It's what a living, breathing world would present to players, and what the target audience would be for the challenges it would present.
It wouldn't be for everyone. That would be a good thing, not a bad thing.
All the MMO's I've played so far, from AC2, to WoW for a bunch of years, to LOTRO, to Warhammer, to Age of Conan, to Runes of Magic, (I'll exclude EvE in this list because it's a different animal, an apple to the orange), To Vanguard, to Neverwinter, to Archeage, and several others, some of which I liked greatly, all have a same theme generally speaking:
The world is an open parking lot free for lightning fast over-running by the player base. The only token "push back" from the world is levels and mob level, both of which, relatively speaking, are easily overcome by simple farming exercises and reading of spoilers from others.
The worlds don't require UNLOCKING of key, hmmm, "artifacts" I'll call them by the playerbase. They are . . .boop! . . . already provided on the maps: Towns, roadways, open fields ready for planting (archeage) unencumbered by old-growth forests that need to be cleared and prepped first, etc.
Exploration and Discovery are, to huge degree, nullified by this world structure, only present in token amounts . . . then too gone once the waves of ravening players sweep across every square yard of space like a pack of starving fat kids set loose in a Sander's Chocolate factory.
The Unknown, "what's around the corner" gets neutered in the process, quickly.
Godlike powers given to players too quickly, instead of being incorporated into the game as . . . eventual unlocks . . . by players as a result of a signature activity (as a concept example). I mean, players spent MASSIVE amounts of time and effort, sometimes expense for a dang MOUNT. What would it be like to have an unlock in the background, such as Fire, Water, or Elemental magic, not present or available in the game yet, but due to some random exposure of opportunity to a player, who completes some kind of "investigation and research" into something, and does so SUCCESSFULY . . . causes an UNLOCK of a new branch of magic to the entire game world.
And maybe they get the permanent, embodied in the game, recognition for doing so.
Environmental Pushback: Game worlds are too open, too easily traversed level and mob level regardless. A true, huge, "living world" would present significant challenges to players right at the border of the starting areas, even if that was a SMALL zone with a castle and king to start.
Challenges and activities met, and conquered, by players would AFFECT the game world. "Safe", or safer / easier (meaning what our current crop of MMO zones look like, about) would slowly appear as the playerbase expanded their exploration of the huge game world.
The world would be WILD enough, and DANGEROUS enough there wouldn't be waves of spoiler driven, or even beta knowledge driven farmers, sweeping across an entire game world in . . . a day or three. (lmfao . . . and lol some more).
A HUGE game world is a great idea. But what's vastly more profound is HOW that volume is architected against a target audience of customers.
Wherever you go, there you are.
this is a good point. How do you keep the world populated across all zones?
StrawmanEpic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
You have some good points, but consider:
"A smaller hand crafted worlds" will have a small inventory of "interesting things to discover" with a very SHORT life expectancy. Thus, a small, hand crafted world is the antithesis to keeping things interesting and discoverable.
Players flood the small world like jackrabbits, work out the farming dyanmics, and in short order stuff turns into farming-grind-gerbil-wheel.
Travel: it's how you do it that matters. If your design establishes what you've described, then that's what you get. On the other hand . . . . design for success, do it different. It's in how you do it.
I agree with you about connection with the game world story-lining and NPC characters of note. I'm very much like you in that regard. /waves
The crop of MMO's that have been released the past few years don't really do the job. They follow (generally) a same pattern: Make it smaller and FASTER, feed people stuff FAST, grab the money while it's flowing . . .
. . . meaning a deliberate, expected feed off the initial whale-rush that steams through the game world in no time flat, then a fast (or perhaps moderate) crash as actual interest and discovery are bled out and it falls into the SAME OH RUT of repeat farming.
In the end an MMO is nothing more than a blank canvas until artist(s) put paint to brush. Bigger, larger, all by itself is meaningless except for one, very important factor:
It provides for much greater opportunity. There's more to work with.
It's in how you do it that makes the difference.
Wherever you go, there you are.
I agree with the OP; I much prefer large, open worlds. I'm not going to suddenly become bored if there's not a point of interest every 20 feet. This is the one thing that drives me absolutely nutty about FFXIV.
There is one other thing that hasn't been touched on yet, however. Namely, that every single structure in these games seems to have been built with 12' tall titans in mind. Every thing is XXL; can anyone think of an area where you can't have four people walk abreast without touching the sides? Cramped hallways, narrow tunnels, houses that aren't inhabited by giants, these things just seem to not exist in MMORPGs.
There are two reasons for that. One is camera views. If the camera is on the other side of a wall, you can't see what is going on. If the camera is two feet behind your character, you still can't see what is going on. In order to allow a camera to give you a good view of the action, you have to allow more space, and that means more spacious buildings. You can scale everything up to look like it's built for giants, or else you can only make the room bigger and not tables or chairs or such and make it seem out of proportion.
The second reason is animations. When you run, for example, what is maximum forward gap between the furthest forward part of your body (likely a front foot, possibly a hand) and the furthest back part (probably the back foot)? If you turn that sideways, do you think you would fit through a typical real-life doorway? Having characters pull their arms and legs in when near a wall is very, very awkward to do with traditional animation methods. Having characters able to walk right up to a wall without pulling arms and legs in would mean graphically poking through it, which looks terrible. The alternative is to make spaces bigger so that arms and legs and such can go where they need to go without looking all wrong.
Be specific. What are you referring to exactly?
Wherever you go, there you are.
Designing and coding takes too much time and money to do this in todays market. Until the tools are so easy to use that you could hugely cut the development time this just is not going to happen. Also if we reached that point a new bar would be set, one all would then have to follow, so the issue may arise again.
Not really specific enough. You've made a generalized, sweeping statement, a dictum, that translates to: "We don't have the time to do it right, so doing it any ole way is ok".
The irony here is: It's the sign of the times, the way we've been "programmed", or conditioned, to ACCEPT the mediocre, or even the failure, or we're the people who don't understand. Which isn't a good thing at all.
"Measure twice, cut once." is a saying vastly older than MMO business providers. It's a truism from the time it was first uttered, and a truism today - though one ignored because it's uncomfortable to face.
Our problem today is: We are a bunch of spoiled, pampered, self involved slackers willing to accept mediocrity, or even schlock . . . just because "that's the way it is, it can't be changed, just has to be accepted, that's just the market get a clue".
No.
MMO's rest at one pinnacle, or facet, of creative human effort. The technology capabilities today are astounding. But what's it turned into? A money grab carnival run by sidewalk hawkers who suck in rubes busy with their noses stuck in their butts.
We've seen a bunch of years of MMOs pumped out by dev houses. We've seen bits and pieces of fantastic implementation in each of them. The knowledge is there, the designs, principles, technology, is there.
You want to know what the real problem is, to greater degree than many would like to admit?
Businesses have lost the ability to manage their budgets properly, lured by the same siren call everyone else is afflicted with: Grab the money now and run.
So why bother to measure twice before putting saw to wood?
With the knowledge, technology, and experience out there I'll politely disagree "it's just not possible".
It'll take someone with a remarkably strong will however to rise above the mediocre, or even Fail people hold up today as the Standard.
Wherever you go, there you are.
I really like the OP's view of a vast procedural world that players can find endless content.
That being said, I would hope the size would grow and shrink adaptively to the population size.
Players want to see other players.
-WL
Werewolf Online(R) - Lead Developer
I really don't see your logic here... As a Game Developer my self world Size doesn't really mean more Programming... You program a single Zone Server that can then serve any zone in the world... It's not like you have to program a Zone Server for each Zone in your world... With the right technology going into your game your world can be as large as you want it to be. It comes down to Server hardware to host the zones on which takes money... The more going on in your zones the better hardware is needed... the better the hardware needed the more money it's going to cost.
Company Owner
MMO Interactive
Personally I have been waiting for a game like the op described. Maybe not as huge as Europe but something quite large, at least something larger than what we've seen in previous MMO's.
I feel like EQ did this well. It may not have been the largest land mass but it certainly gave the feeling of being in a world that was quite large and formidable. I think the weather affects added to this, specifically with the rain and fog, because in both instances it limited your sight distance, making even the most common zones seem large and dangerous.
Personally I think this form of game could work extremely well. Especially with the addition in todays MMO's of more player created or controlled content. Like having player farms, housing, cities and castles. In the terms of a LARGE land mass I think systems like these would help to fill it up, one game that I could use as an example would be Shadowbane.
In Shadowbane, players/guilds were able to create their own cities anywhere on the landmass that they deemed fit. They could setup their cities in anyway they wanted except in one, which was where the city tree was placed. The city tree is basically the item you would plant to stake your claim on land to build your city. The tree was typically in the center of the city but being able to shape the city as you deemed fit, you could end up making it in the back or front or middle depending on how you created the city around your tree. However the tree was in the middle of the "claim" and you would at times be wasting land if you wanted the tree to be anywhere other than the middle.
I think a game with a really LARGE landmass would do great with a system like this. Allow guilds to make cities/castles and players to create farms and homes. In this instance, with the large land mass, you could allow players to literally create plantations that would consist of multiple buildings and many fields. Allowing players to have very large "plots" of land to do with as they like. This would obviously all be tied to crafting and allow the player/guild to create items to help them adventure.
With the addition of this content to any other content that was already in the game (ie NPC dungeons, NPC castles, NPC towns, etc etc) you could fill up the world quite well. There would still be the issue of everyone wanting to be close to the prebuilt towns for quest and AH access but you could put in restrictions on building too close to towns/cities that were pre-built.
There are other systems you could attempt to create to help this as well. For instance maybe throughout creating your home/farm/plantation you could create a NPC that is your servant. Through this NPC you could "send" them to the local city or town to place certain things on the AH for you or to talk to other NPC's looking for quests. Maybe something like having a interface with the NPC where you could say, I want you to take these # of items and put them on the AH for these prices and I want you to look for quests that involve Blacksmithing and Mining. Then have selections in the interface for the different crafts, exploration, kill quests that the NPC would search for. After setting this and telling the NPC to go, he would walk off your property (or just despawn) while he traveled, did the tasks and then comes back (or just respawns) to let you know the items are on the AH and offer the quests that he found. There would be a time frame on this so it wasn't automatic and you would have to wait for them to do everything, so it felt like he actually did the walk and all the talking, to keep immersion.
With the extra landmass you could really turn the game into not just a MMO but a simulator. For instance, with the plantation idea or large farms, maybe after a certain size you can start creating NPC's that live on your farm and do the farm work for you. So you could then setup where you wanted things planted and then send your servants to work on it while you went out adventuring or gathering other materials. You would then have to also make sure they had housing and food and what not but as you can see you could really flesh out this whole farm/home/town/city into a game all itself. Allowing the players that just wanted to have a huge plantation and create food/items and what not and sell them and then others that had a home and filled it with loot they got fighting monsters. Add in PVP and city sieges and BOOM, now you have a whole new system for different types of player content and a HUGE world to put it in so everyone has room.
There is still different issues to overcome, like how does a player go from entering the game to having enough experience to go FAAAAARRRR out into the world and create a place to live and have everything they need to do that. If players have these huge farms and things, how do you make having these large responsibilities worth it in the end? Do players really need 4 carts full of wheat? What would need that quantity that doesn't break immersion, I mean a box of cornflakes doesn't take 3 fields worth of wheat to make. These are all just examples but I think there are things that could be done in a game like this that would fill it up with either dev created content and player created content.
Then you have the issue of hardware and how to support it without going over budget and I have no idea on how to do that but I can dream can't I?
It can be done. In alpha testing of our upcoming mmo we had a world that took almost 2.5 hours to cross at a sprint and non encumbered from one side to the other and zoneless. A cluster of 7 high end hexacores ran this. It is a matter of hardware and server budget.
We also can infinitely expand this world by adding more servers to the cluster.
Life IS Feudal
It is the content that has to fit in the zones I am referring to. A big world means big content. MMO's today tend to be 'rat runs' compared to older MMOs.
UE4 can do this, it's part of the standard demo.
You don't really have to make the game world insanely large to make it fun. You also don't need everything to be procedurally generated to make it dynamic. Perhaps one server could vary from another when its initially built, but beyond that mob AI and terraforming would do the trick.
To fill the world and keep everything relevant you do what great games of the past did. Scatter rare mobs, quests and other points of interest throughout all zones, including those near cities or "starter zones." Then add stuff like trade routes and you're pretty much good to go. Remove things like the auction house and make localize banks and you will find every city and the surrounding area will naturally become a hub.
Oh, it certainly can be done on just about any game engine. It's just a question of how much work it adds. And the answer is usually going to be, a lot. Is it worth having 20% fewer animated models across an entire game just to have the rest be able to pull their arms and legs in appropriately when walking through small doorways? Making doorways bigger is much, much easier to do.
Sure, it can be done but there are a few problems.
First of all you need to use the right mechanics for a game where monsters and npcs of all types roam around. The old levelbased D&D mechanics don't work in a MMO like that because in games like Daggerfall and RPG games the mobs you meet are customized for your level. In a MMO you either would have to use mechanics to level down at least most of the opposition to your level (kinda like GW2 but the other way around) or you would have to use mechanics based on "Runequest" instead of "Dungeons and Dragons". The lower powergap and skill based system there would mean that not 90% of everything you run into are impossible when you start a new character.
As for the number of farms is really the reason that most MMOs don't really show the entire world. The problem with a huge gameworld is of course traveltime. There must be a lot for all players to do almost everywhere on the map if you have a huge map without much teleportation, ships or griffons. Then again, Daggerfall did have fast travel betweeen places so maybe it isn't a problem.
I do know for a fact that I loved Daggerfall (still my favorite ES game) and a similar MMO with good mechanics would be fun, as long as you also added some really interesting dungeons. Because only those huge and often illogical random dungeon would not be enough
I like how you think, a themepark similar to Daggerfall is possible but there are plenty of problems to overcome since you really just can't continue building on the basic mechanics M59 started and EQ and Wow continued to improve. Far more of the devs work would have to be put into this then the usual world building here.
UE4 is magic, check it out.
Company Owner
MMO Interactive
I can think of two solutions to the problem of suiting monsters to the player's level.
Firstly, given that monsters are not going to be evenly distributed over a field in the manner of many current MMOs, but will occur in lairs and other special locations, it would not be hard to have some symbol indicating the difficulty of that location relative to the player's level - like the red/amber/green name system widely used for monsters. The further you ventured from the civilised lands, the more high-level lairs would predominate.
Secondly, one could revive a trope from original D&D now lost - deep dungeons. In D&D campaigns of the 70s, it was common to have a large dungeon with many levels. As you ventured deeper, you encountered more and more powerful monsters. Low-level and high-level characters could visit the same dungeon, but the former would stick to the upper levels, while the latter would head for the stairs down. This idea was largely ditched from table-top games since these sprawling heterogeneous dungeons were not exactly realistic. On the other hand, they were fun, and they were hardly any less realistic than the way monsters are distributed in current MMOs.