Goblin Squad Member
|
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
The best and most exciting exploration experiences I ever had playing an MMO was the early closed beta testing for Saga of Ryzom, and it was the exploring.
A friend and I went exploring. Really exploring, seeing mobs we had not seen, environments we didn't know existed, and it was vacant. We spent hours exploring areas before bumping into another person. We must have been the only people for literately a miles around.
As the beta progressed we lead teams of people at lower levels through interesting areas, this was before there was any fast travel so if you wanted to get to X and you were in Y, it might be a 1/2 hour journey through a dangerous expanse.
When I played WoW this was the biggest disappointment I had. Everywhere i went, there was never exploring. The world was generally small, open, and densely populated with players.
TLDR: Make the world vast, not dense. Make distance important, make actual adventuring important, not just questing.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I'll put a +1 to this.
A massive world, where towns are just that, towns, not four or five streets and some buildings.
That's a village, dammit. Cataclysm Stormwind is perhaps the only 'true' city in World of Warcraft at the moment. Hence why I'm always there. Racist bastards still won't serve me drinks, though!
In a town, yes, a crush of people, NPCs and PCs alike, but outside of those regions, I would have a Nerd-Gasm that would raise the ocean level across the world by several meters if I could pick a random direction, hit the auto-walk button and just see other Players in the distance at best.
WoW made a good game, but they never made the maps truly big enough for the sheer volume of players they have. At prime-time, on the more populous servers, it is entirely possible to have people spawn-camping mobs just to do their quests.
Don't even get me started on the death-threats and drama that their laziness with the Easter Holiday Event generated, with them trying to cram every player into 4 of the 'starter' towns. I jumped from Wyrmrest Accord to Theramoore at prime-time to see if the rumours were true, and having twelve or so players camped at every. single. spawn. point and furiously right-clicking in the hopes of getting enough eggs just to do the Dailies was enough to make me log out and forget I had an account till the event was over for another year.
World of Camp-Craft, and god help you if you somehow ask people to give you a chance.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Any way to do a procedurally generated world? I know there are some middle ware guys out there... Mix this with a sandbox system that generates random mobs/camps/resources, and you can get massive explorable lands for people who like exploring, while still retaining the ability to focus on specific areas for people who like theme-gaming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
They are planning a small world to begin with, but balancing that by limiting the number of players.
The term small is very subjective, I believe this "Small" world to begin with, is actually going to be larger then many games build up to.
That red rectangle in the northwest highlights the Crusader Road area, our focus for launch.This area is roughly 11 miles wide and 12 miles tall—about 133 square miles. It contains part of the Echo Wood to the east and is bordered on the west by the West Sellen River. The zone includes the currently abandoned town of Mosswater.
....
Let me give you a little perspective on how large this place really is: Below is a similarly scaled map of Philadephia, PA—a city with an area of 134 square miles that supports a real-world population of more than 1.5 million people.
For further perspective, at least from what I am finding on Google searches. Many people estimate the size of Azeroth from world of warcraft, to be roughly 60 square miles.
I am curious about the method in which maps will be managed with the players. Large maps with high numbers of players equals performance problems. Typically, the only way around this is to have sparse/open terrain or by keeping player density fairly high.
From my days of running a Neverwinter Nights Server (I & II), there were huge problems with large areas of detail rich terrain plus more than a few dozen players logged on at a time. Everyone wants a vast world that is detail rich and lots of players to interact with. There has to be a balancing act with all this.
Please tell me you have this problem resolved?
Thanks,
Urlord the Wonderful
@Urlord, I believe they intend to address the problem by having each map hex run in its own process.
That would take advantage of multithreaded processing and clustering which is great. Thanks.
I have read the term "hex" in several blogs and posts. Would you happen to know how big a hex will be?|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I'm gonna reference Ultima Online again, but I feel that player housing in Ultima is still the best way to create a breathing land mass. One thing I would change; when a player builds a home, no home may be placed within say 50 feet of his land. Also, only allow player housing within a few miles of cities. This would disallow the map from become a mass of block to block buildings spanning the land mass, something I feel was Ultima's only weakness in this regard.
Player housing, in this fashion, keeps large areas of the world interesting; Darkfall is an example of a vast and interesting world which was immense to experience initially, only to eventually make the game feel as dead as a dodo.
@Urlord, I believe they intend to address the problem by having each map hex run in its own process.That would take advantage of multithreaded processing and clustering which is great. Thanks.
I have read the term "hex" in several blogs and posts. Would you happen to know how big a hex will be?
So, we all know "a server" is actually in modern games a bunch of servers. Some control areas, some chat channels, some AI, etc.
From my standpoint I imagine how many machines are covering an area would depend on how populous and active an area is. A prime city may be made up of many *servers* even though it doesn't cover much area. A barren wasteland with very low traffic may cover a huge area with one server from the cluster. I'm not sure the number of servers serving a hex has much implications to players, but technically in the background those may be subdivided many times due to the need to serve more players without a performance loss.
Eve seems to handle load balancing *super* well with a "single server" environment, and many of the guys in Goblinworks are from CCP.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I have read the term "hex" in several blogs and posts. Would you happen to know how big a hex will be?
Lots of really good info in the blog The Crusader Road.
But to answer your question, it's about 1.1 kilometers across.
I think I read somewhere that PFO may be using HeroEngine. If this is true, from my experience HeroEngine handles seamless worlds very well with proximity areas which allow players to see and interact with objects in an adjacent area. From a player's perspective, they will probably never know when they move from one area (hex) to another.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I completely agree with the urge to explore vast spaces. When I played SWG, I once got the clever idea to walk from one town to another to save myself the cost of a Rapid Transit ticket. It took me about 2-3 hours of gameplay, easily, to walk from one location to another. It was tiring, and there were periods of time where I was about ready to go throw myself at a monster, let it kill me, and just buy a ticket. But I kept going. I saw parts of Talus (one of the worlds) that I honestly believe no one else had traveled to before. I learned quite a bit about game mechanics when I couldn't just run back and grab an extra tool for something. And when, at long long last, I crested a hill and saw the city I had been traveling to, I felt a sense of accomplishment and relief.
I want that feeling again. It wouldn't be possible in most MMOs these days, for one they aren't big enough. Two, fast travel (be it shuttle tickets or mounts) makes the goal getting from one location to another. Not traveling there, not surviving the journey. Travel should be a part of the game, not an inconvenience on the way to the fun. Make it big. Make fast travel not cover most of the world (if there were perhaps just 5 fast travel spots in the entire map, I'd be fine). And make sure that we never lose that sense of wonder, that curiosity for what lies over that hill.
TLDR: Bring back the magic of seeing a new world.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm gonna reference Ultima Online again, but I feel that player housing in Ultima is still the best way to create a breathing land mass. One thing I would change; when a player builds a home, no home may be placed within say 50 feet of his land. Also, only allow player housing within a few miles of cities. This would disallow the map from become a mass of block to block buildings spanning the land mass, something I feel was Ultima's only weakness in this regard.
Player housing, in this fashion, keeps large areas of the world interesting; Darkfall is an example of a vast and interesting world which was immense to experience initially, only to eventually make the game feel as dead as a dodo.
IMO, fairly easilly destroyable houses would also solve this problem. Within the walls of a city houses would rarely be ransacked, as that should draw alerts from the watchtowers in PC towns, and the marshals in NPC towns. In the wilderness on the other hand, you have PCs, wandering monsters etc...
Basically as long as player built structures are destroy-able and are not trivial to make, there really isn't much of an issue when it comes to house littering
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Comments have built up to a good point: Construction and destruction lead to activity and change in landscape = active & resourceful area of the world to interact with.
Size of map is certainly advantage to an explorable world. But - what about cartographers, explorers and becoming lost in the world relying on skills and player decisions how to navigate from that state? That is a really explorable experience where even the next corner allows true exploration even in a smaller world. Namely a large world will eventually become smaller, but it remains larger for longer, if maps are rare artefacts.
Hence why flying mounts are essentially speeding up the march to a "smaller" world.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm glad this thread is getting traction, and that I'm not the only player that enjoys exploring.
Going back to ryzom before fast travel... Your starting race determined where you started, so in the early phases of the game it was very rare to run into outsiders. My friend and i wanted to go to another capital city. We made sure we had provisions we needed, talked to everyone we could about what way might be the easiest to get there and set off on an adventure.
I've been thinking a bit more on this, and about other games that use fast travel be it MMO or games like skyrim/red dead/fallout, where fast travel exists because distance is an obstacle to fun, and what a previous poster said rings loud:
"fast travel (be it shuttle tickets or mounts) makes the goal getting from one location to another. Not traveling there, not surviving the journey. Travel should be a part of the game, not an inconvenience on the way to the fun. Make it big. Make fast travel not cover most of the world (if there were perhaps just 5 fast travel spots in the entire map, I'd be fine). And make sure that we never lose that sense of wonder, that curiosity for what lies over that hill. "
One thing that having long distance/travel between areas does is creates a strong sense of community for that area. One communities concerns become very different from an others. When you look at resources this becomes even more important. Some resources may be scares in one region, and bountiful in another, if you cant just fast transport (or world wide auctions), this sets up a whole lot of possibility for people to play merchant adventurers.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I would like to lend my voice also to the idea of having a large open world. I am quite tired of the assumption by previous developers that I need to have "content" packed so close and tightly such that I may not "lose interest" if I have to run X minutes without "doing something".
Indeed, some of the most fun moments I've had were in Asheron's Call running on the road from Samsur to Holtburg. If memory serves me correct that run would take 45 minutes to an hour if you didn't stop to kill monsters and you had a Run Skill around 100. So longer with lower skill and a little shorter time with higher skill.
Having huge open areas with the occasional random monster spawns does, in my view, lend to the feeling of another world being created. It strays away from "game building" (your tight and neatly packaged themeparks) to "world building" (your large, open, explorable sandboxes).
Additionally, if the plan is to allow players to develop kingdoms and empires, cities and towns, then we need area to do such things. Areas that hopefully we will have to fight back the wilderness and tame the area to then bring civilization to.
Don't worry about providing convenience for me. I've been "convenienced" enough with the recent slate of themepark MMOs and instead of playing those right now I'm here, in your sandbox announced game forums. That says alot, I think, and I know I'm not the only one.
Make sinks for my time. Delay my gratification. Make me wait. Make me run. Let me explore.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Add me to the list of people wishing to make distance and exploring meaningful.
Something I thought of was a mapping skill. With no mapping skill you have no mini-map display, or overhead map view. Raise your mapping skill and you can increase the detail and accuracy of the mini/overhead map as you go.
Please do not, however, include anything resembling 'quest markers' or 'find this here' zones on them, I don't want my hand held, or content pointed out to me, I want to discover and I want to get lost.
But how can you get lost with fast travel? Simple. Make it so you can only fast travel from a road. The moment you wander off the beaten path you are on your own. This means your traders can, mostly, get where they need to, it creates genuine trade routes that thieves can set up on, and gives real meaning to wandering off into the true unknown.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Make it so you can only fast travel from a road.
I believe their current intentions are to require you to initiate Fast Travel from a Hub of some sort.
See the "Fast Travel" section near the end of the blog Time is the Fire in which We Burn.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Make it so you can only fast travel from a road.I believe their current intentions are to require you to initiate Fast Travel from a Hub of some sort.
See the "Fast Travel" section near the end of the blog Time is the Fire in which We Burn.
This is why I like Goblinworks, they like my ideas so much, they implemented them months before I even suggested them! :D
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I will add my voice to this discussion. The idea of crossing a huge untamed expanse with my friends is incredible. I remember the first day of EQ1 -- I played a Barbarian from Halas, surrounded by other Barbarians - trying to find our way through the wilderness - and it really made a community of people trying to help each other.
I would say that most current MMO's populations are worried about the destination and 'mad' leveling to max level to 'win'. Please make this game about the journey and a series of communities all striving to make it in their corner of the world.
Cheers!
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I will add my voice to this discussion. The idea of crossing a huge untamed expanse with my friends is incredible. I remember the first day of EQ1 -- I played a Barbarian from Halas, surrounded by other Barbarians - trying to find our way through the wilderness - and it really made a community of people trying to help each other.
I had a very similar experience crossing from Freeport to Qeynos! I still remember that journey well.
I think exploration is an extremely important aspect for my enjoyment in an MMO. But I don't think it always has to be a new landmass or content. Revitalizing old content is a great way to freshen up areas, and make them candidates for exploration once again.
I definitely want to continually get new places to explore, but I'm always a little sad when developers forget about early-release zones. Turbine has done a good job of going back to old content in Lord of the Rings Online, but only in terms of quests and what not...I'd be interested to see areas change a bit with time, to reflect changes in the lore/story of the game.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I think exploration is an extremely important aspect for my enjoyment in an MMO. But I don't think it always has to be a new landmass or content. Revitalizing old content is a great way to freshen up areas, and make them candidates for exploration once again.
I totally agree with this. I'm not sure it's going to be the way PFO works, since they're starting out with such a vast scale (note, I'm not saying vast scope) and planning on adding hexes regularly.
I hope that most of the changes in older hexes are due to player actions, but it would be nice to see, for example, the NPC Settlements get a facelift every now and then.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I totally agree with this. I'm not sure it's going to be the way PFO works, since they're starting out with such a vast scale (note, I'm not saying vast scope) and planning on adding hexes regularly.
I must have missed that in a blog post, that makes me excited! Could you toss me a reference link, good sir?
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
@Alexander_Damocles, here's a quick link. I'm sure there are more, but this one was easy to find :)
From the thread to discuss the blog on A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step:
The map itself will expand over time as well which means there will be regular opportunities to be exploring territory no player has previously seen.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
@Alexander_Damocles, here's a quick link. I'm sure there are more, but this one was easy to find :)
From the thread to discuss the blog on A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step:
The map itself will expand over time as well which means there will be regular opportunities to be exploring territory no player has previously seen.
That is *awesome*. Goblinworks, hurry up and get this to alpha! I've got *way* too much time I could burn testing your product...I'd even do it for free! *taps foot impatiently*
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I've got *way* too much time I could burn testing your product...I'd even do it for free! *taps foot impatiently*
I think you'll have to pay $1000 for the privilege.
I'm all for the opportunity to trek through wide open spaces, but I would also like the chance to fast travel when I want to.
I think in WoW (or at least when I last played) you can only get a mount at 10th level (it might even have been 20th level when I started) and a fast mount at 40th and you can only fly between hubs that you have already visited.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Vanilla WoW, you couldn't get a basic mount till level 40 (I believe) and an Epic Mount at 60, which was worth hundreds of gold.
Burning Crusade added a further hump to this process via flying mounts.
Then Blizzard started to lower the bar, letting players have access to mounts at level 20 (basic) and 40 (Epic) and flying at 60 (Again, from memory)
Then Cata came out and herp a derp flying everywhere.
Please, as much fun as Flying would be, in an open-world PvP-ish setting .... having high levels dropping down from on high to power-teabag you while gathering materials on your low-level character is never fun.
I believe there was a WoW Guild called the something-or-other Aerial Superiority Squadron, which consisted purely of Druids knocking people off their mounts in mid-air. I can fully see guilds of Player-Killers grinding flying mounts for the sole reason of getting that 'first shot' in purely because 90% of the player-base will be more focused on watching everything on the Horizontal Plane, not peering up and dreading the whistle sound of the wind rushing past the +5 Adamantine Crotch-Plate of the Paladin dropping down on them from on-high.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
It's a good thing that fast travel is between defined nodes and ambush can occur. This idea limits fast travel to a sort of transport infrastructure idea. It would be good if mounts perhaps could not go over some terrain such as heavy woods or Mountains. Also mounts perhaps would need maintenance and associated upkeep costs? Eg I don't like the idea of flying mounts^ above assuming there was a dragon mount, it should be the equivalent of a white elephant in expence only a king might afford!
All travel options affect exploration: Where there are roads the wilderness vanishes in RL eg. Just ask bears.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
It would be good if mounts perhaps could not go over some terrain such as heavy woods or Mountains.
I would love to see certain terrain types force dismounted or extremely slow travel.
As for Flying, there has been a lot of discussion in several threads, but I think the main consensus was that there should be significant costs to it to keep it from being commonplace.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
It would be good if mounts perhaps could not go over some terrain such as heavy woods or Mountains.I would love to see certain terrain types force dismounted or extremely slow travel.
As for Flying, there has been a lot of discussion in several threads, but I think the main consensus was that there should be significant costs to it to keep it from being commonplace.
For my money, I'd rather not see it at all. The point is to interact with other characters. Flight makes it trivial to avoid most of the other players. At bare minimum, it doesn't need to be in the game at launch, there are quite a few other systems that could use the code time more.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
|
...Flight makes it trivial to avoid most of the other players...
That's one way of implementing it, and the way that most other games have. There is indeed little benefit to doing it in that way. It also doesn't need to be in the game at launch, because nobody will be able to do it at launch.
What I want is a placeholder down the line, saying 'this is where flying will be'.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
...Flight makes it trivial to avoid most of the other players...That's one way of implementing it, and the way that most other games have. There is indeed little benefit to doing it in that way. It also doesn't need to be in the game at launch, because nobody will be able to do it at launch.
What I want is a placeholder down the line, saying 'this is where flying will be'.
The question is, how hard should flight be to achieve? If it is hard (time intensive or expensive), then only the rich and experienced can do it, leaving the newer players unable to interact. The devs have stated their goal is for players to be a part of the game quickly, but that doesn't work if they can't touch the older players. If flight is easy to achieve, then the game is all about said flight, and roads become unnecessary, as do rivers and so on.
TLDR: I don't think flight has a real purpose in PFO, outside a limited number of monsters.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
TLDR: I don't think flight has a real purpose in PFO, outside a limited number of monsters.
Practically I think this is unavoidable end result. It would be a case that it obly fits if it's so rare to activate it makes less and less sense to then implement it. Although I like the idea of a unique title of Dragon-tamer that only one player could ever hold... ;)
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Yeah, I think it would be cool for horses and spells/skills or their equivalent that effect ground travel to remain relevant the entire game-no jumping over content. So mount spell, phantom steed, barbarian and monk fast movement, haste, etc. but no fly or flying mounts. Levitate could remain and be one of the best spells so maybe short duration?
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
The question is, how hard should flight be to achieve? If it is hard (time intensive or expensive), then only the rich and experienced can do it, leaving the newer players unable to interact. The devs have stated their goal is for players to be a part of the game quickly, but that doesn't work if they can't touch the older players. If flight is easy to achieve, then the game is all about said flight, and roads become unnecessary, as do rivers and so on.
IMO if/when it can be achieved (which I think should be a low priority way down the line. as far as costs, it needs limited utility, limited percentage of time (IE only able to fly in short bursts), not being able to fly out of reach of ground based weaponry, and potentially huge drawbacks to being shot by ground based weaponry (AKA splat).
As far as cost, I believe up front cost is irrelevant, no matter what someone will always be able to afford any up front cost, and if the advantage is too great, many people will view the character as incomplete until after he gains that, so everyone will have it.
continuous costs on the other hand are a different matter, in other words, 5k per use of fly spell, or 200k a week to feed a flying mount, is far better of a way to handle it than, 200M one time fee, as even people who can afford it, will often opt out to prevent from bankrupting themselves.
Again I do think flight should be a low priority, absolutely not a launch goal, balancing it alone
