I think game world sizes are just like any other aspect of a game. There are right ways to do it, and there are wrong ways to do it. In this case, I don't think a large game world is necessarily flat out wrong. Some games have done it right (in so far as trying to create the game experience they were targetting anyways).

It's interesting you should mention Morrowind as well, cause I feel this is a game that did it right. The world was large, but I never felt it was overly large. It was a very open ended game, and some people don't want that in a game whether it's large or small. It did provide plenty of means to figure things out without just wandering around aimlessly. Involved talking to a lot of people, but getting the information was part of the challenge. Knowing where to go so you didn't wander around aimlessly was another part. In an open ended game like this, a large environment is almost a requirement, else it becomes far to easy to just stumble onto the things you are looking for.

World of Warcraft, for all it's flaws, has done a good job with it's game world as well. Every area has it's flavor, it's residents (good or bad), and it's own story and history. There are the repetitive trees and bushes and what have (but in all reality, even in the middle of a real forest, a tree is pretty much a tree), but there's almost always something unique within a few minutes run of where ever you are, and for most of those places there's an actual story behind them, if you're inclined to dig for them (though most players aren't)

I prefer large (CRPG) worlds, as I like the feeling of freedom and the ability to explore relatively unhindered. Finding "action" is not every player's primary objective.

For me, smaller worlds often induce claustrophobia and a sense of being "herded" along a particular path.

As far as Daggerfall and Morrowind are concerned, I'm probably the exact opposite of Gyrthok, as I much prefer the former to the latter.

Incidentally, it supposedly takes 2 weeks in real time to walk from one side of the Daggerfall map to the other, so a map that can be traversed in 15 minutes in tiny in comparison. At an average walking speed, a person can only travel about a mile in a quarter of an hour.

As others have mentioned, world size is another aspect that is down to personal preference. Personally, I intend to create the types of games that I like to play, rather than creating something I would dislike, merely to please a particular demographic.

Funny, I've been meaning to start a topic that's just the opposite of this, called "Curb Your Enthusiasm: How Unrealistic Expectations Are Killing Games." (or something like that) [wink]

I do understand where the desire for greater fidelity and variety is coming from. But I'm also supremely aware that that same desire is pushing game budgets into the astronomical range.

More important than anything else, I see that the problem isn't terrain, it's choices and results per time segment. If your paradigm is monster bashing, as is the norm, that means you'll need wildernesses filled with monsters (that players are going to get bored with unless you have a lot).

I suspect you can make a game interesting with a flat red texture stretching to infinite horizons, if the gameplay itself doesn't concern itself with geography. Combat and Fedex missions, the staple of RPGs the world over, are all about geography-- finding it, negotiating it, using it to your best advantage.

But the flight sim example ICC brought up is a great contradiction to this because the gameplay isn't so much embedded in the geography, it's embedded in the object being controlled and the forces controlling it.

For the medieval RPG, which is the norm, this posses some serious problems, because it's hard to embed gameplay in flesh. But it could be done with what the person is carrying, how their magick works-- all sorts of things that make the terrain secondary to the real goals of the game.

I'm saddened to see people (designers!) thinking of games so narrowly.

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Original post by infrmtn So our computers get faster and we can show more polygons, but the developer still has to come up with ideas to populate the world with. Forget about making a large world if all you're gonna do is spray it with trees and move on to design towns, "'cause that's where the action is."

So does that mean you're not going to like my game set on the surface of a Dyson sphere? [wink]

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Original post by Kazgoroth Almost all the locations in a game should either have something to do, someone to talk to, or at the least be particularly interesting to look at and explore. Its often argued that the world should be large and unconstrained to help the players immersion, and this is a good point - but personally I'd prefer to have a slightly less realistic world where I can't just go look 'over there' unless there's actually something to do or see over there.

Argh! No, that would be totally evil. Not the mention being the lazy way. The right approach would be to make sure that interesting things are happening wherever you go. If there are quests waiting to be introduced to the player, instead of putting them in a fixed location, you could put them in whatever towns that the player visits. Or you could procedurally generate random quests.

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Original post by infrmtn I'm saddened to see people (designers!) thinking of games so narrowly.

That's not a very productive thing to say, is it? If there's a point in question that you disagree with, why not highlight it? After all, it's not as if your original post really said all that much apart from "don't make things repetitive", which isn't terribly constructive.

Now Final Fantasy XI has really really big areas. As a low level player, your time will probably be spent running around. Just running from one edge of a zone to the other edge would take anywhere from 15 - 20 minutes, but at least each zone had distinctive geographical characteristics, which you probably need to use some times to avoid being detected by monsters that roam the area. The developers have been expanding the world and some of the new areas just have a very interesting sense of design to them, yet have the natural organic touch. Warrant that it does get mundane after a while, but that's where teleporting and warping comes in.

I had wished to be able to see the entire world, but sadly after about 18 months of playing, i still have not seen more than 60% of it, and it just keeps growing. :|

But truthfully speaking, I agree that levels should not be larger than their content. If you are going to have large regions, you better have it make sense. Immersion is a nice arguement for large levels and zones, but you have to do it right. Its okay if you have a large desert, just don't put a rain forest or swamp right next to it, because that's probably never going to happen in real life anyways. Randomness is also nice, but things still have to make sense.

I think, in general, the industry is getting better at it. But probably the worst example of level design recently was Suikoden4. It was horrible. Large world, little content, high encounter rate, and the actual dungeons and areas were relatively small and linear. The game was horrible compared to Suikoden3. I would say that in recent memory for me, Suikoden 4 is probably the best case study of what NOT to do in a game, gameplay-wise, level design-wise, etc.

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Original post by Kylotan That's not a very productive thing to say, is it? If there's a point in question that you disagree with, why not highlight it? After all, it's not as if your original post really said all that much apart from "don't make things repetitive", which isn't terribly constructive.

Hey, I don't see you adding much to the topic now. Maybe you'd like me to fill a form and draw a picture? Look, if you can't extract my point from my THREE previous posts (read the second one) then here it is, as clear as an unmuddied lake: Think of something new NOT ALREADY DONE in the last big names of genre x.

OK, let's go back, if you read that and thought it really was the point I was trying to make then you need to pay more attention. The real point (thus not the slightly fake point above) I will leave to the individual to solve. But when they think of games as black and white they can never achieve anything.

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Original post by infrmtn Hey, I don't see you adding much to the topic now. Maybe you'd like me to fill a form and draw a picture?

Don't get all narky at Kylotan for asking you to keep your posts constructive. Making a general, untargeted, unqualified criticism like you did is completely unconstructive and is a good way to turn your own thread into a shitty flame war, and consequently get it deleted.

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Look, if you can't extract my point from my THREE previous posts (read the second one) then here it is, as clear as an unmuddied lake: Think of something new NOT ALREADY DONE in the last big names of genre x.

So rather than being a general long-winded appeal to 'not make things repetitive', it's a general long-winded appeal to 'be original'?

Either way, it's been heard before, and it's not particularly constructive. Just stamping your feet and shouting "BE ORIGINAL" isn't going to achieve anything. Furthermore, if people fail to get your point, try explaining it better rather than shouting at them for being stupid - communication is an important part of game design, so take the opportunity to practice it.

Anyway, to try and get back to the topic, which is potentially quite an interesting area for discussion...

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It hasn't been mentioned yet that you don't have to freeze your world after you're done with it. When you say it's just as bad seeing the same tree 40 times as it is seeing 40 trees that look the same, yes it's true but a single tree shouldn't look the same all the time. Flowers don't look the same all the time. Of course with plants any major changes don't happen that fast, but for example there are also the smaller changes that happen through the day/night cycle.

It looks like you're falling into the realism trap here. It seems you're suggesting that rather than having big, simple worlds, we have small complex ones.

The problem is the sort of complexity you're talking about here isn't really going to do anything for the gameplay. At least with a big, simple world, people can still get some enjoyment out of exploration. With a small, uber realistic one, you have less space to explore, and nothing more than gimmicky effects like flowers that close at night and trees that look a pixel taller if you come back to the game 3 years later.

If you're going to replace size with complexity, it should be meaningful complexity rather than trivial effects which 99% of people won't even notice.

It may be interesting to consider the content density distribution as well as the overall size. I would favour a model where content is concentrated around relatively small areas (e.g cities) with a marked drop in content for the outlying areas. (rural areas) This is much more intuitive and realistic than a uniform distribution, and it gives some incentive to explore - you wander around the low-content wilderness in the hope of finding a previously undiscovered nugget of high content goodness. However, when the player isn't exploring, the high concentration of content around certain areas means that the amount of legwork while actually doing important stuff is minimized.

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Original post by Nathan Baum Quote: Original post by infrmtn So our computers get faster and we can show more polygons, but the developer still has to come up with ideas to populate the world with. Forget about making a large world if all you're gonna do is spray it with trees and move on to design towns, "'cause that's where the action is." So does that mean you're not going to like my game set on the surface of a Dyson sphere? [wink]

Depends what you do with it...

Halo's ring was entirely irrelevant to the actual gameplay - you could just have well set the entire game on a handful of snow-globes (hmmm, that could be an interesting mod) and the plot never realy made use of it either - beyond its status as an obviously artificial world-size object (and making it easier to destroy, I guess)

Having an exotic location just for the sake of it is a bit pointless - and an entire Dyson sphere is massive overkill - a Ringworld is already mind-bogglingly large enough - you could put the entire surface of the Earth down on one, look away and not be able to find it again - when you consider that, if you walked 50 miles a day, it would take over a year (a little over 16 months) to walk the length of the equator. At that rate, you're looking at roughly 30,000 years to walk the length of an Earth-orbit Ringworld - roughly the time since the Neandertals went extinct. Going at the speed of sound, it would take you several centuries of non-stop travel to cover the same distance - even at light speed, you'd take most of an hour to get round.

If you restrict players to walking speed, then you could fit about 10,000,000 players into an Earth-orbit Dyson Sphere spread out so that if the two players whose characters were closest walked their characters directly towards each other non-stop it would take them a year of play time to meet. That's roughly one person in every thousand alive today playing your game without a realistic chance of anyone ever meeting another player.

I'm not saying you shouldn't ever set a game on a Dyson sphere, but as things stand, it seems like overkill to have such a large area.


And, yes, I realise the comment wasn't meant seriously...