I think one of the biggest things missing from games these days is a truly deformable game world. Meaning you can destroy or modify everything in the game.

For example, say you couldn't get into a building, but then you could dig a tunnel or blast a hole in any of the walls with a bomb.

Just how much would a fully deformable game world affect your gameplay experience? I seem to read a lot of posts saying they want a more interactive game world, especially from MMO players.

What would you do if you could modify the game world any way you wanted and how much of an impact do you think it would have on your gameplay?

I'm a big fan of manipulating or destroying game worlds, but the problem that you inevitably run into with that is breaking the game with it. AI can't be expected to keep up with human ingenuity in a world like that, so you'll inevitably come up with something clever, like tunneling under fortifications or stacking up corpses to build a bridge or sniping support wires that would really shine in a multiplayer situation but wind up being un-fun in many cases because they're not being countered by the guys you're doing them against. Also, you wind up with a "scorched earth" problem, where every inch of the map is a desolate wasteland due to players smashing for the sake of smashing.

Dwarf Fortress and Clonk Endeavor are two good examples. In DF, my forts always start out on forested areas, and I clear-cut them and wipe out all wildlife, exploiting resources in ways that would get me a stern letter from the DEP in real life, and then some engineering error fill the fort with magma and I abandon it. My Clonk settlements always fall into ruin because I destabilize the map with my mining and building and flooding, until it's an obstacle course to get from my mines to my factories, and then a lift gets struck by lightning or something and I just quit the game, rather than trying to fix the problems I caused.

It's no secret that it's easier to break something than to build it, and we gamers love to smash things. I spent an afternoon in Crysis just blowing up palm trees one time. You can make a game with a vast futuristic cityscape or a pristine tropical rainforest or a serene archipelago, but it's always going to wind up being a blasted mad-max wasteland in the end, shot through with experimental tunnels and pitted with deep craters.

You have to have rules, to constrain the players' ambition to within the tolerances of the world and the game.

Yeah, that's a problem I've heard mentioned before, that the game will eventually end up as a wasteland, and I don't know of a good solution yet. One I heard was to put everything on a restoration timer where everything will revert back to it's original form after awhile, but that kinda defeats the purpose of having a deformable game world.

I guess one solution would be to make it easier to build than it is to destroy. Like make everything overly durable.

Well there should be a "punishment" (notice the quotes) for total deformation. If you dig too many tunnels or a tunnel in the wrong place, the building above collapses above you. Or if you decide to deforest everything, then the enemy can see everything you're doing and have perfect counters for anything you have. If you mine too much, then you have caves collapsing or flooding. Scorched earth means no food and that means you die (sooner or later).

I think it just wouldn't work in an MMO. For a FPS, though, it would be a blast. Apparently, "they" are working on a FPS for the Thermite3D engine.

Pun was not intended until I noticed it :).

Edit: Just tried the demo of the aforementioned FPS. It's a lot of fun, not least because it includes a jetpack feature.

[Edited by - theOcelot on June 6, 2010 5:24:19 PM]

Check out the MMO called Love.

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Original post by Butabee Just how much would a fully deformable game world affect your gameplay experience? I seem to read a lot of posts saying they want a more interactive game world, especially from MMO players. What would you do if you could modify the game world any way you wanted and how much of an impact do you think it would have on your gameplay?

Having a more interactive world would affect the gameplay a lot. Iron Chef Carnage points out a valid point being the difficulty in building an AI up to the task.

It's likely even worse than that. The problem spreads out in providing more content, resulting in more work to be done unless several limitations are put in place. I would also like extremely interactive worlds but after a long thinking, they're just not feasible.

Example 1: give the player a bomb which they can use everywhere they want. This results in player ability to access every possible room which is separated by a bomb blast. The number of rooms to model suddendly goes 10x. It's alot of work (I understand this could be tackled by going procedural but keep reading).

Example 2: the hulking boss at the top of LEVEL_SKYCRAPER is way too hard. The player died N times and starts thinking at other strategies. He figures out that bombing out (what looks like) the structural pillars would fine enough. Have phun in explaining why the collapse does not happen as he would expect... or building the necessary content!
Example 2.POST: the hulking boss in now below 30ft of concrete debris. Unfortunately, the ITEM_NEEDED_IN_NEXT_MISSION is still in his pocket.

After playing Battlefield Bad Company 2, every other FPS just feels dull now.

The deformation/destruction is still pretty primitive:
- collapsing buildings are animated, not simulated
- the parts of an object/building that can break off are pre-cut by artists
- there seems to be a maximum depth to craters in the ground
- lots of vehicle damage is just cosmetic, not functional

...but it's just so intuitive that when a tank shell hits the corner of the concrete barrier that you're hiding behind that chunks of rock should go flying everywhere... or that instead of getting inside a building to destroy an object in it, you can just C4 all the load-bearing walls... or that a 10 minute fight in dense jungle is going to fell a few trees, etc.
Destruction == Win!

i am all for deformable environment and the solution for me is that the player shouldn't have a mega-hyper-powerful weapon which can destroy everything( or if he has one of these, maybe a few shots only).
so if the player wants to destroy/collapse a building by grinding the bricks in its foundation with your knife then he has to spent at least a year ( real time ) doing that in the game! :)
another example, if the player wants to dig a hole in the ground with his shovel, then a 2-meter-wide hole with depth of 2 meters should be dug for at least 4 hours (real time) :) :)

^^ I think that's the key to good deformation. The destruction/deformation in Bad Company 2 works so well because there are simple rules as to which weapons can destroy which things. Grenades can blow open small holes in just about anything, and if you hit a brick wall with one, they can kill someone standing directly on the other side, but they're useless against tanks. RPGS will create bigger holes and have a bigger damage radius. Bullets don't destroy too much of anything except doors, while knives can destroy doors and chain-link fences. Tanks can do pretty much anything, but it takes a few minutes (literally) to pull down a building.