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Two ways an MMO can improve on where Skyrim took the TES series.
Distopia
Member EpicPosts: 21,183
Diversity: Skyrim took away the diversity in TES creatures. There was very little in the variety of creatures or wildlife. Almost to disappointing levels. Coming from Oblivion to Skyrim was disorienting in this department.
Items were also extremely limited in terms of uniqueness. Especially where weapons are concerned. An MMO can not offer so little in these two categories. They will need to offer far more in terms of itemization. The different continents should also promise more in the way of enemy types.
World: I know people like to place TES games on a level all their own in this department. However what's truly there has been in just about every MMORPG to ever exist. I'd argue there's more purpose to these aspects in an MMO because you're playing with other people. Your crafts, your finds, your place in the world all serve a bigger purpose in an MMO. IN TES games your stuck dealing with automated responses, and hearing the same greeting/goodbye or warning you get from the onset. Trade also serves a much more profound purpose in an MMO. The world will be much more alive.
The main thing that will lack in TES is housing, as there is none. Other than that you will actually have a greater diversity on what to do in the world. The online nature is just a different environment entirely, it opens up so many possibilities that are just not possible in a single-player experience.
All IMO of course
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Comments
Housing exists. I saw a guy build a house out of turtle shells or something. A fox or wolf knocked it all over, but it was there.
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Problem is that ESO world is made up of instances channels and natural barriers plus it's pretty linear. You can't go where you want and even within each faction area you are loading into each zone because of the invisible or natural barriers.
If you look at this map you can see zone walls between each zone within the different faction areas. I actually think they chose the wrong path with how the world is set up.
It reminds me of how EQ2s world is set out.
As far as creatures, I was surprised at how little daedra there were in skyrim.
Other than that, it's pretty much the same palette of creatures.
As far as weapon diversity, funny thing that, if you look in the construction set there are quite a lot of wepons with different enchantments but for "some reason" I never saw many of them in my game.
I've been working a bit with the toolset and sometimes I do a search and have to scroll down quite a ways because of all the weapons and armor there are.
bug? Not sure.
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
There are certain limitations and tradeoffs when it comes to designing game worlds, especially mmo's. Everyone has this idea of being able to just create a huge open landmass without understanding why so many games have to resort to natural barriers and zones.
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Every instance of an item that is placed in the world is given a unique id, so when you search the toolset for something like "Steel Axe," it's going to list every copy that's lying on the ground, or decorating a wall or whatever.
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This would be right if all mmo's worlds were designed like ESO world but they are not, some mmo do have huge open land masses.
Name them. I mean name the ones with truly huge open land masses. I'm curious to see how many you can list that also perform well without looking like absolute crap.
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I share a similar opinion; Diversity is the key to any great MMO; In Everquest; it had a wide diversity of dungeons and items and monsters to battle at each level; WoW did too; And DAOC in its own unique way. This is the thing that MMOs are forgetting, they can try to clone WoW or other RPGS as much as they want, but they are cloning the wrong aspects of the game.
Everquest had hundreds of different areas to fight enemies and farm items etc. But current MMOS are far too linear and you will notice how every player of each level bracket is in the same place. While this has it's ups; mainly being the illusion of a bigger community; It takes far more from the game than it adds; The games people make today are sadly not geared towards cooperaton and player grouping; So forcing everyone into the same area adds more tension than anything as you are constantly battling for the same monsters or treasure chests etc. Bless all the FFXIV fans but this is a prime example of the problem with linear game play. You tend to lose interest really fast when there is only one zone for each level bracket, and by the time you finished all the quests and are level 45 or so, you have to grind fates in the zone for the level bracket, which means hundreds of people going after these things, so if you can't get to it by the time its over, a few seconds usually, you wasted all that time to get to it; and guildleves? Sure; but its hard to do the same four guildleves or so 40+ times; and no game is as anti-mmo and anti-social as FFXIV, you cant even send someone a tell when they are doing an instance.
World of Warcraft; As i said, there are hundreds of WoW clones out there, but here is the reason why none of them even come close (Other than the fact that WoW is the original WoW); What people try to clone is the Quest Hubs, The Casual Gamer style (typically soloability). But these things aren't what make wow, wow; World of Warcraft has years of lore behind it, and several different zones for each level; and the fact that the alliance and the horde share the same leveling zones adds a slight edge of caution (at least on a pvp server) And the part that most games miss; is every area has its own lore, its own style. Haunted Forests, Demon Infested Woods, etc. Its not just some stronger version of the monsters in the previous zone, while it does, they at least tend to have different models and textures. It all comes down to diversity.
DAOC had three completely different worlds for people to play on; Hibernia, Albion, and Midgard; and each one was extremely diverse, Not to mention it is the mother of faction-based PVP; A lot of games try for this good vs evil PVP but it can never measure up to three-way PVP, because in three-way pvp you never know who is your enemy or your ally, as constantly two of the factions will work together to overthrow a keep and then suddenly turn against each other for the remnants of the keep. this added an excillerating edge to the pvp in DAOC that no game since has been able to duplicate.
Vanguard has an open world; as does Darkfall; Both are p2p though. WoW techincally has a few different open worlds, Azaroth, Eastern kingdoms, Northrend, Durotar etc are all seemless and large.
"just saw the last bit about without looking like crap hahaha; you got me."
This would be right if all mmo's worlds were designed like ESO world but they are not, some mmo do have huge open land masses.
Name them. I mean name the ones with truly huge open land masses. I'm curious to see how many you can list that also perform well without looking like absolute crap.
WoW's landmass is considerably larger than Oblivion's, and you in WoW you can physically run from one end to the other. There are areas where zones are visibly separated, and there are areas where the only limitation is the view distance.
Zone design isn't a system limitation so much as it's a design limitation based around the ideas that players want variety, areas are limited by how far people are willing to run, putting areas with wildly different environments next to each other just looks weird and there shouldn't be a whole lot of wasted or 'filler' space.
It's perfectly feasible to load portions of a a nearly unlimited amount of landmass around a player as they move through the world. Minecraft does this using Java of all things and it works with landmasses that dwarf any game, MMORPG or otherwise. Just having a huge landmass because a developer can do it doesn't make sense.
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As does ArcheAge, Bless and Black Desert.
Vanguard, WoW, and Darkfall both have the illusion of an open world, but their maps are really just chunks of zones that get loaded while running around. Even then, the maps are designed with things like mountains and other natural barriers to prevent being able to see too many zones at any given time.
WoW used to be designed the same (it still is to a small degree), but it can get away with larger chunks of zones because the terrain and assets are very minimal.
It should also be noted that both Vanguard and Darkfall do not perform very well. I remember Darkfall actually freezing for a second at certain places, while it loaded distant zones into memory.
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All of which are Korean MMO's. I mention that because the server tech for that style of game leans more towards having lots of servers and instances with fewer people each, to allow for workable performance. I could be wrong, and maybe they are a new breed of Korean MMO with larger populations in a shared space, rather than just large number of total players.
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They are nothing like ESO which is like EQ2, you can't go from one area to another without loading screen plus Vanguards has no natural barriers i can go where anywhere i want. I can see very far in Vanguard but in ESO i can only see one zone, have you actually played the game lol.
I work with the CK a lot, I've noticed that as well. Still most use the same few models.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
WoW used to be designed the same (it still is to a small degree), but it can get away with larger chunks of zones because the terrain and assets are very minimal.
It should also be noted that both Vanguard and Darkfall do not perform very well. I remember Darkfall actually freezing for a second at certain places, while it loaded distant zones into memory.
Would you care to explain how it's possible or even desirable to load several gigs of landscape into memory all at once just so it doesn't have to load dynamically?
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Yes, I have. And I was able to play for hours at a time without seeing a loading screen other than leaving the tutorial area, or going inside a building. About as often as I see loading screens in WoW, really.
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It's desirable because it allows you to actually see things in the distance. Take WoW for example: You could never see Stranglethorn Vale while in Hinterlands, even though you could run the entire way without a loading screen. Partly because there's simply too much stuff in the way (mountains, etc), and partly because the draw distance isn't great enough. Once they revamped it in Cata, you can now fly up and see over the mountains and things, but the draw distance is still too short.
Wow has, in effect, something like a half-kilometer visibility, which is why it will never feel like a real open world.
It's possible because games can load landscape (the terrain heightmap) without loading all of the assets that go with it (rocks and bushes and monsters and houses and stuff). Just like assets, landscape can have LoD settings, so that the game can render distant landscape terrain at lower resolutions than up close (and probably leaving assets out entirely).
Here is a link to how Unreal is handling it with their fairly new tool called Landscape Mode. I believe this is what the soon-to-be-released crop of Korean MMO's that were mentioned earlier are using for their open-world feel.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Landscape.html
Just keep in mind that this is fairly new tech (although not exclusive to Unreal) and I don't believe any game that uses it has yet been released, and it's certainly not built into anything like the Hero Engine, which is what ESO is using. (ESO has been in development for something like 5 years now).
It's also worth pointing out that Asian game publishers are generally able to crank new stuff out much faster than western publishers, mostly due to differences in labor costs.
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ArcheAge is already released and it's CryEngine 3, 5000 per server unlike ESO which is made up of instanced channels.
This is why ESO should be scrapped. I'm telling its nothing more than a money grab. Its not a tes game at all.
Uhh Vanguard has been F2P for a while now, in fact its prolly the most open and available F2P there is.
Really? Obviously you havent played in a long time since VG has been F2P for quite a while now. Even has new content!
5,000 what per server? total users or concurrent users? Source? MMO's are usually designed so that a single server houses a zone, not the entire server. So I guess I'm not really sure your metric really means, unless you're implying that the game truly is just one giant zone on a single server, hosting 5k people at once. In which case I'd need an actual source for that.
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When did I ever say that?
*edit*
just reread this. Not sure if you're being facetious or not, but ESO is P2P.
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