I'd say the game world of A Tale in the Desert is a clear example of one that is too big relative to the interest of its content. MMO cities are often too big, having a lot of wasted space where nothing useful is located. Dungeons can be too big in the sense that they take an impractically long time to play yet must be done all in one sitting.

Rules of thumb: In a multiplayer game, players should either not need physical proximity (within the game world) to play together, or players should be naturally thrown together so that they can spontaneously play together. In a multi- or singleplayer game world, there should not be areas where no players go in the course of 24 hours or the duration of the single player game. There should not be areas of boring meaninglessness that players just have to run through, especially if they have to do so repeatedly. Overall, the size of the game world should not make it less fun to play the game.

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It's got me thinking about whether or not there is really any overall game goal that can justify so much territory.

Exploration should justify territory. I think the key would be to make sure that as territory is generated, it contains or also generates useful resources for the player. Whether that's harvest-able nodes, missions, places to build, etc.

I had a similar idea for a game about 10 years ago, where you could fly around a galaxy and then land on planets, explore continents, visit towns, etc. It was a bit before Neverwinter Nights first came out, and I was intrigued with the possibility of creating sessions as a Dungeon Master for Players to play through, which had not been featured in many or any games back then. So I envisioned a huge generated universe that a DM could pick a spot in and start creating content for other players to explore. Maybe World A was a Sci-Fi themed world, and World B was medieval with dragons and wizards. Or maybe you just wanted to fly around in a ship from planet to planet.

The point of it was to create a system for the users to have the ability to create their own play-goals, i.e, if the users wanted a WoW themed world, they could do that. If they got bored they could find a space port and hitch a ride to a Star Wars themed world, or Call of Duty world, or wherever, and see how their character fared there....

So maybe my answer is, I don't know if any game goal can justify so much territory, but I definitely see procedural generated galaxies as enabling some interesting types of games which don't exist yet....

EVnova is a pretty good example actually in that it had a whole lot of planets, but each planet had very little depth to it so you were not over whelmed. On the other hand if each planet had a large number of towns to interact with, then each planet might nearly be its own game.

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What would your opinion be on achievable goals that leave the world free to explore and leave more emergent gameplay available? Does the game have to end in order for the goal to feel worthwhile?

For me, there has to be an end - which I might delay going for, if there
are other interesting things to do. For example I might decide to play
a few sidequests, follow the mainquest a bit - maybe defeat a bossmob,
explore a bit, do more sidequest and then continue on the mainquest again.

But in the end, I think the mainquest should be finishable in a reasonable
amount of time when focusing on it ( 20 hours).

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When you defeat him, which works better: 1) Game acknowledges your victory and tells you you can keep playing, but it won't be "keeping score" (for lack of a better way of putting it) 2) Game ends ("and they lived happily ever after") 3) Victory is more organic-- the world changes and you get to cruise about experiencing how it's changed before you ultimately decide to quit

1. Of course I should get score - I'm playing, so I want to get a feeling of "achieving" something...
2. Acceptable, but I prefer 1 where I can decide to roam about a bit more to see if there's still things to do (finish things I skipped)
3. Hmm... no goals left? Lots of time needed to stage/setup these things (graphics, localization-texts, ...), not economical (development time).

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I think it's a given that quality is preferable to lack of quality, but I'm not certain that large automatically implies empty.

Large doesn't automatically imply empty, true - but it's very easy
to go down with quality (repetitive quests, starting to get boring).
Thinking of new, original content is where you'll get into problems.

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What if you have quality all over the place, yet the sheer size dwarfs what you can hope to experience in a reasonable amount of time. Would you defeat the game and pick it up later just to see what else there was to do?

With the exception of an MMO - where you want to keep people bound as
long as possible (600+ hours?), and need to provide new content all the time,
think about the following:

Do you really want 500+ quests and a 20 km2 world (or a huge amount of planets) with a playtime of 100+ hours? What about high-level content? Most player will
not play so long, thus never seeing the cool things when you reach the really
high levels.

In other words: do you want to invest development time for things only
a select group of hardcore players will ever see? Is it really worthwhile
to do? Maybe instead update the low(er)-level content to as high as possible quality (cutscenes, staging, original quest-ideas, ...).
Every player will experience the first few hours, less people will see
the high-level content... Put the focus where you can achieve the most.


I worked on a title which was huge...
You could easily invest 100+ hours into the game.

Was it smart from a business point of view? No! We could have
scaled the world-size down by 50%, take only 1/2 the quests (with
increase originality/quality) - and added more cutscenes, and still
have a fun game with 30 hours of gameplay (but released 1 year earlier!)
That would have minimize risk (basic version running), leaving the option
to start making addons.
Now I'm not saying it wasn't a fun game - but from a business point
of view it wasn't the success it could have been.


Conclusion: Sure, you can have a huge world with high quality content!
But possible doesn't mean that you actually have to do it!
Do you want to invest the time + money to actually do that - for a
(casual) player who would be just as happy with 10-30 hours of playtime?


Regards

>"too many fun places to visit."

One more example: We had a huge capital city - many houses which you can enter, with lots of npc's walking around doing their daily thing. Sound cool huh?

From the player perspective: Oh cool, a big city - let's take a look in this house... oh wow, we can even enter the second floor, nicey... nothing to do here though, let's take a look in the next house.. nothing to do here either.. next house.. next...
(reaching the end of the street).. "I could check the houses on the other side, hmmm... nah, never mind, not fun - I wanna fight some monsters).

We wasted lots of time with this, decorating houses, doing npc day/night/job-cycles - for something which didn't really interest the player in the end.

Again: Whatever you want to do: Make a judgement: Is the time needed for creating this, relative to how much time the player is going to put into investigating it - and more important: enjoy the time spent on it?

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What would your opinion be on achievable goals that leave the world free to explore and leave more emergent gameplay available? Does the game have to end in order for the goal to feel worthwhile?

I would say #2. Its annoyed me to no end when i complete Morrowind or Oblivion's final quest that i'm left standing there with nothing left to do, it feels like there's no real closure to it. I mean, the player can play infinitely to begin with, so if a player goes for the Final Quest (which is totally optional) one would assume they're seeking to end the game.

Incidentally, how long do you expect the average game session to last? Hours? Or something like the 20 minute sessions in Strange Adventures in Infinite Space? This I think would also determine how large your environments should be, or perhaps it could be user defined?

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In movies I agree, and in linear games this is possible. But what's a sandbox style game to do? Part of the magic of a game (especially one with an open world) is that you can look behind the waterfall or see what's beyond the next hill.

As a gamer, I will of course be excited by what's behind the waterfall and what's over the next hill. As long as there's actually something worth getting to behind the waterfall or over the hill.

Your universe should be as big as the number of (different!) behind-waterfall and over-hill secrets you think you can create. If city 1 is exactly the same as city 2, and neither of them are facing problems related to my goals, nor do they have treasures that make them stick out, why should I bother?

Edit: Or, you can think about how to make your sandbox based on... a real sandbox.

So you're in a sandbox. Would you explore? Of course not. There's no reason to explore - you're in the sandbox, you can see the borders of the box, and all the sand that is available to you is visible. If the sandbox were bigger, you would still have the understanding that it is a box full of sand. If the sandbox is huge, your reasons to explore are: (a) Maybe There's a Better Bucket, (b) Maybe There's More Sand, or (c) Maybe There's Blue Sand.

A. Maybe There's a Better Bucket. You've used the tools available to you already - small bucket, small shovel, toy tractor. But you think you could make an even better something if you had a tool that would allow you to haul more sand around, and the idea excites you. You would probably choose this only if you saw someone else's bigger bucket, otherwise you'd probably be blissfully unaware, happy with your small bucket until the end of time.

B. Maybe There's More Sand. You've been messing around with sand, and you've created a sandcastle that you think was definitely worth the time. But it took a lot of sand, and now you need more. Perhaps you really just like building the sandcastle and you don't like hauling all the sand around - maybe you're exploring to try to find someone who'll haul it for you.

C. Maybe There's Blue Sand. A passing traveller told you of something incredible - blue sand! The possibility boggles your mind, so you simply must discover if it's true.

Options A and B give you a game that's something like the Sims/Sim City. Option C gives you something more RPG-esque, I suppose with some tourism included. These options are assuming that your sandbox is absolute, where all the gameplay and goals are emergent. Otherwise you might also have I Must Kill the Sand Monster, I Must Marry the Sand Princess, or The Sand King is a Jerk.

[Edited by - bardbarienne on June 29, 2009 10:48:26 PM]

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Original post by Wavinator In movies I agree, and in linear games this is possible. But what's a sandbox style game to do? Part of the magic of a game (especially one with an open world) is that you can look behind the waterfall or see what's beyond the next hill. I think you make a valid point but I can't see using that approach unless I take away the player's freedom to travel and explore. At that point, it's a mission-based game, which isn't what I'm trying to do.

Sandbox style games also do have mission areas (and often some "recreational" areas). The difference is, that these areas are mostly accessible at all times and contain, when the respective mission is not active, some generic gameplay elements (i.e. people to interact with / shoot).

Additionally, the missions themselves are often also pretty generic (i.e. a car chase in a game where you can drive around freely al the time), meaning that many areas can be used in a multitude of ways, creating the "sandbox".

On the other hand, sandbox games do not often have missions that go a lot outside of the generic gameplay mechanics that go on all the time. In other words, if you want to swing, you have to leave the sandbox. :)

I disagree that a game needs an "endgame" state to be purposeful and fun. Think about it, it's not the end you enjoy, it's the satisfaction and reward of victory of some kind, and the resolution of a long plot. When you die that's an endgame as well, but it's not something you enjoy.

It's possible to introduce multiple "endgames" within a single game - and each of the plots can be completely dynamic within the world as well. For example in a procedural world if you complete some major long-term goal, you might get the equivalent of an "endgame" victory, except as someone mentioned you can continue in the world experiencing the results of this victory, and continue to follow another "plot thread" if you choose.

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Now it might be a pipe dream but I'd like to build almost ALL player activity around procedural generation methods. This means missions come from autonomous AI activities, findable loot is generated from attributes and enemies increase in difficulty based on player relation to the center of the game world. It seems to be a system that can scale (although practice will prove what's playable).

I completely agree, and this is exactly what I'm working on in my procedural space game as well.

The power of procedural generation is that it can extend the size of a world infinitely without sacrificing much "local quality", but the problem is as you "zoom out" in a larger world you begin to notice the repetition of data concepts and it becomes just statistical noise.

The only solution to this is to work on the procedural algorithms, adding more and more layers of complexity, etc. until there's enough variety, but the larger the world is the harder this is to achieve satisfactorily. Think of it like a multifractal in terms of gameplay rather than graphics, and the need for more octaves as the game world's scope and scale increases.

But since it would take an enormous amount of work to implement acceptable variety on all levels across an explorable galaxy with many millions of stars, the next best solution to this is to implement more detailed layers within a limited scope: For example, you can make a massive universe that works fairly well as a game, and on top of that add a localized and very high quality story involving a relatively small handful of planets. And relating to my post in the "Game Design Round Table 3" thread, this "story" does not need to be linear and can be implemented to emerge from well-crafted meta-AIs.

[Edited by - JohnJ on June 30, 2009 10:00:22 AM]

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Original post by Wavinator Quote: Original post by Edtharan - If the player would not be able to explore the whole space in a reasonable amount of time (eg: if the game take place in a singe city, then having a dozen other cities would not be necessary). The reason is that this costs development time and therefore takes away resources from the other features. I've heard this argument before and I know it definitely applies to hand created content. But procedurally generated content seems somewhat different. When you take something like land feature generation or the arrangement of stars I don't think there's going to be a noticeable tradeoff between what you could have done by hand and how long it took you to perfect your procedural algorithms. Now it might be a pipe dream but I'd like to build almost ALL player activity around procedural generation methods. This means missions come from autonomous AI activities, findable loot is generated from attributes and enemies increase in difficulty based on player relation to the center of the game world. It seems to be a system that can scale (although practice will prove what's playable). The point I'm trying to make is that game size shouldn't be taking away from other areas. This wouldn't be a game with a set narrative revealed by a ladder of escalating missions.

True, this point really only applies to games with a preset story and content. Procedurally generated content games would of course not be as subject to this concern as other types of games.

I too like the concepts of procedurally generated content for games, especially story and plot (or at least missions). However, spending time developing a procedurally generated world still take resources away from other aspects of the game. In this case, if the time spent developing the procedural algorithms needed and fine tuning them is longer than it would take to make a large enough space and content manually, then this too runs into the problem I am talking about.

This point is all about the cost/benefit analysis of the game development. If the time and resources needed to implement one method is greater than the time/resources needed to implement the other method, then one needs to look at what is best for the project.

So would having a large procedurally generated world give the player a better experience than a smaller carefully crafted one? This is always the question one needs to ask in this situation.

If it is important to your game to ahve the larger worlds (if exploration is an important aspect of your gameplay), then having that larger world becomes an important reason to have the larger world.

I suppose this is probably a better way of expressing what I meant: You have to justify any development time/resources spent on a particular feature in terms of the value to the player, and if increasing the size of the world does not give value to the player, then you should not do it.