Original post by rmsgrey I agree that mindlessly inserting teleportation systems is extremely unlikely to be the best answer. The question that should be asked is why do players ask for teleportation and larger worlds simultaneously?
Larger worlds mean more content, which means more content of interest.
Teleportation means the ability to skip content, which means less content which isn't of interest.
Suddenly the two ideas make sense together - what's really wanted is more selective content. Which doesn't solve the problem, but does at least help identify the right problem to tackle...
The 'right problem' would then be the good old issue with "traditional" level-based system rendering large amounts of content useless for everyone who isn't on the "right" level...
Original post by tolaris The 'right problem' would then be the good old issue with "traditional" level-based system rendering large amounts of content useless for everyone who isn't on the "right" level...
I think the problem's actually wider than that - unless you're very restrictive in how people can approach the game, there will always be some content which is more relevant to some players than others. Level and class systems are obvious examples, but any choice of play-style produces the same issues.
The problem is how to match content with player - or at least enable the players to match themselves with the appropriate content.
Most large worlds exist for one reason: To suck up your time. MMORPG developers that charge per month WANT you to WASTE TIME. It makes them money. Look at a game like Diablo II. Everything is fast.
Now, in World of Warcraft, there is a timer on everything. Slow, tedious, dull. Gigantic world. It takes forever to get anywhere.
If there were a game with a huge world that had all of the detail of a game with a much smaller world, it would be warranted. But until then, it's a bussiness device employed in MMO's to suck up your time and generate increased long term revenue.
Original post by rmsgrey The question that should be asked is why do players ask for teleportation and larger worlds simultaneously?
Larger worlds mean more content, which means more content of interest.
Teleportation means the ability to skip content, which means less content which isn't of interest.
Suddenly the two ideas make sense together - what's really wanted is more selective content. Which doesn't solve the problem, but does at least help identify the right problem to tackle...
Isn't this an issue of the player's experience evolving? Aren't you interested in lots of expansiveness when you first start, but then in getting things done as you grow to master the game?
I can't use MMOs as a gauge because I don't play them, but in Morrowind, I wanted a huge world as a new player because I was strictly in a limits testing and exploration mindset. Once I knew the lay of the land and where the leveling resources (quests, items, businesses) were, I became interested in mastering what I'd discovered.
I certainly vote for making teleporting increasingly expensive as it becomes more useful. By the time you want it, you're probably a high level character needing money sinks anyway, and nothing is worse than being so rich you can't do anything with it.
--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...
Original post by rmsgrey I think the problem's actually wider than that - unless you're very restrictive in how people can approach the game, there will always be some content which is more relevant to some players than others. Level and class systems are obvious examples, but any choice of play-style produces the same issues.
Dunno about it, really... i mean, you can break the "playstyle" in very few groups -- solo or grouped (either pickup groups or 'regular'), outdoor hunting, dungeon hunting and optionally crafting in games which have it... now, how would either of these choices determine significantly larger amounts of travel than others, or even introduce large amounts of travel period, in game which doesn't limit content available to your character at any given time to a few small pockets scattered all over the world..?
Original post by infrmtn It's definitely and infinitely easy to add some more 'land' tiles into your world and say: "Wow, now it takes 15 minutes to walk from one end to another."
BUT! Why do I want to walk through a large area consisting of randomly placed look-alike trees, a few rocks, some plants and a cemetery? How many times have YOU thought, "Great, I get to explore the flora" instead of, "OK, I gotta wander through these plains and woods to get to the next town, where the action is. I'm kinda weak still so I'm gonna do a running version of 'Piper of Hamelin' to evade the monsters."
Personally I don't mind large terrains as long as the following is respected
a) the terrain is diverse enough b) the terrain is recognize-able enough c) designers don't use it to lengthen the game by making me run on so-called fed-ex missions d) and if there are fed-ex type of missions I require fast transportation from one location to another even if I am just beginning with the game, at least that is one point that most of the games I have played so far missed out on, except perhaps Elderscroll 3: Morrowind and follow ups. Although the missions and the terrain could get a bit tedious if not lenghty at times. Gothic 1 on the other hand could become quite boring after a while due to the large terrain and the way the missions were laid out [c].
I think that large terrains are valuable in that it provides for more empty space, space in which the player may rejoice or reconcile his or her belongings, skills and plans for the future of the character and game-play regarding role playing type of games. Other games would not necessarily benefit from larger terrains, except perhaps strategical or simulatory games with their focus' set on realism.
I recently discussed world size with a friend of mine in regards to a Sci-Fi RPG I'm planning (note NOT MMOrpg [smile]), and other games. His opinion was that the world should be "real" size and "real" time. IE 1 day in the RPG should be 24 hours of playing time, and to walk 8km should take about 1 hour (realistic walking speed). Of course the game would need things like cars and planes or other transportation means, and ability to travel to places such as clicking on the map. In that case travel would be instantaneous for the player but the time in the game world would run normally (for example 1 hour for the 8km walk).
As a developer I see several problems with his idea. The most obvious is that you'd have to have detailed landscape for the entire area. Morrowind is huge, but it doesn't take all that long to walk across it. I've never tried, but I suspect it would take a few hours. Daggerfall is more like it.. It takes a few hours just to walk to the nearest city (not sure.. I gave up), and probably well over a week to walk across the world. Real world time. But the world in Daggerfall is extremely low detail. Just rolling hills and a few trees. No roads or rivers or anything to make it realistic. The world in Morrowind isn't very realistic either, but it's much better than the one in DF, but even at that detail level it would need an extreme amount of storage to store the world, not to mention the time for the artists to create it.
As I mentioned, my planned RPG is set in the future with inter-stellar travel, and has many planets. I also want to make it possible to fly from space and into the athmosphere of the planets and land wherever it would be realistic (any flat, hard surface of enough size). From there the player should be able to exit the ship and walk or drive across the world. If I were to map out every planet in the "known" galaxy (gameworld), I'd have to have 1m precicion maps of perhaps 20 planets. Each planet almost 500 000 km2. Perhaps a little smaller for some.
Needless to say the storage and work on making the maps would be impossibly huge.
But in such a game I couln't just "scale" everything down. It wouldn't make sense that the player could walk around the planet in a couple of hours. It would have to take almost a year. If the time was scaled so that each day last 48 minutes (Neverwinter Nights), then combat and npc interaction won't make sense either. To use the NVN example. 1 turn lasts 3 seconds in the real world (AFAIK). As a starting chartacter he can take one swing at an enemy each round. Since the time is compressed 30 times (24 hours -> 48 min), that swing would take 90 seconds of game time. It doesn't make any sense at all.
In my opinion is FPS games the most realistic in sense of detail, world size and sense of time, while RPGs usually is a complete mess. In FPS games it doesn't take very long to walk across the "world", but it's because it's small not "time compressed". The reason it's small is that it doens't make sense for it to be very large. After all, a warehouse or a factory is seldom much larger than a few hundred meters, and a military base might be a few km across. It doesn't make sense to include a huge world around the comparatively tiny object of interest. Since the "world" is so small it's possible to make it very detailed and realistic.
With RPGs the world usually has to be much larger to make it possible to have courier quests and such. There are however many ways to make the world "big".
In the SW:KOTOR games, the world is huge, since it takes place on several planets or ships, but the game only focus on a very small part of each planet. They've also eliminated the problem of time-compression by removing the daylight/night cycle altogether.
In NVN they've increased the flow of time 30-fold, probalby to give character with night-vision sight a slight advantage over charcters with "normal" sight, and to give the illusion that the world is huge. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier this introduces a lot of other problems with realism. It takes the character perhaps a second to move his own height in distance. This equals to 7,6km/h in real life. In the gameworld however this becomes about 0,25 km/h. Honestly, I could crawl home from a pub faster than that. The short period of daylight and night (probably around 22 minutes each to allow for dusk and dawn) also makes it annoying for the player whoose character might not have night vision and thus is "useless" during night, or has night vision or is stealth based and would have an edge during the night but a disadvantage during the day. You can rest to pass time, but it get's tedious to find a safe spot for resting so often. Also, the days fly by so fast that it should have seasons. I don't doubt that a year or more will pass in the GW until you complete it.
Daggerfall has an absolutely HUGE world, but with absolutely nothing between the towns and ruins except mostly flat ground and some trees. (IIRC) All towns and ruins are marked on the map so you can click on them to travel. IIRC the time was compressed in this as well, but I don't know by which factor.
Morrowind is much more detailed than DF, but the world is a lot smaller. The distance between towns and other points of interest (POI) is also a lot shorter. The time is compressed but I don't know how much. Usually you don't have to walk/run more than a few minutes to reach a POI, and less than 10 to go from town to town. It has some instant transportation means, but since the world is so small that they're not a necessity, at least compared to DF.
The Gothic games have very detailed worlds. In fact I doubt they are using heightfields for their terrain. But the world is also small compared to Morrowind. Unlike morrowind however, the world hasn't a lot of cities and it makes more sense that the distance between farms and a nearby town is small, than that the distance between large towns is equally small. Where Morrowind tries to be Britain, Gothic2 is a small peninsula, and Gothic1 is a valley.
I'm not sure how to fix the problem of planets in my game, but frozen worlds, desert planets, mining colonies or water worlds would simplify matters, though they wouldn't be very realistic. Some combination of modeling and procedural detailing will be needed, but this might make lands as un-inspiring as DF or Elite Frontiers to use a more apt comparison.
Original post by frostburn If I were to map out every planet in the "known" galaxy (gameworld), I'd have to have 1m precicion maps of perhaps 20 planets. Each planet almost 500 000 km2. Perhaps a little smaller for some.
500 000 km2? Are these planets peebles or something?
Earth has a bit over _100 million_ km2 of just the land, alone. While planet size and water coverage will obviously vary, that's pretty good average estimate, i guess.
(just posted a rant on the subject in another thread, though, so no point in going further >>;;
