Have to agree with the OP on this one, just trees wont make a forest, only when un-even ground / terrain, and some bushes, obstacles are added it starts to look and feel like a forest
they should also have somekind of platforming element that conveys that the player is long way from home
and the ability to build things from wood if the obstacle cant be overcome without "tools" like a ladder or a bridge
Sounds like you want survival/horror elements into an MMO. Can't really see that working Try DayZ / Arma. That game has really pretty forests and areas.
I think a big reason the forests arent dense in MMOs is the combat. I think it would feel out of place when the fight gets bigger and involves more people, all those trees and stuff blocking spells. It might also have something to do with performance and graphics. All those models being displayed.
I'm not saying it cant be implemented. It could be cool to travel through a dense, dark forest with a party, and having someone carry a torch to light a small area.
It might sound wierd, but I think the fact that MMOs have a map is a problem too. When you reveal an area once, you can just run in the pitch black looking at the minimap. Maybe if you disable it inside the forest/cave it could work.
Actually we are discussing whether or not to make a game or a simulation.
Btw I love the woods but not every woods is deep and thick. Here in Illinois we actually do have deer and rabbit paths you can easily follow. And if a woods gets tall enough to drown out the light to the little plants we get the effect of more path than not. The biggest paths being next to bodies of water because the animals go there often. Perhaps the developers grew up in an area with walkable woods like myself? Only, lolz, I don't know if you Europeans have the mosquito and poison oak infestations we have. Be funny if our player character found out they got poison oak or had to cover themselves in spray to keep their health from dropping at night. In northern Illinois we have ticks in the trees and leeches in the water as well. Blood sucking bastards. In the middle where I live there are water moccasins to watch out for.
Back to the original subject - yes it would be nice to get more simulation in games but I think this generation is reaching to find entertainment that lasts and keeps players coming back for more - if they reach at all. Simulation is not considered a game tactic yet but if it ever is that would rock all.
On the subject I would like to think we might be able to save those forests in real life first before simulating them. I used to see owls everywhere when I was a child and they are all gone now. What's left are deer, rabbit, beaver, groundhog, possums, raccoons, foxes, coyotes, hawks and a few bats.
Originally posted by DamonVile Ever seen a forest that has a million+ fat gamers go through it every day ? It wouldn't look like those pictures for long.
LOOL true. XD
Still, I am really getting cranky over MMOs these days. People just walz and run through worlds who are PRESUMED to be dangerous! Do you guys have any idea how TERRIFYING nature seemed to our ancestors! How FUCKING FRIGHTENED they were walking through a forest?! If a bear or a pack of wolves jumped at you from the underbush it was a mortally dangerous thing, not some yawnfest "oh yawn another 20 bear paws to gather".
People CAN run through these worlds, and that is whats wrong. The old games like EQ1 grasped that better. EVERY DAMN STEP was DANGEROUS and fearful! That is how worlds are supposed to feel! It hasn't to be full of grief, like corse-run or what. But the worlds just pose no danger! People can run through a forest, a cave, a ruin, anything like a stroll in a city park! And that is just plain wrong!
God I never thought I say that. But every new MMO is easier and less a risk until it just has no feeling of excitement, of accomplishment. I recall even in EQ2, when I finally was able to cross the Nektulous Forest, it was some accomplishment! Today environment is just like a city street or a park. It's just no longer fun, when it is all so safe like passing through a zoo!
I was gonna say EQ seemed to get this right. Night was dark and it brought out things that were more dangerous and not around during the day. Good luck in Blackburrow if your torch dies or how about Kithicor Forest. No one has come close since.
Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
Take that scene from Avatar where Jake got lost in the forest after he escaped the Thanator and just before he meets Neytiri.
That scene would suck if it was a bright night like in today's MMORPGs. What makes the scene so great is the necessity for Jake to craft a makeshift torch, and then the torchlight reflecting in the eyes of the multitude of Viperwolves all around. It's night, damnit, not some darker version of day.
Darkness and the use of individual lighting creates intensity, mystery, drama, surprises.
MMORPG nights are all at best "full moon" nights. Dungeons are never dark. It's sad.
I so agree with you.. Darkness should be an issue, just like forest and other natural surroundings.. When a human goes down into the depths of Blackburrow, it should be pitch black.. There is NO natural light in a cave or underground dungeon.. I can see torches having limited use, and in some cases where no torches are around, bring your own or use some other magic way of illuminating your surroundings.. For me this goes back to EQ having weight encumbrances, stamina and health penalties.. MMO games today have seem to become nothing more then carebear arcade games..
Sorry guys, you want fairyland forests not real forests. There is a huge difference. An old growth forest is not as dark as you gents want it to be. Here is a pic from the Olympic National Forest in Washington State - a temperate rain forest. It is old growth but not as dark as you would expect.
Because most games just aren't made for people who want realistic or difficult worlds. They are made for the majority of people who want entertainment.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Originally posted by botrytis Sorry guys, you want fairyland forests not real forests. There is a huge difference. An old growth forest is not as dark as you gents want it to be. Here is a pic from the Olympic National Forest in Washington State - a temperate rain forest. It is old growth but not as dark as you would expect. http://www.thesouthsounder.com/images/OlympicForest.jpg
Heh. Punch to da face by irony.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Old Forest was great before the nerfs ,in LOTRO beta you could get quite lost there or wander too close to an elite tree. Nektulos forest is also well done and quite claustrophobic after the openness of Commonlands. Hopefully eqn or eso will have big forests to explore, with elite monsters ambushes or caves to discover and real dark during nightime, so you have to carry torches and fuel for them.
It is more the feeling of safety in today's MMOs which I feel is WRONG. In a MMO walking through wild lands should always feel dangerous and not easy like a city park!
Come take a walk in the woods of Darkfall...see how safe you feel.
Incognito www.incognito-gaming.us "You're either with us or against us"
Gamers don't want to spend 90% of the time trying to clear bushes so that they can go from point A to B.
This gamer wouldn't mind spending a somewhat lower percentage of his time clearing bushes if there was the prospect of revealing something interesting behind them.
Not Nariu...and he will keep rallying against it. He wants it all NOW NOW NOW. Perfect recipient for the quoted below.
Yeh. I would mind. It is not fun for me clearing bushes. I wouldn't spend even a min on it. If there is something interesting, just reveal it without requirement of any work.
Because most games just aren't made for people who want realistic or difficult worlds. They are made for the majority of people who want entertainment.
Yeh.
And from this perspective, they got forests "right". Games don't have to be "realistic" to be "right".
Trees are expensive to draw. Big trees with lots of branches are really expensive to draw. Drawing lots of trees at once is really, really expensive to draw. And if you want them to be lots of different trees, rather than lots of copies of the same tree, then, well, I hope you like single-digit frame rates. On high end hardware. At low graphical settings.
I think it may be possible to ease up on the computational burden of drawing complex trees somewhat by having a handful of leaves or small sections of branches and drawing lots of copies of them in geometry shaders. But that's tricky to do, and only partially ameliorates the problem.
The reason forests are dark is that if you look in a random direction and draw a straight line, it might go through ten different things before it goes off into space (or into the ground). But having to run pixel/fragment shaders 10 times for each pixel rather than one or two will kill your performance. If you're using any sort of transparency to draw your trees, you can't ease the computational burden with early fragment tests, either.
What about the approach SOE is taking with EQN and using noise to generate LOD, which fleshes out as you approach into models? It sounds like it would be a painstaking process, yet by their claim it requires little to naught in terms of system resource to generate.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
All the issues with forests and cities are the result of modern technology.
The proportions between quality and realism are getting worse and worse with every new game.
Back in the days it was all about world details, like actually having rooms in a house full of people, or having some visible drainpipes on a house, some dirt on the road, missing bricks, more dense forests etc. Now it is about making a building with four walls, a roof and a door, but with 5million pixel textures and billion different lights from every direction. And we have such nonsence like few sun rays from different directions in a scene, I thought we have one sun... I don't know if people are stupid enough to accept those crazy mistakes, or just don't care.
Because most games just aren't made for people who want realistic or difficult worlds. They are made for the majority of people who want entertainment.
Yeh.
And from this perspective, they got forests "right". Games don't have to be "realistic" to be "right".
I think that maybe those in favor of "Getting forests right" are simply explaining it wrong.
I don't think many want to have to take a sword and/or axe...or use fire spells, etc to actually clear brush in a forest setting. Perhaps having certain areas where this was possible to uncover something of interest (I.E. A hidden cave entrance behind some ivy growing over an old mind shaft hidden in the forest, a hidden treasure chest, etc.). But other than that...having to clear all the way through would get monotonous and annoying.
What I THINK they may mean...which is how I myself feel about it...is giving you the feeling of being in an actual forest in an actual living world. Pre-cut paths everywhere don't give that feeling....overly open areas don't give that effect and/or feeling.
You can still have paths...but make them worn, over grown in areas making them more difficult to make out, but still passable....areas off paths thicker...yet still passable if he player wishes. The trees should canopy the forest and cloak it in thick shade even in the day time...and be pitch black at night. And not all forests in the game need to be this way based on the setting (I.E. Snow covered areas could be pine dense forests which give a different look and feel and ARE more opened to daylight. Especially since regular trees in such areas would be few..and if there...devoid of leaves).
Anyways...again...I think it's more about making the settings feel like the settings in question. Not really having to be completely realistic based on graphics. Cartoon settings such as in EQ Next and WoW are fine. But make them somewhat correct in nature (I.E. Maybe some mirages and heat distortion looking at things at long distance in desert settings, more brightness in snow covered areas, etc.)
Seems as of late most games just throw a setting in there to give a setting to rush through and nothing more...but have lost that touch of making it so you stop and actually say "wow that is cool or beautiful!" and encourage you to explore every nook and cranny to see what you can see and/or discover.
Really, there is no right way to "getting forests right", nor any other setting for that matter. But there are subtle things that can be done to these settings to set them apart from all of the other games settings on the market and make them interesting and worth traversing.
Night isn't that dark, it's actually quite bright compared to indoors with the lights off. Not only that, but myth busters did an episode of the pirate eye patch to see in the dark myth, and your eyes acclimate to the dark in a short amount of time and you can see pretty much everything and that was in controlled pitch black environment.
Alos not all forests are the same, some are very dense while some are more spread out, stop being silly.
Lastly, these are video game, no one wants to spend 3 hours to go 50 yards in game because of its impossible terrain.
Sounds like you want survival/horror elements into an MMO. Can't really see that working Try DayZ / Arma. That game has really pretty forests and areas.
I think a big reason the forests arent dense in MMOs is the combat. I think it would feel out of place when the fight gets bigger and involves more people, all those trees and stuff blocking spells. It might also have something to do with performance and graphics. All those models being displayed.
I'm not saying it cant be implemented. It could be cool to travel through a dense, dark forest with a party, and having someone carry a torch to light a small area.
It might sound wierd, but I think the fact that MMOs have a map is a problem too. When you reveal an area once, you can just run in the pitch black looking at the minimap. Maybe if you disable it inside the forest/cave it could work.
It's what I loved about "Silent Hill". Most of the time you were not even attacked. It was just the FEAR, the sound, the fog, the subtle details that kept you constantly on your toes.
THAT is what MMO developers still don't get. Excitement, the feeling of danger is NOT evoked by letting us kill 20 bears, glued to the ground in an orderly fashion every 5 meters. It doesn't HAVE to be dark, that is just one example. It is a matter of design.
Take Nektulos Forest, both in Everquest and the early days of Everquest II, it was a fearsome, dangerous place. That made it memorable, as opposed to the hundreds of nameless generic places we walz through which nobody will ever remember. Light and darkness is just one example how to handle feelings of danger and exploration.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Have fun designing and coding that. Oh whats that? People would rather spend their time grouped in a town hub? Guess those tens of thousands of hours of work making that forest was easily forgotten.
Sounds like you want survival/horror elements into an MMO. Can't really see that working Try DayZ / Arma. That game has really pretty forests and areas.
I think a big reason the forests arent dense in MMOs is the combat. I think it would feel out of place when the fight gets bigger and involves more people, all those trees and stuff blocking spells. It might also have something to do with performance and graphics. All those models being displayed.
I'm not saying it cant be implemented. It could be cool to travel through a dense, dark forest with a party, and having someone carry a torch to light a small area.
It might sound wierd, but I think the fact that MMOs have a map is a problem too. When you reveal an area once, you can just run in the pitch black looking at the minimap. Maybe if you disable it inside the forest/cave it could work.
It's what I loved about "Silent Hill". Most of the time you were not even attacked. It was just the FEAR, the sound, the fog, the subtle details that kept you constantly on your toes.
THAT is what MMO developers still don't get. Excitement, the feeling of danger is NOT evoked by letting us kill 20 bears, glued to the ground in an orderly fashion every 5 meters. It doesn't HAVE to be dark, that is just one example. It is a matter of design.
Take Nektulos Forest, both in Everquest and the early days of Everquest II, it was a fearsome, dangerous place. That made it memorable, as opposed to the hundreds of nameless generic places we walz through which nobody will ever remember. Light and darkness is just one example how to handle feelings of danger and exploration.
You can't make a horror mmorpg that is scary. It is the same as going to cinema to watch a horror movie, try being scared with all those people sitting around you.
What fear, what silence, when you have hundreds of people running around you? It is not like the old mmo's, where thousands of people played, now we have millions of people in a single title. The reason that everything is big and wide in mmo's is the number of players. If you made a thick forest, that would mean you need to fit all those players between the trees, it would be more populated than a town. You would see a flashlight blinding you with light every few seconds in your dark forest. You think you don't see so many players in a mmo because there's not so many of them on your server? It is because the space is so huge. Ever noticed how ridiculously huge some objects in mmorpgs are, like bridges? It is to avoid crowding of players, you will never see this problem because of how large everything is made and it needs to stay that way. That is why narrow places packed with details are single player thing. We don't have technology to make a rich forest and make it large enough for all those players to feel isolated.
Sounds like you want survival/horror elements into an MMO. Can't really see that working Try DayZ / Arma. That game has really pretty forests and areas.
I think a big reason the forests arent dense in MMOs is the combat. I think it would feel out of place when the fight gets bigger and involves more people, all those trees and stuff blocking spells. It might also have something to do with performance and graphics. All those models being displayed.
I'm not saying it cant be implemented. It could be cool to travel through a dense, dark forest with a party, and having someone carry a torch to light a small area.
It might sound wierd, but I think the fact that MMOs have a map is a problem too. When you reveal an area once, you can just run in the pitch black looking at the minimap. Maybe if you disable it inside the forest/cave it could work.
It's what I loved about "Silent Hill". Most of the time you were not even attacked. It was just the FEAR, the sound, the fog, the subtle details that kept you constantly on your toes.
THAT is what MMO developers still don't get. Excitement, the feeling of danger is NOT evoked by letting us kill 20 bears, glued to the ground in an orderly fashion every 5 meters. It doesn't HAVE to be dark, that is just one example. It is a matter of design.
Take Nektulos Forest, both in Everquest and the early days of Everquest II, it was a fearsome, dangerous place. That made it memorable, as opposed to the hundreds of nameless generic places we walz through which nobody will ever remember. Light and darkness is just one example how to handle feelings of danger and exploration.
I remember powers like blind that actually made your screen dark lol. I used to get turned around sometimes EQ. Those were some brutal newbie zones.
Originally posted by Majinash The same reason most towns in MMOs have 2-3 homes and a store or two. We don't play in full sized worlds, we play in scaled down versions.
Why then did WOW and LOTRO at least halfway get this in their age old graphics?
And should that not be a point of development? Should not symbolic worlds be a matter of the past?
If you are still playing lotro check out fanghorn forest. They didnt' do a bad job. It's closer to original Great Forest.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
I've posted about this in the past. Most mmo games barely try to have any atmosphere at all in them these days. For being around ten years old, I still find the forests on planet Dathomir of Star Wars Galaxies to be one of the few that pulls off being dark and scary, and this is with ancient graphics. Especially with so many bad ass mobs like Nighsister witches running around.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Watch Man VS Wild for a few years and you'll be able to walz left and right all you want, and drinking your own piss will save your life once in a while.
Originally posted by Majinash The same reason most towns in MMOs have 2-3 homes and a store or two. We don't play in full sized worlds, we play in scaled down versions.
Why then did WOW and LOTRO at least halfway get this in their age old graphics?
And should that not be a point of development? Should not symbolic worlds be a matter of the past?
Because they were able to get away with using less polygons & simpler textures.
It's a simple matter of density. Most games can't handle tightly packed geometry + lighting, texturing ,etc. on a realistic level. That kind of stuff is known to kill even the best machines, and artists spend years learning how to trick & decieve people into thinking an area is more dense then it actually is, because there is no viable alternative.
Even the movies that do it correctly, often take days per-frame to render that kind of detail.
That kind of details is insanely expensive (both in hardware, software; and monetary resources)
Comments
Have to agree with the OP on this one, just trees wont make a forest, only when un-even ground / terrain, and some bushes, obstacles are added it starts to look and feel like a forest
they should also have somekind of platforming element that conveys that the player is long way from home
and the ability to build things from wood if the obstacle cant be overcome without "tools" like a ladder or a bridge
Sounds like you want survival/horror elements into an MMO. Can't really see that working
Try DayZ / Arma. That game has really pretty forests and areas.
I think a big reason the forests arent dense in MMOs is the combat. I think it would feel out of place when the fight gets bigger and involves more people, all those trees and stuff blocking spells. It might also have something to do with performance and graphics. All those models being displayed.
I'm not saying it cant be implemented. It could be cool to travel through a dense, dark forest with a party, and having someone carry a torch to light a small area.
It might sound wierd, but I think the fact that MMOs have a map is a problem too. When you reveal an area once, you can just run in the pitch black looking at the minimap. Maybe if you disable it inside the forest/cave it could work.
Actually we are discussing whether or not to make a game or a simulation.
Btw I love the woods but not every woods is deep and thick. Here in Illinois we actually do have deer and rabbit paths you can easily follow. And if a woods gets tall enough to drown out the light to the little plants we get the effect of more path than not. The biggest paths being next to bodies of water because the animals go there often. Perhaps the developers grew up in an area with walkable woods like myself? Only, lolz, I don't know if you Europeans have the mosquito and poison oak infestations we have. Be funny if our player character found out they got poison oak or had to cover themselves in spray to keep their health from dropping at night. In northern Illinois we have ticks in the trees and leeches in the water as well. Blood sucking bastards. In the middle where I live there are water moccasins to watch out for.
Back to the original subject - yes it would be nice to get more simulation in games but I think this generation is reaching to find entertainment that lasts and keeps players coming back for more - if they reach at all. Simulation is not considered a game tactic yet but if it ever is that would rock all.
On the subject I would like to think we might be able to save those forests in real life first before simulating them. I used to see owls everywhere when I was a child and they are all gone now. What's left are deer, rabbit, beaver, groundhog, possums, raccoons, foxes, coyotes, hawks and a few bats.
I was gonna say EQ seemed to get this right. Night was dark and it brought out things that were more dangerous and not around during the day. Good luck in Blackburrow if your torch dies or how about Kithicor Forest. No one has come close since.
Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
Thomas Jefferson
I so agree with you.. Darkness should be an issue, just like forest and other natural surroundings.. When a human goes down into the depths of Blackburrow, it should be pitch black.. There is NO natural light in a cave or underground dungeon.. I can see torches having limited use, and in some cases where no torches are around, bring your own or use some other magic way of illuminating your surroundings.. For me this goes back to EQ having weight encumbrances, stamina and health penalties.. MMO games today have seem to become nothing more then carebear arcade games..
Sorry guys, you want fairyland forests not real forests. There is a huge difference. An old growth forest is not as dark as you gents want it to be. Here is a pic from the Olympic National Forest in Washington State - a temperate rain forest. It is old growth but not as dark as you would expect.
http://www.thesouthsounder.com/images/OlympicForest.jpg
Because most games just aren't made for people who want realistic or difficult worlds. They are made for the majority of people who want entertainment.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Heh. Punch to da face by irony.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Old Forest was great before the nerfs ,in LOTRO beta you could get quite lost there or wander too close to an elite tree. Nektulos forest is also well done and quite claustrophobic after the openness of Commonlands. Hopefully eqn or eso will have big forests to explore, with elite monsters ambushes or caves to discover and real dark during nightime, so you have to carry torches and fuel for them.
Come take a walk in the woods of Darkfall...see how safe you feel.
Incognito
www.incognito-gaming.us
"You're either with us or against us"
Yeh. I would mind. It is not fun for me clearing bushes. I wouldn't spend even a min on it. If there is something interesting, just reveal it without requirement of any work.
Yeh.
And from this perspective, they got forests "right". Games don't have to be "realistic" to be "right".
What about the approach SOE is taking with EQN and using noise to generate LOD, which fleshes out as you approach into models? It sounds like it would be a painstaking process, yet by their claim it requires little to naught in terms of system resource to generate.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
All the issues with forests and cities are the result of modern technology.
The proportions between quality and realism are getting worse and worse with every new game.
Back in the days it was all about world details, like actually having rooms in a house full of people, or having some visible drainpipes on a house, some dirt on the road, missing bricks, more dense forests etc. Now it is about making a building with four walls, a roof and a door, but with 5million pixel textures and billion different lights from every direction. And we have such nonsence like few sun rays from different directions in a scene, I thought we have one sun... I don't know if people are stupid enough to accept those crazy mistakes, or just don't care.
I think that maybe those in favor of "Getting forests right" are simply explaining it wrong.
I don't think many want to have to take a sword and/or axe...or use fire spells, etc to actually clear brush in a forest setting. Perhaps having certain areas where this was possible to uncover something of interest (I.E. A hidden cave entrance behind some ivy growing over an old mind shaft hidden in the forest, a hidden treasure chest, etc.). But other than that...having to clear all the way through would get monotonous and annoying.
What I THINK they may mean...which is how I myself feel about it...is giving you the feeling of being in an actual forest in an actual living world. Pre-cut paths everywhere don't give that feeling....overly open areas don't give that effect and/or feeling.
You can still have paths...but make them worn, over grown in areas making them more difficult to make out, but still passable....areas off paths thicker...yet still passable if he player wishes. The trees should canopy the forest and cloak it in thick shade even in the day time...and be pitch black at night. And not all forests in the game need to be this way based on the setting (I.E. Snow covered areas could be pine dense forests which give a different look and feel and ARE more opened to daylight. Especially since regular trees in such areas would be few..and if there...devoid of leaves).
Anyways...again...I think it's more about making the settings feel like the settings in question. Not really having to be completely realistic based on graphics. Cartoon settings such as in EQ Next and WoW are fine. But make them somewhat correct in nature (I.E. Maybe some mirages and heat distortion looking at things at long distance in desert settings, more brightness in snow covered areas, etc.)
Seems as of late most games just throw a setting in there to give a setting to rush through and nothing more...but have lost that touch of making it so you stop and actually say "wow that is cool or beautiful!" and encourage you to explore every nook and cranny to see what you can see and/or discover.
Really, there is no right way to "getting forests right", nor any other setting for that matter. But there are subtle things that can be done to these settings to set them apart from all of the other games settings on the market and make them interesting and worth traversing.
Night isn't that dark, it's actually quite bright compared to indoors with the lights off. Not only that, but myth busters did an episode of the pirate eye patch to see in the dark myth, and your eyes acclimate to the dark in a short amount of time and you can see pretty much everything and that was in controlled pitch black environment.
Alos not all forests are the same, some are very dense while some are more spread out, stop being silly.
Lastly, these are video game, no one wants to spend 3 hours to go 50 yards in game because of its impossible terrain.
It's what I loved about "Silent Hill". Most of the time you were not even attacked. It was just the FEAR, the sound, the fog, the subtle details that kept you constantly on your toes.
THAT is what MMO developers still don't get. Excitement, the feeling of danger is NOT evoked by letting us kill 20 bears, glued to the ground in an orderly fashion every 5 meters. It doesn't HAVE to be dark, that is just one example. It is a matter of design.
Take Nektulos Forest, both in Everquest and the early days of Everquest II, it was a fearsome, dangerous place. That made it memorable, as opposed to the hundreds of nameless generic places we walz through which nobody will ever remember. Light and darkness is just one example how to handle feelings of danger and exploration.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
You can't make a horror mmorpg that is scary. It is the same as going to cinema to watch a horror movie, try being scared with all those people sitting around you.
What fear, what silence, when you have hundreds of people running around you? It is not like the old mmo's, where thousands of people played, now we have millions of people in a single title. The reason that everything is big and wide in mmo's is the number of players. If you made a thick forest, that would mean you need to fit all those players between the trees, it would be more populated than a town. You would see a flashlight blinding you with light every few seconds in your dark forest. You think you don't see so many players in a mmo because there's not so many of them on your server? It is because the space is so huge. Ever noticed how ridiculously huge some objects in mmorpgs are, like bridges? It is to avoid crowding of players, you will never see this problem because of how large everything is made and it needs to stay that way. That is why narrow places packed with details are single player thing. We don't have technology to make a rich forest and make it large enough for all those players to feel isolated.
I remember powers like blind that actually made your screen dark lol. I used to get turned around sometimes EQ. Those were some brutal newbie zones.
If you are still playing lotro check out fanghorn forest. They didnt' do a bad job. It's closer to original Great Forest.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
"It has potential"
-Second most used phrase on existence
"It sucks"
-Most used phrase on existence
I've posted about this in the past. Most mmo games barely try to have any atmosphere at all in them these days. For being around ten years old, I still find the forests on planet Dathomir of Star Wars Galaxies to be one of the few that pulls off being dark and scary, and this is with ancient graphics. Especially with so many bad ass mobs like Nighsister witches running around.
http://starwarsfuerza.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/dathomir.jpg
This is daytime.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Because they were able to get away with using less polygons & simpler textures.
It's a simple matter of density. Most games can't handle tightly packed geometry + lighting, texturing ,etc. on a realistic level. That kind of stuff is known to kill even the best machines, and artists spend years learning how to trick & decieve people into thinking an area is more dense then it actually is, because there is no viable alternative.
Even the movies that do it correctly, often take days per-frame to render that kind of detail.
That kind of details is insanely expensive (both in hardware, software; and monetary resources)